Metaheuristic algorithms (MAs) have seen unprecedented growth thanks to their successful applications in fields including engineering and health sciences. In this work, we investigate the use of a deep learning (DL) model as an alternative tool to do so. The proposed method, called MaNet, is motivated by the fact that most of the DL models often need to solve massive nasty optimization problems consisting of millions of parameters. Feature selection is the main adopted concepts in MaNet that helps the algorithm to skip irrelevant or partially relevant evolutionary information and uses those which contribute most to the overall performance. The introduced model is applied on several unimodal and multimodal continues problems. The experiments indicate that MaNet is able to yield competitive results compared to one of the best hand-designed algorithms for the aforementioned problems, in terms of the solution accuracy and scalability.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving relevant code given a natural language query. While related to other information retrieval tasks, it requires bridging the gap between the language used in code (often abbreviated and highly technical) and natural language more suitable to describe vague concepts and ideas. To enable evaluation of progress on code search, we are releasing the CodeSearchNet Corpus and are presenting the CodeSearchNet Challenge, which consists of 99 natural language queries with about 4k expert relevance annotations of likely results from CodeSearchNet Corpus. The corpus contains about 6 million functions from open-source code spanning six programming languages (Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby). The CodeSearchNet Corpus also contains automatically generated query-like natural language for 2 million functions, obtained from mechanically scraping and preprocessing associated function documentation. In this article, we describe the methodology used to obtain the corpus and expert labels, as well as a number of simple baseline solutions for the task. We hope that CodeSearchNet Challenge encourages researchers and practitioners to study this interesting task further and will host a competition and leaderboard to track the progress on the challenge. We are also keen on extending \task to more queries and programming languages in the future.

--The purpose of this work is to develop and study a distributed strategy for Pareto optimization of an aggregate cost consisting of regularized risks. Each risk is modeled as the expectation of some loss function with unknown probability distribution while the regularizers are assumed deterministic, but are not required to be differentiable or even continuous. The individual, regularized, cost functions are distributed across a strongly-connected network of agents and the Pareto optimal solution is sought by appealing to a multi-agent diffusion strategy. T o this end, the regularizers are smoothed by means of infimal convolution and it is shown that the Pareto solution of the approximate, smooth problem can be made arbitrarily close to the solution of the original, non-smooth problem. Performance bounds are established under conditions that are weaker than assumed before in the literature, and hence applicable to a broader class of adaptation and learning problems. Index T erms --Distributed optimization, diffusion strategy, smoothing, proximal operator, non-smooth regularizer, proximal diffusion, regularized diffusion. The objective of distributed learning is the solution of global, stochastic optimization problems across networks of agents through localized interactions and without information about the statistical properties of the data. Using streaming data, the resulting strategies are adaptive in nature and able to track drifts in the location of the minimizers due to variations in the statistical properties of the data. Regularization is one useful technique to encourage or enforce structural properties on the sought after minimizer, such as sparsity or constraints. A substantial number of regularizers are inherently non-smooth, while many cost functions are differentiable.

The paper demonstrates the use of the fully convolutional neural network for glioma segmentation on the BraTS 2019 dataset. Three-layers deep encoder-decoder architecture is used along with dense connection at encoder part to propagate the information from coarse layer to deep layers. This architecture is used to train three tumor sub-components separately. Subcomponent training weights are initialized with whole tumor weights to get the localization of the tumor within the brain. At the end, three segmentation results were merged to get the entire tumor segmentation. Dice Similarity of training dataset with focal loss implementation for whole tumor, tumor core and enhancing tumor is 0.92, 0.90 and 0.79 respectively. Radiomic features along with segmentation results and age are used to predict the overall survival of patients using random forest regressor to classify survival of patients in long, medium and short survival classes.

A new procedure to construct predictive models in supervised learning problems by paying attention to the clustering structure of the input data is introduced. We are interested in situations where the input data consists of more than one unknown cluster, and where there exist different underlying models on these clusters. Thus, instead of constructing a single predictive model on the whole dataset, we propose to use a K-means clustering algorithm with different options of Bregman divergences, to recover the clustering structure of the input data. Then one dedicated predictive model is fit per cluster. For each divergence, we construct a simple local predictor on each observed cluster. We obtain one estimator, the collection of the K simple local predictors, per divergence, and we propose to combine them in a smart way based on a consensus idea. Several versions of consensual aggregation in both classification and regression problems are considered. A comparison of the performances of all constructed estimators on different simulated and real data assesses the excellent performance of our method. In a large variety of prediction problems, the consensual aggregation procedure outperforms all the other models.

If you are predicting the label $y$ of a new object with $\hat y$, how confident are you that $y = \hat y$? Conformal prediction methods provide an elegant framework for answering such question by building a $100 (1 - \alpha)\%$ confidence region without assumptions on the distribution of the data. It is based on a refitting procedure that parses all the possibilities for $y$ to select the most likely ones. Although providing strong coverage guarantees, conformal set is impractical to compute exactly for many regression problems. We propose efficient algorithms to compute conformal prediction set using approximated solution of (convex) regularized empirical risk minimization. Our approaches rely on a new homotopy continuation technique for tracking the solution path w.r.t. sequential changes of the observations. We provide a detailed analysis quantifying its complexity.

Factory machinery is prone to failure or breakdown, resulting in significant expenses for companies. Hence, there is a rising interest in machine monitoring using different sensors including microphones. In the scientific community, the emergence of public datasets has led to advancements in acoustic detection and classification of scenes and events, but there are no public datasets that focus on the sound of industrial machines under normal and anomalous operating conditions in real factory environments. In this paper, we present a new dataset of industrial machine sounds that we call a sound dataset for malfunctioning industrial machine investigation and inspection (MIMII dataset). Normal sounds were recorded for different types of industrial machines (i.e., valves, pumps, fans, and slide rails), and to resemble a real-life scenario, various anomalous sounds were recorded (e.g., contamination, leakage, rotating unbalance, and rail damage). The purpose of releasing the MIMII dataset is to assist the machine-learning and signal-processing community with their development of automated facility maintenance. The MIMII dataset is freely available for download at: https://zenodo.org/record/3384388

A recently proposed SLOPE estimator (arXiv:1407.3824) has been shown to adaptively achieve the minimax $\ell_2$ estimation rate under high-dimensional sparse linear regression models (arXiv:1503.08393). Such minimax optimality holds in the regime where the sparsity level $k$, sample size $n$, and dimension $p$ satisfy $k/p \rightarrow 0$, $k\log p/n \rightarrow 0$. In this paper, we characterize the estimation error of SLOPE under the complementary regime where both $k$ and $n$ scale linearly with $p$, and provide new insights into the performance of SLOPE estimators. We first derive a concentration inequality for the finite sample mean square error (MSE) of SLOPE. The quantity that MSE concentrates around takes a complicated and implicit form. With delicate analysis of the quantity, we prove that among all SLOPE estimators, LASSO is optimal for estimating $k$-sparse parameter vectors that do not have tied non-zero components in the low noise scenario. On the other hand, in the large noise scenario, the family of SLOPE estimators are sub-optimal compared with bridge regression such as the Ridge estimator.

Recently deep neural networks have shown their capacity to memorize training data, even with noisy labels, which hurts generalization performance. To mitigate this issue, we propose a simple but effective baseline that is robust to noisy labels, even with severe noise. Our objective involves a variance regularization term that implicitly penalizes the Jacobian norm of the neural network on the whole training set (including the noisy-labeled data), which encourages generalization and prevents overfitting to the corrupted labels. Experiments on both synthetically generated incorrect labels and realistic large-scale noisy datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with a high tolerance to severe noise.

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations, several major challenges remain. First, existing IRL methods learn reward functions from scratch, requiring large numbers of demonstrations to correctly infer the reward for each task the agent may need to perform. Second, existing methods typically assume homogeneous demonstrations for a single behavior or task, while in practice, it might be easier to collect datasets of heterogeneous but related behaviors. To this end, we propose a deep latent variable model that is capable of learning rewards from demonstrations of distinct but related tasks in an unsupervised way. Critically, our model can infer rewards for new, structurally-similar tasks from a single demonstration. Our experiments on multiple continuous control tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art imitation and inverse reinforcement learning methods.