We study classification problems over relational background structures for hypotheses that are defined using logics with counting. The aim of this paper is to find learning algorithms running in time sublinear in the size of the background structure. We show that hypotheses defined by FOCN(P)-formulas over structures of polylogarithmic degree can be learned in sublinear time. Furthermore, we prove that for structures of unbounded degree there is no sublinear learning algorithm for first-order formulas.

Efficiency of self-optimizing systems is heavily dependent on their optimization strategies, e.g., choosing exact or approximate solver. A choice of such a strategy, in turn, is influenced by numerous factors, such as re-optimization time, size of the problem, optimality constraints, etc. Exact solvers are domain-independent and can guarantee optimality but suffer from scaling, while approximate solvers offer a "good-enough" solution in exchange for a lack of generality and parameter-dependence. In this paper we discuss the trade-offs between exact and approximate optimizers for solving a quality-based software selection and hardware mapping problem from the scalability perspective. We show that even a simple heuristic can compete with thoroughly developed exact solvers under condition of an effective parameter tuning. Moreover, we discuss robustness of the obtained algorithm's configuration. Last but not least, we present a software product line for parameter tuning, which comprise the main features of this process and can serve as a platform for further research in the area of parameter tuning.

In this paper we introduce a novel neural network architecture based on Fast Hough Transform layer. The layer of this type allows our neural network to accumulate features from linear areas across the entire image instead of local areas. We demonstrate its potential by solving the problem of vanishing points detection in the images of documents. Such problem occurs when dealing with camera shots of the documents in uncontrolled conditions. In this case, the document image can suffer several specific distortions including projective transform. To train our model, we use MIDV-500 dataset and provide testing results. The strong generalization ability of the suggested method is proven with its applying to a completely different ICDAR 2011 dewarping contest. In previously published papers considering these dataset authors measured the quality of vanishing point detection by counting correctly recognized words with open OCR engine Tesseract. To compare with them, we reproduce this experiment and show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art result.

Learning knowledge graph embedding from an existing knowledge graph is very important to knowledge graph completion. For a fact $(h,r,t)$ with the head entity $h$ having a relation $r$ with the tail entity $t$, the current approaches aim to learn low dimensional representations $(\mathbf{h},\mathbf{r},\mathbf{t})$, each of which corresponds to the elements in $(h, r, t)$, respectively. As $(\mathbf{h},\mathbf{r},\mathbf{t})$ is learned from the existing facts within a knowledge graph, these representations can not be used to detect unknown facts (if the entities or relations never occur in the knowledge graph). This paper proposes a new approach called TransW, aiming to go beyond the current work by composing knowledge graph embeddings using word embeddings. Given the fact that an entity or a relation contains one or more words (quite often), it is sensible to learn a mapping function from word embedding spaces to knowledge embedding spaces, which shows how entities are constructed using human words. More importantly, composing knowledge embeddings using word embeddings makes it possible to deal with the emerging new facts (either new entities or relations). Experimental results using three public datasets show the consistency and outperformance of the proposed TransW.

In this paper we work on the recently introduced ShARC task - a challenging form of conversational QA that requires reasoning over rules expressed in natural language. Attuned to the risk of superficial patterns in data being exploited by neural models to do well on benchmark tasks (Niven and Kao 2019), we conduct a series of probing experiments and demonstrate how current state-of-the-art models rely heavily on such patterns. To prevent models from learning based on the superficial clues, we modify the dataset by automatically generating new instances reducing the occurrences of those patterns. We also present a simple yet effective model that learns embedding representations to incorporate dialog history along with the previous answers to follow-up questions. We find that our model outperforms existing methods on all metrics, and the results show that the proposed model is more robust in dealing with spurious patterns and learns to reason meaningfully.

Most of the existing algorithms fail to properly address the issues stemming from a large number of features. In particular, outlier detection algorithms perform poorly on data set of small size with a large number of features. In this paper, we propose a novel outlier detection algorithm based on principal component analysis and kernel density estimation. The proposed method is designed to address the challenges of dealing with high-dimensional data by projecting the original data onto a smaller space and using the innate structure of the data to calculate anomaly scores for each data point. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real-life data show that our method performs well on high-dimensional data. Our method also produces better-than-average execution times compared to the benchmark methods. Despite the growing amount of data that has become available for research and discovery there remain areas where certain type of data is scarce. In the fields such as medical diagnostics, network intrusion detection, fraudulent financial transactions and many others, deviations from normal behavior, i.e. anomalies, are rare. However, often, these events are of the greatest importance. For example, it would be extremely beneficial to determine if a person has an illness based on abnormal lab results.

The problem of verifying whether a textual hypothesis holds the truth based on the given evidence, also known as fact verification, plays an important role in the study of natural language understanding and semantic representation. However, existing studies are mainly restricted to dealing with unstructured evidence (e.g., natural language sentences and documents, news, etc), while verification under structured evidence, such as tables, graphs, and databases, remains unexplored. This paper specifically aims to study the fact verification given semi-structured data as evidence. To this end, we construct a large-scale dataset called \textsc{TabFact} with 16k Wikipedia tables as evidence for 118k human-annotated natural language statements, which are labeled as either {\tt ENTAILED} or {\tt REFUTED}. \textsc{TabFact} is more challenging since it involves both soft linguistic reasoning and hard symbolic reasoning. To address these reasoning challenges, we design two different models: Table-BERT and Latent Program Algorithm (LPA). Table-BERT leverages the state-of-the-art pre-trained language model to encode the linearized tables and statements into continuous vectors for verification. LPA parses statements into LISP-like programs and executes them against the tables to obtain the returned binary value. Both methods achieve similar accuracy but yet far from human performance. We also perform comprehensive analysis and demonstrate great future opportunities. The data and code of the dataset are provided in \url{https://github.com/wenhuchen/Table-Fact-Checking}.

There is increasing awareness in the planning community that the burden of specifying complete domain models is too high, which impedes the applicability of planning technology in many real-world domains. Although there have many learning systems that help automatically learning domain models, most existing work assumes that the input traces are completely correct. A more realistic situation is that the plan traces are disordered and noisy, such as plan traces described by natural language. In this paper we propose and evaluate an approach for doing this. Our approach takes as input a set of plan traces with disordered actions and noise and outputs action models that can best explain the plan traces. We use a MAX-SAT framework for learning, where the constraints are derived from the given plan traces. Unlike traditional action models learners, the states in plan traces can be partially observable and noisy as well as the actions in plan traces can be disordered and parallel. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through a systematic empirical evaluation with both IPC domains and the real-world dataset extracted from natural language documents.

In this paper, we consider the problem of optimizing the quantiles of the cumulative rewards of Markov Decision Processes (MDP), to which we refers as Quantile Markov Decision Processes (QMDP). Traditionally, the goal of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) is to maximize expected cumulative reward over a defined horizon (possibly to be infinite). In many applications, however, a decision maker may be interested in optimizing a specific quantile of the cumulative reward instead of its expectation. Our framework of QMDP provides analytical results characterizing the optimal QMDP solution and presents the algorithm for solving the QMDP. We provide analytical results characterizing the optimal QMDP solution and present the algorithms for solving the QMDP. We illustrate the model with two experiments: a grid game and a HIV optimal treatment experiment.

AI Lab (European ARTificial Intelligence Lab) is led and organised by Ars Electronica in collaboration with 13 partners across Europe, including Edinburgh. Experiential AI, a new research group at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, Bayes Centre and Heriot-Watt Robotarium in Edinburgh, is the scientific partner for the AI Lab Lighthouse Residency in 2019/20. The theme for the Artist Residency is Entanglements – fair, moral and transparent AI. The residency is a fully funded opportunity for an artist, designer or artists' collective to create new dimensions in their artistic practice through their encounters with the world of AI. Edinburgh is the world's foremost festival city, and has been a centre for AI research since the early 1960s.