Police could soon get help from an artificial intelligence system that reads the hidden emotions of suspects by scanning involuntary "micro-expressions". The technology analyses fleeting facial movements that researchers believe betray true emotions and are impossible to suppress or fake. The system has been developed by Facesoft, a British company co-founded by Allan Ponniah, a consultant plastic surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital in northwest London, who first used AI to reconstruct patients' faces. The company, which has held discussions with police forces in Britain and India, describes micro-expressions as "emotional leakage". The expressions were first linked to deception by psychologists in the 1960s, who noticed that suicidal patients sometimes lied to disguise strong negative feelings.

WASHINGTON - In recent weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump has drawn the ire of security hawks in Congress for suggesting he could trade away his blacklisting of Huawei Technologies Co. to secure a trade deal with China. On Saturday he took a big step toward doing just that, signaling that he cares more about selling U.S. products to China than embarking on a clash of civilizations advocated by some top advisers. In the long run, those business instincts may say more about where U.S.-China ties are headed than his deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping to suspend any new tariffs and resume trade talks. Trump's move last month to cut off supplies to Huawei, one of China's most celebrated companies, marked a major escalation in his confrontation with Beijing after he raised tariffs following a collapse in trade talks. Putting the company on a Commerce Department "entity list" normally reserved for rogue regimes and affiliated businesses was seen as the latest sign the U.S. and China were tumbling into a new technological cold war.

We consider filtering in high-dimensional non-Gaussian state-space models with intractable transition kernels, nonlinear and possibly chaotic dynamics, and sparse observations in space and time. We propose a novel filtering methodology that harnesses transportation of measures, convex optimization, and ideas from probabilistic graphical models to yield robust ensemble approximations of the filtering distribution in high dimensions. Our approach can be understood as the natural generalization of the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) to nonlinear updates, using stochastic or deterministic couplings. The use of nonlinear updates can reduce the intrinsic bias of the EnKF at a marginal increase in computational cost. We avoid any form of importance sampling and introduce non-Gaussian localization approaches for dimension scalability. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art tracking performance on challenging configurations of the Lorenz-96 model in the chaotic regime.

Interactive recommender systems that enable the interactions between users and the recommender system have attracted increasing research attentions. Previous methods mainly focus on optimizing recommendation accuracy. However, they usually ignore the diversity of the recommendation results, thus usually results in unsatisfying user experiences. In this paper, we propose a novel diversified recommendation model, named Diversified Contextual Combinatorial Bandit (DC$^2$B), for interactive recommendation with users' implicit feedback. Specifically, DC$^2$B employs determinantal point process in the recommendation procedure to promote diversity of the recommendation results. To learn the model parameters, a Thompson sampling-type algorithm based on variational Bayesian inference is proposed. In addition, theoretical regret analysis is also provided to guarantee the performance of DC$^2$B. Extensive experiments on real datasets are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Recently, there has been interest in multiplicative recurrent neural networks for language modeling. Indeed, simple Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) encounter difficulties recovering from past mistakes when generating sequences due to high correlation between hidden states. These challenges can be mitigated by integrating second-order terms in the hidden-state update. One such model, multiplicative Long Short-Term Memory (mLSTM) is particularly interesting in its original formulation because of the sharing of its second-order term, referred to as the intermediate state. We explore these architectural improvements by introducing new models and testing them on character-level language modeling tasks. This allows us to establish the relevance of shared parametrization in recurrent language modeling.

Deep predictive coding networks are neuroscience-inspired unsupervised learning models that learn to predict future sensory states. We build upon the PredNet implementation by Lotter, Kreiman, and Cox (2016) to investigate if predictive coding representations are useful to predict brain activity in the visual cortex. We use representational similarity analysis (RSA) to compare PredNet representations to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from the Algonauts Project (Cichy et al., 2019). In contrast to previous findings in the literature (Khaligh-Razavi & Kriegeskorte, 2014), we report empirical data suggesting that unsupervised models trained to predict frames of videos may outperform supervised image classification baselines in terms of correlation to spatial (fMRI) data. Our best submission achieves an average noise normalized correlation score of 16.67% and 27.67% on the fMRI and MEG tracks of the Algonauts Challenge.

A spoken language understanding (SLU) system includes two main tasks, slot filling (SF) and intent detection (ID). The joint model for the two tasks is becoming a tendency in SLU. But the bi-directional interrelated connections between the intent and slots are not established in the existing joint models. In this paper, we propose a novel bi-directional interrelated model for joint intent detection and slot filling. We introduce an SF-ID network to establish direct connections for the two tasks to help them promote each other mutually. Besides, we design an entirely new iteration mechanism inside the SF-ID network to enhance the bi-directional interrelated connections. The experimental results show that the relative improvement in the sentence-level semantic frame accuracy of our model is 3.79% and 5.42% on ATIS and Snips datasets, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art model.

Current reinforcement learning methods fail if the reward function is imperfect, i.e. if the agent observes reward different from what it actually receives. We study this problem within the formalism of Corrupt Reward Markov Decision Processes (CRMDPs). We show that if the reward corruption in a CRMDP is sufficiently "spiky", the environment is solvable. We fully characterize the regret bound of a Spiky CRMDP, and introduce an algorithm that is able to detect its corrupt states. We show that this algorithm can be used to learn the optimal policy with any common reinforcement learning algorithm. Finally, we investigate our algorithm in a pair of simple gridworld environments, finding that our algorithm can detect the corrupt states and learn the optimal policy despite the corruption.

A recent proposal of data dependent similarity called Isolation Kernel/Similarity has enabled SVM to produce better classification accuracy. We identify shortcomings of using a tree method to implement Isolation Similarity; and propose a nearest neighbour method instead. We formally prove the characteristic of Isolation Similarity with the use of the proposed method. The impact of Isolation Similarity on density-based clustering is studied here. We show for the first time that the clustering performance of the classic density-based clustering algorithm DBSCAN can be significantly uplifted to surpass that of the recent density-peak clustering algorithm DP. This is achieved by simply replacing the distance measure with the proposed nearest-neighbour-induced Isolation Similarity in DBSCAN, leaving the rest of the procedure unchanged. A new type of clusters called mass-connected clusters is formally defined. We show that DBSCAN, which detects density-connected clusters, becomes one which detects mass-connected clusters, when the distance measure is replaced with the proposed similarity. We also provide the condition under which mass-connected clusters can be detected, while density-connected clusters cannot.

In this work, we focus on fine-tuning an OpenAI GPT-2 pre-trained model for generating patent claims. GPT-2 has demonstrated impressive efficacy of pre-trained language models on various tasks, particularly coherent text generation. Patent claim language itself has rarely been explored in the past and poses a unique challenge. We are motivated to generate coherent patent claims automatically so that augmented inventing might be viable someday. In our implementation, we identified a unique language structure in patent claims and leveraged its implicit human annotations. We investigated the fine-tuning process by probing the first 100 steps and observing the generated text at each step. Based on both conditional and unconditional random sampling, we analyze the overall quality of generated patent claims. Our contributions include: (1) being the first to generate patent claims by machines and being the first to apply GPT-2 to patent claim generation, (2) providing various experiment results for qualitative analysis and future research, (3) proposing a new sampling approach for text generation, and (4) building an e-mail bot for future researchers to explore the fine-tuned GPT-2 model further.