Artificial Intelligence is increasingly changing the way we interact with the world. Chatbots or Virtual assistants are trending nowadays as they have simplified the interaction between humans and machines. Today, brands are using these chatbots to improve efficiency and productivity in all areas of business. Freshworks, a Chennai and San Mateo-based software unicorn is investing in developing chatbots. Brands and customers find themselves interacting online on apps and other platforms with artificial intelligence enabled conversations.

Pruning is a standard technique for removing unnecessary structure from a neural network to reduce its storage footprint, computational demands, or energy consumption. Pruning can reduce the parameter-counts of many state-of-the-art neural networks by an order of magnitude without compromising accuracy, meaning these networks contain a vast amount of unnecessary structure. In this paper, we study the relationship between pruning and interpretability. Namely, we consider the effect of removing unnecessary structure on the number of hidden units that learn disentangled representations of human-recognizable concepts as identified by network dissection. We aim to evaluate how the interpretability of pruned neural networks changes as they are compressed. We find that pruning has no detrimental effect on this measure of interpretability until so few parameters remain that accuracy beings to drop. Resnet-50 models trained on ImageNet maintain the same number of interpretable concepts and units until more than 90% of parameters have been pruned.

Computer-aided breast cancer diagnosis in mammography is limited by inadequate data and the similarity between benign and cancerous masses. To address this, we propose a signed graph regularized deep neural network with adversarial augmentation, named \textsc{DiagNet}. Firstly, we use adversarial learning to generate positive and negative mass-contained mammograms for each mass class. After that, a signed similarity graph is built upon the expanded data to further highlight the discrimination. Finally, a deep convolutional neural network is trained by jointly optimizing the signed graph regularization and classification loss. Experiments show that the \textsc{DiagNet} framework outperforms the state-of-the-art in breast mass diagnosis in mammography.

Next-generation wireless networks must support ultra-reliable, low-latency communication and intelligently manage a massive number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in real-time, within a highly dynamic environment. This need for stringent communication quality-of-service (QoS) requirements as well as mobile edge and core intelligence can only be realized by integrating fundamental notions of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning across the wireless infrastructure and end-user devices. In this context, this paper provides a comprehensive tutorial that introduces the main concepts of machine learning, in general, and artificial neural networks (ANNs), in particular, and their potential applications in wireless communications. For this purpose, we present a comprehensive overview on a number of key types of neural networks that include feed-forward, recurrent, spiking, and deep neural networks. For each type of neural network, we present the basic architecture and training procedure, as well as the associated challenges and opportunities. Then, we provide an in-depth overview on the variety of wireless communication problems that can be addressed using ANNs, ranging from communication using unmanned aerial vehicles to virtual reality and edge caching.For each individual application, we present the main motivation for using ANNs along with the associated challenges while also providing a detailed example for a use case scenario and outlining future works that can be addressed using ANNs. In a nutshell, this article constitutes one of the first holistic tutorials on the development of machine learning techniques tailored to the needs of future wireless networks.

Estimating causal effects for survival outcomes in the high-dimensional setting is an extremely important topic for many biomedical applications as well as areas of social sciences. We propose a new orthogonal score method for treatment effect estimation and inference that results in asymptotically valid confidence intervals assuming only good estimation properties of the hazard outcome model and the conditional probability of treatment. This guarantee allows us to provide valid inference for the conditional treatment effect under the high-dimensional additive hazards model under considerably more generality than existing approaches. In addition, we develop a new Hazards Difference (HDi), estimator. We showcase that our approach has double-robustness properties in high dimensions: with cross-fitting, the HDi estimate is consistent under a wide variety of treatment assignment models; the HDi estimate is also consistent when the hazards model is misspecified and instead the true data generating mechanism follows a partially linear additive hazards model. We further develop a novel sparsity doubly robust result, where either the outcome or the treatment model can be a fully dense high-dimensional model. We apply our methods to study the treatment effect of radical prostatectomy versus conservative management for prostate cancer patients using the SEER-Medicare Linked Data.

Ludii is a general game system being developed as part of the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project (DLP). While its primary aim is to model, play, and analyse the full range of traditional strategy games, Ludii also has the potential to support a wide range of AI research topics and competitions. This paper describes some of the future competitions and challenges that we intend to run using the Ludii system, highlighting some of its most important aspects that can potentially lead to many algorithm improvements and new avenues of research. We compare and contrast our proposed competition motivations, goals and frameworks against those of existing general game playing competitions, addressing the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.

Time series forecasting is an important problem across many domains, including predictions of solar plant energy output, electricity consumption, and traffic jam situation. In this paper, we propose to tackle such forecasting problem with Transformer. Although impressed by its performance in our preliminary study, we found its two major weaknesses: (1) locality-agnostics: the point-wise dot-product self attention in canonical Transformer architecture is insensitive to local context, which can make the model prone to anomalies in time series; (2) memory bottleneck: space complexity of canonical Transformer grows quadratically with sequence length $L$, making modeling long time series infeasible. In order to solve these two issues, we first propose convolutional self attention by producing queries and keys with causal convolution so that local context can be better incorporated into attention mechanism. Then, we propose LogSparse Transformer with only $O(L(\log L)^{2})$ memory cost, improving the time series forecasting in finer granularity under constrained memory budget. Our experiments on both synthetic data and real-world datasets show that it compares favorably to the state-of-the-art.

Synthetic images rendered by graphics engines are a promising source for training deep networks. However, it is challenging to ensure that they can help train a network to perform well on real images, because a graphics-based generation pipeline requires numerous design decisions such as the selection of 3D shapes and the placement of the camera. In this work, we propose a new method that optimizes the generation of 3D training data based on what we call "hybrid gradient". We parametrize the design decisions as a real vector, and combine the approximate gradient and the analytical gradient to obtain the hybrid gradient of the network performance with respect to this vector. We evaluate our approach on the task of estimating surface normals from a single image. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our approach can outperform the prior state of the art on optimizing the generation of 3D training data, particularly in terms of computational efficiency.

In this paper, the trajectory optimization problem for a multi-aerial base station (ABS) communication network is investigated. The objective is to find the trajectory of the ABSs so that the sum-rate of the users served by each ABS is maximized. To reach this goal, along with the optimal trajectory design, optimal power and sub-channel allocation is also of great importance to support the users with the highest possible data rates. To solve this complicated problem, we divide it into two sub-problems: ABS trajectory optimization sub-problem, and joint power and sub-channel assignment sub-problem. Then, based on the Q-learning method, we develop a distributed algorithm which solves these sub-problems efficiently, and does not need significant amount of information exchange between the ABSs and the core network. Simulation results show that although Q-learning is a model-free reinforcement learning technique, it has a remarkable capability to train the ABSs to optimize their trajectories based on the received reward signals, which carry decent information from the topology of the network.

Nowadays, users open multiple accounts on social media platforms and e-commerce sites, expressing their personal preferences on different domains. However, users' behaviors change across domains, depending on the content that users interact with, such as movies, music, clothing and retail products. In this paper, we propose an adaptive deep learning strategy for cross-domain recommendation, referred to as ADC. We design a neural architecture and formulate a cross-domain loss function, to compute the non-linearity in user preferences across domains and transfer the knowledge of users' multiple behaviors, accordingly. In addition, we introduce an efficient algorithm for cross-domain loss balancing which directly tunes gradient magnitudes and adapts the learning rates based on the domains' complexities/scales when training the model via backpropagation. In doing so, ADC controls and adjusts the contribution of each domain when optimizing the model parameters. Our experiments on six publicly available cross-domain recommendation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ADC model over other state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we study the effect of the proposed adaptive deep learning strategy and show that ADC can well balance the impact of the domains with different complexities.