This research investigates an equation of productivity for workflows regarding its robustness towards the definition of workflows as probabilistic distributions. The equation was formulated across its derivations through a theoretical framework about information theory, probabilities and complex adaptive systems. By defining the productivity equation for organism-object interactions, workflows mathematical derivations can be predicted and monitored without strict empirical methods and allows workflow flexibility for organism-object environments.

Training deep neural networks with the error backpropagation algorithm is considered implausible from a biological perspective. Numerous recent publications suggest elaborate models for biologically plausible variants of deep learning, typically defining success as reaching around 98% test accuracy on the MNIST data set. Here, we investigate how far we can go on digit (MNIST) and object (CIFAR10) classification with biologically plausible, local learning rules in a network with one hidden layer and a single readout layer. The hidden layer weights are either fixed (random or random Gabor filters) or trained with unsupervised methods (PCA, ICA or Sparse Coding) that can be implemented by local learning rules. The readout layer is trained with a supervised, local learning rule. We first implement these models with rate neurons. This comparison reveals, first, that unsupervised learning does not lead to better performance than fixed random projections or Gabor filters for large hidden layers. Second, networks with localized receptive fields perform significantly better than networks with all-to-all connectivity and can reach backpropagation performance on MNIST. We then implement two of the networks - fixed, localized, random & random Gabor filters in the hidden layer - with spiking leaky integrate-and-fire neurons and spike timing dependent plasticity to train the readout layer. These spiking models achieve > 98.2% test accuracy on MNIST, which is close to the performance of rate networks with one hidden layer trained with backpropagation. The performance of our shallow network models is comparable to most current biologically plausible models of deep learning. Furthermore, our results with a shallow spiking network provide an important reference and suggest the use of datasets other than MNIST for testing the performance of future models of biologically plausible deep learning.

Intelligent agents need a physical understanding of the world to predict the impact of their actions in the future. While learning-based models of the environment dynamics have contributed to significant improvements in sample efficiency compared to model-free reinforcement learning algorithms, they typically fail to generalize to system states beyond the training data, while often grounding their predictions on non-interpretable latent variables. We introduce Interactive Differentiable Simulation (IDS), a differentiable physics engine, that allows for efficient, accurate inference of physical properties of rigid-body systems. Integrated into deep learning architectures, our model is able to accomplish system identification using visual input, leading to an interpretable model of the world whose parameters have physical meaning. We present experiments showing automatic task-based robot design and parameter estimation for nonlinear dynamical systems by automatically calculating gradients in IDS. When integrated into an adaptive model-predictive control algorithm, our approach exhibits orders of magnitude improvements in sample efficiency over model-free reinforcement learning algorithms on challenging nonlinear control domains.

As electronically stored data grow in daily life, obtaining novel and relevant information becomes challenging in text mining. Thus people have sought statistical methods based on term frequency, matrix algebra, or topic modeling for text mining. Popular topic models have centered on one single text collection, which is deficient for comparative text analyses. We consider a setting where one can partition the corpus into subcollections. Each subcollection shares a common set of topics, but there exists relative variation in topic proportions among collections. Including any prior knowledge about the corpus (e.g. organization structure), we propose the compound latent Dirichlet allocation (cLDA) model, improving on previous work, encouraging generalizability, and depending less on user-input parameters. To identify the parameters of interest in cLDA, we study Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference approaches extensively, and suggest an efficient MCMC method. We evaluate cLDA qualitatively and quantitatively using both synthetic and real-world corpora. The usability study on some real-world corpora illustrates the superiority of cLDA to explore the underlying topics automatically but also model their connections and variations across multiple collections.

In this paper we demonstrate continuous noisy speech recognition using connectionist temporal classification (CTC) model on limited Chinese vocabulary using electroencephalography (EEG) features with no speech signal as input and we further demonstrate single CTC model based continuous noisy speech recognition on limited joint English and Chinese vocabulary using EEG features with no speech signal as input.

We consider open domain event extraction, the task of extracting unconstraint types of events from news clusters. A novel latent variable neural model is constructed, which is scalable to very large corpus. A dataset is collected and manually annotated, with task-specific evaluation metrics being designed. Results show that the proposed unsupervised model gives better performance compared to the state-of-the-art method for event schema induction.

The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. [2014]) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the convergence speed significantly. For example, if the approximation family is a transformation family, such as a Gaussian, then switching to the reparameterization gradient (Kingma and Welling [2014]) often yields a major reduction in gradient variance. Ultimately, reducing the variance can reduce the computational cost and yield better approximations. We present a new method to extend the reparameterization trick to more general exponential families including the Wishart, Gamma, and Student distributions. Variational Inference with Numerical Derivatives (VIND) approximates the gradient with numerical derivatives and reduces its variance using a tight coupling of the approximation family. The resulting algorithm is simple to implement and can profit from widely known couplings. Our experiments confirm that VIND effectively decreases the gradient variance and therefore improves the posterior approximation in relevant cases. It thus provides an efficient yet simple Variational Inference method for computing non-Gaussian approximations.

There has been a growing interest in expressivity of deep neural networks. But most of existing work about this topic focus only on the specific activation function such as ReLU or sigmoid. In this paper, we investigate the approximation ability of deep neural networks with a quite general class of activation functions. This class of activation functions includes most of frequently used activation functions. We derive the required depth, width and sparsity of a deep neural network to approximate any H\"older smooth function upto a given approximation error for the large class of activation functions. Based on our approximation error analysis, we derive the minimax optimality of the deep neural network estimators with the general activation functions in both regression and classification problems.

Generating fluent natural language responses from structured semantic representations is a critical step in task-oriented conversational systems. Avenues like the E2E NLG Challenge have encouraged the development of neural approaches, particularly sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models for this problem. The semantic representations used, however, are often underspecified, which places a higher burden on the generation model for sentence planning, and also limits the extent to which generated responses can be controlled in a live system. In this paper, we (1) propose using tree-structured semantic representations, like those used in traditional rule-based NLG systems, for better discourse-level structuring and sentence-level planning; (2) introduce a challenging dataset using this representation for the weather domain; (3) introduce a constrained decoding approach for Seq2Seq models that leverages this representation to improve semantic correctness; and (4) demonstrate promising results on our dataset and the E2E dataset.

A key challenge for Multiagent RL (Reinforcement Learning) is the design of agent-specific, local rewards that are aligned with sparse global objectives. In this paper, we introduce MERL (Multiagent Evolutionary RL), a hybrid algorithm that does not require an explicit alignment between local and global objectives. MERL uses fast, policy-gradient based learning for each agent by utilizing their dense local rewards. Concurrently, an evolutionary algorithm is used to recruit agents into a team by directly optimizing the sparser global objective. We explore problems that require coupling (a minimum number of agents required to coordinate for success), where the degree of coupling is not known to the agents. We demonstrate that MERL's integrated approach is more sample-efficient and retains performance better with increasing coupling orders compared to MADDPG, the state-of-the-art policy-gradient algorithm for multiagent coordination.