Dealing with sparse rewards is a longstanding challenge in reinforcement learning. The recent use of hindsight methods have achieved success on a variety of sparse-reward tasks, but they fail on complex tasks such as stacking multiple blocks with a robot arm in simulation. Curiosity-driven exploration using the prediction error of a learned dynamics model as an intrinsic reward has been shown to be effective for exploring a number of sparse-reward environments. We present a method that combines hindsight with curiosity-driven exploration and curriculum learning in order to solve the challenging sparse-reward block stacking task. We are the first to stack more than two blocks using only sparse reward without human demonstrations.

Envisioning a new imaginative idea together is a popular human need. Imagining together as a team can often lead to breakthrough ideas, but the collaboration effort can also be challenging, especially when the team members are separated by time and space. What if there is a AI that can assist the team to collaboratively envision new ideas?. Is it possible to develop a working model of such an AI? This paper aims to design such an intelligence. This paper proposes a approach to design a creative and collaborative intelligence by employing a form of distributed machine learning approach called Federated Learning along with fusion on Generative Adversarial Networks, GAN. This collaborative creative AI presents a new paradigm in AI, one that lets a team of two or more to come together to imagine and envision ideas that synergies well with interests of all members of the team. In short, this paper explores the design of a novel type of AI paradigm, called Federated AI Imagination, one that lets geographically distributed teams to collaboratively imagine.

We consider the probabilistic analogue to neural network matrix factorization (Dziugaite & Roy, 2015), which we construct with Bayesian neural networks and fit with variational inference. We find that a linear model fit with variational inference can attain equivalent predictive performance to the regular neural network variants on the Movielens data sets. We discuss the implications of this result, which include some suggestions on the pros and cons of using the neural network construction, as well as the variational approach to inference. Such a probabilistic approach is required, however, when considering the important class of stochastic block models. We describe a variational inference algorithm for a neural network matrix factorization model with nonparametric block structure and evaluate its performance on the NIPS co-authorship data set.

Advances in molecular "omics'" technologies have motivated new methodology for the integration of multiple sources of high-content biomedical data. However, most statistical methods for integrating multiple data matrices only consider data shared vertically (one cohort on multiple platforms) or horizontally (different cohorts on a single platform). This is limiting for data that take the form of bidimensionally linked matrices (e.g., multiple cohorts measured on multiple platforms), which are increasingly common in large-scale biomedical studies. In this paper, we propose BIDIFAC (Bidimensional Integrative Factorization) for integrative dimension reduction and signal approximation of bidimensionally linked data matrices. Our method factorizes the data into (i) globally shared, (ii) row-shared, (iii) column-shared, and (iv) single-matrix structural components, facilitating the investigation of shared and unique patterns of variability. For estimation we use a penalized objective function that extends the nuclear norm penalization for a single matrix. As an alternative to the complicated rank selection problem, we use results from random matrix theory to choose tuning parameters. We apply our method to integrate two genomics platforms (mRNA and miRNA expression) across two sample cohorts (tumor samples and normal tissue samples) using the breast cancer data from TCGA. We provide R code for fitting BIDIFAC, imputing missing values, and generating simulated data.

Soil moisture is an important variable that determines floods, vegetation health, agriculture productivity, and land surface feedbacks to the atmosphere, etc. Accurately modeling soil moisture has important implications in both weather and climate models. The recently available satellite-based observations give us a unique opportunity to build data-driven models to predict soil moisture instead of using land surface models, but previously there was no uncertainty estimate. We tested Monte Carlo dropout (MCD) with an aleatoric term for our long short-term memory models for this problem, and asked if the uncertainty terms behave as they were argued to. We show that the method successfully captures the predictive error after tuning a hyperparameter on a representative training dataset. We show the MCD uncertainty estimate, as previously argued, does detect dissimilarity.

Smartphones have become the ultimate'personal' computer, yet despite this, general-purpose data mining and knowledge discovery tools for mobile devices are surprisingly rare. DataLearner is a new data mining application designed specifically for Android devices that imports the Weka data mining engine and augments it with algorithms developed by Charles Sturt University. Moreover, DataLearner can be expanded with additional algorithms. Combined, DataLearner delivers 40 classification, clustering and association rule mining algorithms for model training and evaluation without need for cloud computing resources or network connectivity. It provides the same classification accuracy as PCs and laptops, while doing so with acceptable processing speed and consuming negligible battery life. With its ability to provide easy-to-use data mining on a phone-size screen, DataLearner is a new portable, self-contained data mining tool for remote, personalised and educational applications alike. DataLearner features four elements - this paper, the app available on Google Play, the GPL3-licensed source code on GitHub and a short video on YouTube.

We propose a new approach to address the text classification problems when learning with partial labels is beneficial. Instead of offering each training sample a set of candidate labels, we assign negative-oriented labels to the ambiguous training examples if they are unlikely fall into certain classes. We construct our new maximum likelihood estimators with self-correction property, and prove that under some conditions, our estimators converge faster. Also we discuss the advantages of applying one of our estimator to a fully supervised learning problem. The proposed method has potential applicability in many areas, such as crowdsourcing, natural language processing and medical image analysis.

We improve the over-parametrization size over two beautiful results [Li and Liang' 2018] and [Du, Zhai, Poczos and Singh' 2019] in deep learning theory.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is a framework to classify images belonging to unseen classes based on solely semantic information about these unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a new ZSL algorithm using coupled dictionary learning. The core idea is that the visual features and the semantic attributes of an image can share the same sparse representation in an intermediate space. We use images from seen classes and semantic attributes from seen and unseen classes to learn two dictionaries that can represent sparsely the visual and semantic feature vectors of an image. In the ZSL testing stage and in the absence of labeled data, images from unseen classes can be mapped into the attribute space by finding the joint sparse representation using solely the visual data. The image is then classified in the attribute space given semantic descriptions of unseen classes. We also provide an attribute-aware formulation to tackle domain shift and hubness problems in ZSL. Extensive experiments are provided to demonstrate the superior performance of our approach against the state of the art ZSL algorithms on benchmark ZSL datasets.

Deep neural networks have been proved efficient for medical image denoising. Current training methods require both noisy and clean images. However, clean images cannot be acquired for many practical medical applications due to naturally noisy signal, such as dynamic imaging, spectral computed tomography, arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging, etc. In this paper we proposed a training method which learned denoising neural networks from noisy training samples only. Training data in the acquisition domain was split to two subsets and the network was trained to map one noisy set to the other. A consensus loss function was further proposed to efficiently combine the outputs from both subsets. A mathematical proof was provided that the proposed training scheme was equivalent to training with noisy and clean samples when the noise in the two subsets was uncorrelated and zero-mean. The method was validated on Low-dose CT Challenge dataset and NYU MRI dataset and achieved improved performance compared to existing unsupervised methods.