In the last decade, artificial intelligence (AI) models inspired by the brain have made unprecedented progress in performing real-world perceptual tasks like object classification and speech recognition. Recently, researchers of natural intelligence have begun using those AI models to explore how the brain performs such tasks. These developments suggest that future progress will benefit from increased interaction between disciplines. Here we introduce the Algonauts Project as a structured and quantitative communication channel for interdisciplinary interaction between natural and artificial intelligence researchers. The project's core is an open challenge with a quantitative benchmark whose goal is to account for brain data through computational models. This project has the potential to provide better models of natural intelligence and to gather findings that advance AI. The 2019 Algonauts Project focuses on benchmarking computational models predicting human brain activity when people look at pictures of objects. The 2019 edition of the Algonauts Project is available online: http://algonauts.csail.mit.edu/.

In this paper we show several similarities among logic systems that deal simultaneously with deductive and quantitative inference. We claim it is appropriate to call the tasks those systems perform as Quantitative Logic Reasoning. Analogous properties hold throughout that class, for whose members there exists a set of linear algebraic techniques applicable in the study of satisfiability decision problems. In this presentation, we consider as Quantitative Logic Reasoning the tasks performed by propositional Probabilistic Logic; first-order logic with counting quantifiers over a fragment containing unary and limited binary predicates; and propositional Lukasiewicz Infinitely-valued Probabilistic Logic

The paper represents an algorithm for planning safe and optimal routes for transport facilities with unrestricted movement direction that travel within areas with obstacles. Paper explains the algorithm using a ship as an example of such a transport facility. This paper also provides a survey of several existing solutions for the problem. The method employs an evolutionary algorithm to plan several locally optimal routes and a parallel genetic algorithm to create the final route by optimising the abovementioned set of routes. The routes are optimized against the arrival time, assuming that the optimal route is the route with the lowermost arrival time. It is also possible to apply additional restriction to the routes.

We investigate the performance of the standard Greedy algorithm for cardinality constrained maximization of non-submodular nondecreasing set functions. While there are strong theoretical guarantees on the performance of Greedy for maximizing submodular functions, there are few guarantees for non-submodular ones. However, Greedy enjoys strong empirical performance for many important non-submodular functions, e.g., the Bayesian A-optimality objective in experimental design. We prove theoretical guarantees supporting the empirical performance. Our guarantees are characterized by a combination of the (generalized) curvature $\alpha$ and the submodularity ratio $\gamma$. In particular, we prove that Greedy enjoys a tight approximation guarantee of $\frac{1}{\alpha}(1- e^{-\gamma\alpha})$ for cardinality constrained maximization. In addition, we bound the submodularity ratio and curvature for several important real-world objectives, including the Bayesian A-optimality objective, the determinantal function of a square submatrix and certain linear programs with combinatorial constraints. We experimentally validate our theoretical findings for both synthetic and real-world applications.

Spaced repetition is among the most studied learning strategies in the cognitive science literature. It consists in temporally distributing exposure to an information so as to improve long-term memorization. Providing students with an adaptive and personalized distributed practice schedule would benefit more than just a generic scheduler. However, the applicability of such adaptive schedulers seems to be limited to pure memorization, e.g. flashcards or foreign language learning. In this article, we first frame the research problem of optimizing an adaptive and personalized spaced repetition scheduler when memorization concerns the application of underlying multiple skills. To this end, we choose to rely on a student model for inferring knowledge state and memory dynamics on any skill or combination of skills. We argue that no knowledge tracing model takes both memory decay and multiple skill tagging into account for predicting student performance. As a consequence, we propose a new student learning and forgetting model suited to our research problem: DAS3H builds on the additive factor models and includes a representation of the temporal distribution of past practice on the skills involved by an item. In particular, DAS3H allows the learning and forgetting curves to differ from one skill to another. Finally, we provide empirical evidence on three real-world educational datasets that DAS3H outperforms other state-of-the-art EDM models. These results suggest that incorporating both item-skill relationships and forgetting effect improves over student models that consider one or the other.

A long-standing question for urban and regional planners pertains to the ability to describe urban patterns quantitatively. Cities' transport infrastructure, particularly street networks, provides an invaluable source of information about the urban patterns generated by peoples' movements and their interactions. With the increasing availability of street network datasets and the advancements in deep learning methods, we are presented with an unprecedented opportunity to push the frontiers of urban modelling towards more data-driven and accurate models of urban forms. In this study, we present our initial work on applying deep generative models to urban street network data to create spatially explicit urban models. We based our work on Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) which are deep generative models that have recently gained their popularity due to the ability to generate realistic images. Initial results show that VAEs are capable of capturing key high-level urban network metrics using low-dimensional vectors and generating new urban forms of complexity matching the cities captured in the street network data.

In this work, we propose a novel meta-learning approach for few-shot classification, which learns transferable prior knowledge across tasks and directly produces network parameters for similar unseen tasks with training samples. Our approach, called LGM-Net, includes two key modules, namely, TargetNet and MetaNet. The TargetNet module is a neural network for solving a specific task and the MetaNet module aims at learning to generate functional weights for TargetNet by observing training samples. We also present an intertask normalization strategy for the training process to leverage common information shared across different tasks. The experimental results on Omniglot and miniImageNet datasets demonstrate that LGM-Net can effectively adapt to similar unseen tasks and achieve competitive performance, and the results on synthetic datasets show that transferable prior knowledge is learned by the MetaNet module via mapping training data to functional weights. LGM-Net enables fast learning and adaptation since no further tuning steps are required compared to other meta-learning approaches.

It is widely accepted that optimization of medical imaging system performance should be guided by task-based measures of image quality (IQ). Task-based measures of IQ quantify the ability of an observer to perform a specific task such as detection or estimation of a signal (e.g., a tumor). For binary signal detection tasks, the Bayesian Ideal Observer (IO) sets an upper limit of observer performance and has been advocated for use in optimizing medical imaging systems and data-acquisition designs. Except in special cases, determination of the IO test statistic is analytically intractable. Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques can be employed to approximate IO detection performance, but their reported applications have been limited to relatively simple object models. In cases where the IO test statistic is difficult to compute, the Hotelling Observer (HO) can be employed. To compute the HO test statistic, potentially large covariance matrices must be accurately estimated and subsequently inverted, which can present computational challenges. This work investigates supervised learning-based methodologies for approximating the IO and HO test statistics. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and single-layer neural networks (SLNNs) are employed to approximate the IO and HO test statistics, respectively. Numerical simulations were conducted for both signal-known-exactly (SKE) and signal-known-statistically (SKS) signal detection tasks. The performances of the supervised learning methods are assessed via receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis and the results are compared to those produced by use of traditional numerical methods or analytical calculations when feasible. The potential advantages of the proposed supervised learning approaches for approximating the IO and HO test statistics are discussed.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is an effective method of finding the global optima of black-box functions. Recently BO has been applied to neural architecture search and shows better performance than pure evolutionary strategies. All these methods adopt Gaussian processes (GPs) as surrogate function, with the handcraft similarity metrics as input. In this work, we propose a Bayesian graph neural network as a new surrogate, which can automatically extract features from deep neural architectures, and use such learned features to fit and characterize black-box objectives and their uncertainty. Based on the new surrogate, we then develop a graph Bayesian optimization framework to address the challenging task of deep neural architecture search. Experiment results show our method significantly outperforms the comparative methods on benchmark tasks.

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has demonstrated impressive ability to represent hyperspectral images and to achieve promising results in hyperspectral image classification. However, traditional CNN models can only operate convolution on regular square image regions with fixed size and weights, so they cannot universally adapt to the distinct local regions with various object distributions and geometric appearances. Therefore, their classification performances are still to be improved, especially in class boundaries. To alleviate this shortcoming, we consider employing the recently proposed Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) for hyperspectral image classification, as it can conduct the convolution on arbitrarily structured non-Euclidean data and is applicable to the irregular image regions represented by graph topological information. Different from the commonly used GCN models which work on a fixed graph, we enable the graph to be dynamically updated along with the graph convolution process, so that these two steps can be benefited from each other to gradually produce the discriminative embedded features as well as a refined graph. Moreover, to comprehensively deploy the multi-scale information inherited by hyperspectral images, we establish multiple input graphs with different neighborhood scales to extensively exploit the diversified spectral-spatial correlations at multiple scales. Therefore, our method is termed 'Multi-scale Dynamic Graph Convolutional Network' (MDGCN). The experimental results on three typical benchmark datasets firmly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed MDGCN to other state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative aspects.