Image-to-image Translation (FUNIT) framework, aiming at learning an image-to-image translation Unsupervised image-to-image translation methods learn model for mapping an image of a source class to an analogous to map images in a given class to an analogous image in image of a target class by leveraging few images of a different class, drawing on unstructured (non-registered) the target class given at test time. The model is never shown datasets of images. While remarkably successful, current images of the target class during training but is asked to methods require access to many images in both source and generate some of them at test time. To proceed, we first hypothesize destination classes at training time. We argue this greatly that the few-shot generation capability of humans limits their use. Drawing inspiration from the human capability develops from their past visual experiences--a person can of picking up the essence of a novel object from better imagine views of a new object if the person has seen a small number of examples and generalizing from there, many more different object classes in the past. Based on we seek a few-shot, unsupervised image-to-image translation the hypothesis, we train our FUNIT model using a dataset algorithm that works on previously unseen target containing images of many different object classes for simulating classes that are specified, at test time, only by a few example the past visual experiences. Specifically, we train the images. Our model achieves this few-shot generation model to translate images from one class to another class capability by coupling an adversarial training scheme by leveraging few example images of the another class.

Recent success in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control has been dominated by model-free approaches which, unlike model-based approaches, do not suffer from representational limitations in making assumptions about the world dynamics and model errors inevitable in complex domains. However, they require a lot of experiences compared to model-based approaches that are typically more sample-efficient. We propose to combine the benefits of the two approaches by presenting an integrated approach called Curious Meta-Controller. Our approach alternates adaptively between model-based and model-free control using a curiosity feedback based on the learning progress of a neural model of the dynamics in a learned latent space. We demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve the sample efficiency and achieve near-optimal performance on learning robotic reaching and grasping tasks from raw-pixel input in both dense and sparse reward settings.

The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve is a representation of the statistical information discovered in binary classification problems and is a key concept in machine learning and data science. This paper studies the statistical properties of ROC curves and its implication on model selection. We analyze the implications of different models of incentive heterogeneity and information asymmetry on the relation between human decisions and the ROC curves. Our theoretical discussion is illustrated in the context of a large data set of pregnancy outcomes and doctor diagnosis from the Pre-Pregnancy Checkups of reproductive age couples in Henan Province provided by the Chinese Ministry of Health.

Effective understanding of the environment and accurate trajectory prediction of surrounding dynamic obstacles are critical for intelligent systems such as autonomous vehicles and wheeled mobile robotics navigating in complex scenarios to achieve safe and high-quality decision making, motion planning and control. Due to the uncertain nature of the future, it is desired to make inference from a probability perspective instead of deterministic prediction. In this paper, we propose a conditional generative neural system (CGNS) for probabilistic trajectory prediction to approximate the data distribution, with which realistic, feasible and diverse future trajectory hypotheses can be sampled. The system combines the strengths of conditional latent space learning and variational divergence minimization, and leverages both static context and interaction information with soft attention mechanisms. We also propose a regularization method for incorporating soft constraints into deep neural networks with differentiable barrier functions, which can regulate and push the generated samples into the feasible regions. The proposed system is evaluated on several public benchmark datasets for pedestrian trajectory prediction and a roundabout naturalistic driving dataset collected by ourselves. The experiment results demonstrate that our model achieves better performance than various baseline approaches in terms of prediction accuracy.

This paper provides an analysis of the tradeoff between asymptotic bias (suboptimality with unlimited data) and overfitting (additional suboptimality due to limited data) in the context of reinforcement learning with partial observability. Our theoretical analysis formally characterizes that while potentially increasing the asymptotic bias, a smaller state representation decreases the risk of overfitting. This analysis relies on expressing the quality of a state representation by bounding $L_1$ error terms of the associated belief states.  Theoretical results are empirically illustrated when the state representation is a truncated history of observations, both on synthetic POMDPs and on a large-scale POMDP in the context of smartgrids, with real-world data. Finally, similarly to known results in the fully observable setting, we also briefly discuss and empirically illustrate how using function approximators and adapting the discount factor may enhance the tradeoff between asymptotic bias and overfitting in the partially observable context.

Support vector regression (SVR) is one of the most popular machine learning algorithms aiming to generate the optimal regression curve through maximizing the minimal margin of selected training samples, i.e., support vectors. Recent researchers reveal that maximizing the margin distribution of whole training dataset rather than the minimal margin of a few support vectors, is prone to achieve better generalization performance. However, the margin distribution support vector regression machines suffer difficulties resulted from solving a non-convex quadratic optimization, compared to the margin distribution strategy for support vector classification, This paper firstly proposes a maximal margin distribution model for SVR(MMD-SVR), then implementing coupled constrain factor to convert the non-convex quadratic optimization to a convex problem with linear constrains, which enhance the training feasibility and efficiency for SVR to derived from maximizing the margin distribution. The theoretical and empirical analysis illustrates the superiority of MMD-SVR. In addition, numerical experiments show that MMD-SVR could significantly improve the accuracy of prediction and generate more smooth regression curve with better generalization compared with the classic SVR.

The paper describes a preferential approach for dealing with exceptions in KLM preferential logics, based on the rational closure. It is well known that the rational closure does not allow an independent handling of the inheritance of different defeasible properties of concepts. Several solutions have been proposed to face this problem and the lexicographic closure is the most notable one. In this work, we consider an alternative closure construction, called the Multi Preference closure (MP-closure), that has been first considered for reasoning with exceptions in DLs. Here, we reconstruct the notion of MP-closure in the propositional case and we show that it is a natural variant of Lehmann's lexicographic closure. Abandoning Maximal Entropy (an alternative route already considered but not explored by Lehmann) leads to a construction which exploits a different lexicographic ordering w.r.t. the lexicographic closure, and determines a preferential consequence relation rather than a rational consequence relation. We show that, building on the MP-closure semantics, rationality can be recovered, at least from the semantic point of view, resulting in a rational consequence relation which is stronger than the rational closure, but incomparable with the lexicographic closure. We also show that the MP-closure is stronger than the Relevant Closure.

Modern machine learning is distributed and the work of several machines is typically aggregated by \emph{averaging} which is the optimal rule in terms of speed, offering a speedup of $n$ (with respect to using a single machine) when $n$ processes are learning together. Distributing data and models poses however fundamental vulnerabilities, be they to software bugs, asynchrony, or worse, to malicious attackers controlling some machines or injecting misleading data in the network. Such behavior is best modeled as Byzantine failures, and averaging does not tolerate a single one from a worker. Krum, the first provably Byzantine resilient aggregation rule for SGD only uses one worker per step, which hampers its speed of convergence, especially in best case conditions when none of the workers is actually Byzantine. An idea, coined multi-Krum, of using $m$ different workers per step was mentioned, without however any proof neither on its Byzantine resilience nor on its slowdown. More recently, it was shown that in high dimensional machine learning, guaranteeing convergence is not a sufficient condition for \emph{strong} Byzantine resilience. A improvement on Krum, coined Bulyan, was proposed and proved to guarantee stronger resilience. However, Bulyan suffers from the same weakness of Krum: using only one worker per step. This adds up to the aforementioned open problem and leaves the crucial need for both fast and strong Byzantine resilience unfulfilled. The present paper proposes using Bulyan over Multi-Krum (we call it Multi-Bulyan), a combination for which we provide proofs of strong Byzantine resilience, as well as an ${\frac{m}{n}}$ slowdown, compared to averaging, the fastest (but non Byzantine resilient) rule for distributed machine learning, finally we prove that Multi-Bulyan inherits the $O(d)$ merits of both multi-Krum and Bulyan.

Cooking is a task that must be performed in a daily basis, and thus it is an activity that many people take for granted. For humans preparing a meal comes naturally, but for robots even preparing a simple sandwich results in an extremely difficult task. In robotics, designing kitchen robots is complicated since cooking relies on a variety of physical interactions that are dependent on different conditions such as changes in the environment, proper execution of sequential instructions, along with motions, and detection of the different states in which cooking-ingredients can be in for their correct grasping and manipulation. In this paper, we focus on the challenge of state recognition and propose a fine tuned convolutional neural network that makes use of transfer learning by reusing the Inception V3 pre-trained model. The model is trained and validated on a cooking dataset consisting of eleven states (e.g. peeled, diced, whole, etc.). The work presented on this paper could provide insight into finding a potential solution to the problem.

Unpaired Image-to-image Translation is a new rising and challenging vision problem that aims to learn a mapping between unaligned image pairs in diverse domains. Recent advances in this field like MUNIT and DRIT mainly focus on disentangling content and style/attribute from a given image first, then directly adopting the global style to guide the model to synthesize new domain images. However, this kind of approaches severely incurs contradiction if the target domain images are content-rich with multiple discrepant objects. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective instance-aware image-to-image translation approach (INIT), which employs the fine-grained local (instance) and global styles to the target image spatially. The proposed INIT exhibits three import advantages: (1) the instance-level objective loss can help learn a more accurate reconstruction and incorporate diverse attributes of objects; (2) the styles used for target domain of local/global areas are from corresponding spatial regions in source domain, which intuitively is a more reasonable mapping; (3) the joint training process can benefit both fine and coarse granularity and incorporates instance information to improve the quality of global translation. We also collect a large-scale benchmark for the new instance-level translation task. We observe that our synthetic images can even benefit real-world vision tasks like generic object detection.