Selfie and cartoon are two popular artistic forms that are widely presented in our daily life. Despite the great progress in image translation/stylization, few techniques focus specifically on selfie cartoonization, since cartoon images usually contain artistic abstraction (e.g., large smoothing areas) and exaggeration (e.g., large/delicate eyebrows). In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a selfie cartoonization Generative Adversarial Network (scGAN), which mainly uses an attentive adversarial network (AAN) to emphasize specific facial regions and ignore low-level details. More specifically, we first design a cycle-like architecture to enable training with unpaired data. Then we design three losses from different aspects. A total variation loss is used to highlight important edges and contents in cartoon portraits. An attentive cycle loss is added to lay more emphasis on delicate facial areas such as eyes. In addition, a perceptual loss is included to eliminate artifacts and improve robustness of our method. Experimental results show that our method is capable of generating different cartoon styles and outperforms a number of state-of-the-art methods.

The Pommerman Team Environment is a recently proposed benchmark which involves a multi-agent domain with challenges such as partial observability, decentralized execution (without communication), and very sparse and delayed rewards. The inaugural Pommerman Team Competition held at NeurIPS 2018 hosted 25 participants who submitted a team of 2 agents. Our submission nn_team_skynet955_skynet955 won 2nd place of the "learning agents'' category. Our team is composed of 2 neural networks trained with state of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms and makes use of concepts like reward shaping, curriculum learning, and an automatic reasoning module for action pruning. Here, we describe these elements and additionally we present a collection of open-sourced agents that can be used for training and testing in the Pommerman environment. Code available at: https://github.com/BorealisAI/pommerman-baseline

LIBS2ML is a library based on scalable second order learning algorithms for solving large-scale problems, i.e., big data problems in machine learning. LIBS2ML has been developed using MEX files, i.e., C++ with MATLAB/Octave interface to take the advantage of both the worlds, i.e., faster learning using C++ and easy I/O using MATLAB. Most of the available libraries are either in MATLAB/Python/R which are very slow and not suitable for large-scale learning, or are in C/C++ which does not have easy ways to take input and display results. So LIBS2ML is completely unique due to its focus on the scalable second order methods, the hot research topic, and being based on MEX files. Thus it provides researchers a comprehensive environment to evaluate their ideas and it also provides machine learning practitioners an effective tool to deal with the large-scale learning problems. LIBS2ML is an open-source, highly efficient, extensible, scalable, readable, portable and easy to use library. The library can be downloaded from the URL: \url{https://github.com/jmdvinodjmd/LIBS2ML}.

Distributed devices such as mobile phones can produce and store large amounts of data that can enhance machine learning models; however, this data may contain private information specific to the data owner that prevents the release of the data. We wish to reduce the correlation between user-specific private information and data while maintaining the useful information. Rather than learning a large model to achieve privatization from end to end, we introduce a decoupling of the creation of a latent representation and the privatization of data that allows user-specific privatization to occur in a distributed setting with limited computation and minimal disturbance on the utility of the data. We leverage a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to create a compact latent representation of the data; however, the VAE remains fixed for all devices and all possible private labels. We then train a small generative filter to perturb the latent representation based on individual preferences regarding the private and utility information. The small filter is trained by utilizing a GAN-type robust optimization that can take place on a distributed device. We conduct experiments on three popular datasets: MNIST, UCI-Adult, and CelebA, and give a thorough evaluation including visualizing the geometry of the latent embeddings and estimating the empirical mutual information to show the effectiveness of our approach. The success of machine learning algorithms relies on not only technical methodologies, but also the availability of large datasets such as images (Krizhevsky et al., 2012; Oshri et al., 2018); however, data can often contain sensitive information, such as race or age, that may hinder the owner's ability to release the data to exploit its utility. We are interested in exploring methods of providing privatized data such that sensitive information cannot be easily inferred from the adversarial perspective, while preserving the utility of the dataset. In particular, we consider a setting where many participants are independently gathering data that will be collected by a third party.

Institut Curie, PSL Research University, CNRS UMR168, Paris, France We introduce DeepMoD, a deep learning based model discovery algorithm which seeks the partial differential equation underlying a spatiotemporal data set. DeepMoD employs sparse regression on a library of basis functions and their corresponding spatial derivatives. A feed-forward neural network approximates the data set and automatic differentiation is used to construct this function library and perform regression within the neural network. This construction makes it extremely robust to noise and applicable to small data sets and, contrary to other deep learning methods, does not require a training set and is impervious to overfitting. We illustrate this approach on several physical problems, such as the Burgers', Korteweg-de Vries, advection-diffusion and Keller-Segel equations, and This resilience to noise and high performance at very few samples highlights the potential of this method to be applied on experimental data. The increasing ability to generate large amounts of model discovery turns into finding a sparse representation data from complex physical, biological, chemical and social of the coefficient vector ξ. Rudy et al. [3] introduce the systems is beginning to transform quantitative science.regression

The adaptive moment estimation algorithm Adam (Kingma and Ba) is a popular optimizer in the training of deep neural networks. However, Reddi et al. have recently shown that the convergence proof of Adam is problematic and proposed a variant of Adam called AMSGrad as a fix. In this paper, we show that the convergence proof of AMSGrad is also problematic. Concretely, the problem in the convergence proof of AMSGrad is in handling the hyper-parameters, treating them as equal while they are not. This is also the neglected issue in the convergence proof of Adam. We provide an explicit counter-example of a simple convex optimization setting to show this neglected issue. Depending on manipulating the hyper-parameters, we present various fixes for this issue. We provide a new convergence proof for AMSGrad as the first fix. We also propose a new version of AMSGrad called AdamX as another fix. Our experiments on the benchmark dataset also support our theoretical results.

Urban autonomous driving decision making is challenging due to complex road geometry and multi-agent interactions. Current decision making methods are mostly manually designing the driving policy, which might result in sub-optimal solutions and is expensive to develop, generalize and maintain at scale. On the other hand, with reinforcement learning (RL), a policy can be learned and improved automatically without any manual designs. However, current RL methods generally do not work well on complex urban scenarios. In this paper, we propose a framework to enable model-free deep reinforcement learning in challenging urban autonomous driving scenarios. We design a specific input representation and use visual encoding to capture the low-dimensional latent states. Several state-of-the-art model-free deep RL algorithms are implemented into our framework, with several tricks to improve their performance. We evaluate our method in a challenging roundabout task with dense surrounding vehicles in a high-definition driving simulator. The result shows that our method can solve the task well and is significantly better than the baseline.

Deep neural networks have become commonplace in the domain of reinforcement learning, but are often expensive in terms of the number of parameters needed. While compressing deep neural networks has of late assumed great importance to overcome this drawback, little work has been done to address this problem in the context of reinforcement learning agents. This work aims at making first steps towards model compression in an RL agent. In particular, we compress networks to drastically reduce the number of parameters in them (to sizes less than 3% of their original size), further facilitated by applying a global max pool after the final convolution layer, and propose using Actor-Mimic in the context of compression. Finally, we show that this global max-pool allows for weakly supervised object localization, improving the ability to identify the agent's points of focus.

This work presents a joint solution to two challenging tasks: text generation from data and open information extraction. We propose to model both tasks as sequence-to-sequence translation problems and thus construct a joint neural model for both. Our experiments on knowledge graphs from Visual Genome, i.e., structured image analyses, shows promising results compared to strong baselines. Building on recent work on unsupervised machine translation, we report the first results - to the best of our knowledge - on fully unsupervised text generation from structured data.

Web Ontology Language (OWL) reasoners are used to infer new logical relations from ontologies. While inferring new facts, these reasoners can be further optimized, e.g., by properly ordering disjuncts in disjunction expressions of ontologies for satisfiability testing of concepts. Different expansion-ordering heuristics have been developed for this purpose. The built-in heuristics in these reasoners determine the order for branches in search trees while each heuristic choice causes different effects for various ontologies depending on the ontologies' syntactic structure and probably other features as well. A learning-based approach that takes into account the features aims to select an appropriate expansion-ordering heuristic for each ontology. The proper choice is expected to accelerate the reasoning process for the reasoners. In this paper, the effect of our methodology is investigated on a well-known reasoner that is JFact. Our experiments show the average speedup by a factor of one to two orders of magnitude for satisfiability testing after applying learning methodology for selecting the right expansion-ordering heuristics.