We introduce GraSPy, a Python library devoted to statistical inference, machine learning, and visualization of random graphs and graph populations. This package provides flexible and easy-to-use algorithms for analyzing and understanding graphs with a scikit-learn compliant API. GraSPy can be downloaded from Python Package Index (PyPi), and is released under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. The documentation and all releases are available at https://neurodata.io/graspy.

Due to the lack of available annotated medical images, accurate computer-assisted diagnosis requires intensive Data Augmentation (DA) techniques, such as geometric/intensity transformations of original images; however, those transformed images intrinsically have a similar distribution to the original ones, leading to limited performance improvement. To fill the data lack in the real image distribution, we synthesize brain contrast-enhanced Magnetic Resonance (MR) images---realistic but completely different from the original ones---using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). This study exploits Progressive Growing of GANs (PGGANs), a multi-stage generative training method, to generate original-sized 256 X 256 MR images for Convolutional Neural Network-based brain tumor detection, which is challenging via conventional GANs; difficulties arise due to unstable GAN training with high resolution and a variety of tumors in size, location, shape, and contrast. Our preliminary results show that this novel PGGAN-based DA method can achieve promising performance improvement, when combined with classical DA, in tumor detection and also in other medical imaging tasks.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among US men. However, prostate imaging is still challenging despite the advances in multi-parametric Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which provides both morphologic and functional information pertaining to the pathological regions. Along with whole prostate gland segmentation, distinguishing between the Central Gland (CG) and Peripheral Zone (PZ) can guide towards differential diagnosis, since the frequency and severity of tumors differ in these regions; however, their boundary is often weak and fuzzy. This work presents a preliminary study on Deep Learning to automatically delineate the CG and PZ, aiming at evaluating the generalization ability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on two multi-centric MRI prostate datasets. Especially, we compared three CNN-based architectures: SegNet, U-Net, and pix2pix. In such a context, the segmentation performances achieved with/without pre-training were compared in 4-fold cross-validation. In general, U-Net outperforms the other methods, especially when training and testing are performed on multiple datasets.

Negotiation is a form of interaction in which a group of agents with conflicting interests and a desire to This paper introduces a new Negotiating Agent for cooperate try to reach a mutually acceptable agreement automated negotiation on continuous domains and on an object of negotiation [2]. The agents without considering a specified deadline. The agent explore solutions according to a predetermined protocol bidding strategy relies on Monte Carlo Tree Search, in order to find an acceptable agreement. Being which is a trendy method since it has been used with widely used in economic domains and with the rise of success on games with high branching factor such as e-commerce applications, the question of automating Go. It uses two opponent modeling techniques for negotiation has gained a lot of interest in the field of its bidding strategy and its utility: Gaussian process artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems.

There has been a strong demand for algorithms that can execute machine learning as faster as possible and the speed of deep learning has accelerated by 30 times only in the past two years. Distributed deep learning using the large mini-batch is a key technology to address the demand and is a great challenge as it is difficult to achieve high scalability on large clusters without compromising accuracy. In this paper, we introduce optimization methods which we applied to this challenge. We achieved the training time of 74.7 seconds using 2,048 GPUs on ABCI cluster applying these methods. The training throughput is over 1.73 million images/sec and the top-1 validation accuracy is 75.08%.

Metaheuristics are general methods that guide application of concrete heuristic(s) to problems that are too hard to solve using exact algorithms. However, even though a growing body of literature has been devoted to their statistical evaluation, the approaches proposed so far are able to assess only coupled effects of metaheuristics and heuristics. They do not reveal us anything about how efficient the examined metaheuristic is at guiding its subordinate heuristic(s), nor do they provide us information about how much the heuristic component of the combined algorithm contributes to the overall performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective methodology of doing so by deriving a naive, placebo metaheuristic from the one being studied and comparing the distributions of chosen performance metrics for the two methods. We propose three measures of difference between the two distributions. Those measures, which we call BER values (benefit, equivalence, risk) are based on a preselected threshold of practical significance which represents the minimal difference between two performance scores required for them to be considered practically different. We illustrate usefulness of our methodology on the example of Simulated Annealing, Boolean Satisfiability Problem, and the Flip heuristic.

This paper investigates the effect of learning a forward model on the performance of a statistical forward planning agent. We transform Conway's Game of Life simulation into a single-player game where the objective can be either to preserve as much life as possible or to extinguish all life as quickly as possible. In order to learn the forward model of the game, we formulate the problem in a novel way that learns the local cell transition function by creating a set of supervised training data and predicting the next state of each cell in the grid based on its current state and immediate neighbours. Using this method we are able to harvest sufficient data to learn perfect forward models by observing only a few complete state transitions, using either a look-up table, a decision tree or a neural network. In contrast, learning the complete state transition function is a much harder task and our initial efforts to do this using deep convolutional auto-encoders were less successful. We also investigate the effects of imperfect learned models on prediction errors and game-playing performance, and show that even models with significant errors can provide good performance.

Despite the great successes of machine learning, it can have its limits when dealing with insufficient training data.A potential solution is to incorporate additional knowledge into the training process which leads to the idea of informed machine learning. We present a research survey and structured overview of various approaches in this field. We aim to establish a taxonomy which can serve as a classification framework that considers the kind of additional knowledge, its representation,and its integration into the machine learning pipeline. The evaluation of numerous papers on the bases of the taxonomy uncovers key methods in this field.

This paper presents a neural relation extraction method to deal with the noisy training data generated by distant supervision. Previous studies mainly focus on sentence-level de-noising by designing neural networks with intra-bag attentions. In this paper, both intra-bag and inter-bag attentions are considered in order to deal with the noise at sentence-level and bag-level respectively. First, relation-aware bag representations are calculated by weighting sentence embeddings using intra-bag attentions. Here, each possible relation is utilized as the query for attention calculation instead of only using the target relation in conventional methods. Furthermore, the representation of a group of bags in the training set which share the same relation label is calculated by weighting bag representations using a similarity-based inter-bag attention module. Finally, a bag group is utilized as a training sample when building our relation extractor. Experimental results on the New York Times dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed intra-bag and inter-bag attention modules. Our method also achieves better relation extraction accuracy than state-of-the-art methods on this dataset.

Descriptive comments play a crucial role in the software engineering process. They decrease development time, enable better bug detection, and facilitate the reuse of previously written code. However, comments are commonly the last of a software developer's priorities and are thus either insufficient or missing entirely. Automatic source code summarization may therefore have the ability to significantly improve the software development process. We introduce a novel encoder-decoder model that summarizes source code, effectively writing a comment to describe the code's functionality. We make two primary innovations beyond current source code summarization models. First, our encoder is fully language-agnostic and requires no complex input preprocessing. Second, our decoder has an open vocabulary, enabling it to predict any word, even ones not seen in training. We demonstrate results comparable to state-of-the-art methods on a single-language data set and provide the first results on a data set consisting of multiple programming languages.