The importance of automated Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) grows the more common human-machine interactions become, which will only continue to increase dramatically with time. A common method to describe human sentiment or feeling is the categorical model the `7 basic emotions', consisting of `Angry', `Disgust', `Fear', `Happiness', `Sadness', `Surprise' and `Neutral'. The `Emotion Recognition in the Wild' (EmotiW) competition is now in its 7th year and has become the standard benchmark for measuring FER performance. The focus of this paper is the EmotiW sub-challenge of classifying videos in the `Acted Facial Expression in the Wild' (AFEW) dataset, consisting of both visual and audio modalities, into one of the above classes. Machine learning has exploded as a research topic in recent years, with advancements in `Deep Learning' a key part of this. Although Deep Learning techniques have been widely applied to the FER task by entrants in previous years, this paper has two main contributions: (i) to apply the latest `state-of-the-art' visual and temporal networks and (ii) exploring various methods of fusing features extracted from the visual and audio elements to enrich the information available to the final model making the prediction. There are a number of complex issues that arise when trying to classify emotions for `in-the-wild' video sequences, which the above two approaches attempt to directly address. There are some positive findings when comparing the results of this paper to past submissions, indicating that further research into the proposed methods and fine-tuning of the models deployed, could result in another step forwards in the field of automated FER.

Human beings are able to master a variety of knowledge and skills with ongoing learning. By contrast, dramatic performance degradation is observed when new tasks are added to an existing neural network model. This phenomenon, termed as \emph{Catastrophic Forgetting}, is one of the major roadblocks that prevent deep neural networks from achieving human-level artificial intelligence. Several research efforts, e.g. \emph{Lifelong} or \emph{Continual} learning algorithms, have been proposed to tackle this problem. However, they either suffer from an accumulating drop in performance as the task sequence grows longer, or require to store an excessive amount of model parameters for historical memory, or cannot obtain competitive performance on the new tasks. In this paper, we focus on the incremental multi-task image classification scenario. Inspired by the learning process of human students, where they usually decompose complex tasks into easier goals, we propose an adversarial feature alignment method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. In our design, both the low-level visual features and high-level semantic features serve as soft targets and guide the training process in multiple stages, which provide sufficient supervised information of the old tasks and help to reduce forgetting. Due to the knowledge distillation and regularization phenomenons, the proposed method gains even better performance than finetuning on the new tasks, which makes it stand out from other methods. Extensive experiments in several typical lifelong learning scenarios demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both accuracies on new tasks and performance preservation on old tasks.

Algorithmic machine teaching studies the interaction between a teacher and a learner where the teacher selects labeled examples aiming at teaching a target hypothesis. In a quest to lower teaching complexity and to achieve more natural teacher-learner interactions, several teaching models and complexity measures have been proposed for both the batch settings (e.g., worst-case, recursive, preference-based, and non-clashing models) as well as the sequential settings (e.g., local preference-based model). To better understand the connections between these different batch and sequential models, we develop a novel framework which captures the teaching process via preference functions $\Sigma$. In our framework, each function $\sigma \in \Sigma$ induces a teacher-learner pair with teaching complexity as $\TD(\sigma)$. We show that the above-mentioned teaching models are equivalent to specific types/families of preference functions in our framework. This equivalence, in turn, allows us to study the differences between two important teaching models, namely $\sigma$ functions inducing the strongest batch (i.e., non-clashing) model and $\sigma$ functions inducing a weak sequential (i.e., local preference-based) model. Finally, we identify preference functions inducing a novel family of sequential models with teaching complexity linear in the VC dimension of the hypothesis class: this is in contrast to the best known complexity result for the batch models which is quadratic in the VC dimension.

This paper proposes SplitSGD, a new stochastic optimization algorithm with a dynamic learning rate selection rule. This procedure decreases the learning rate for better adaptation to the local geometry of the objective function whenever a stationary phase is detected, that is, the iterates are likely to bounce around a vicinity of a local minimum. The detection is performed by splitting the single thread into two and using the inner products of the gradients from the two threads as a measure of stationarity. This learning rate selection is provably valid, robust to initial parameters, easy-to-implement, and essentially does not incur additional computational cost. Finally, we illustrate the robust convergence properties of SplitSGD through extensive experiments.

Collision avoidance algorithms are essential for safe and efficient robot operation among pedestrians. This work proposes using deep reinforcement (RL) learning as a framework to model the complex interactions and cooperation with nearby, decision-making agents (e.g., pedestrians, other robots). Existing RL-based works assume homogeneity of agent policies, use specific motion models over short timescales, or lack a mechanism to consider measurements taken with a large number (possibly varying) of nearby agents. Therefore, this work develops an algorithm that learns collision avoidance among a variety of types of non-communicating, dynamic agents without assuming they follow any particular behavior rules. It extends our previous work by introducing a strategy using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) that enables the algorithm to use observations of an arbitrary number of other agents, instead of a small, fixed number of neighbors. The proposed algorithm is shown to outperform a classical collision avoidance algorithm, another deep RL-based algorithm, and scales with the number of agents better (fewer collisions, shorter time to goal) than our previously published learning-based approach. Analysis of the LSTM provides insights into how observations of nearby agents affect the hidden state and quantifies the performance impact of various agent ordering heuristics. The learned policy generalizes to several applications beyond the training scenarios: formation control (arrangement into letters), an implementation on a fleet of four multirotors, and an implementation on a fully autonomous robotic vehicle capable of traveling at human walking speed among pedestrians.

Most common navigation tasks in human environments require auxiliary arm interactions, e.g. opening doors, pressing buttons and pushing obstacles away. This type of navigation tasks, which we call Interactive Navigation, requires the use of mobile manipulators: mobile bases with manipulation capabilities. Interactive Navigation tasks are usually long-horizon and composed of heterogeneous phases of pure navigation, pure manipulation, and their combination. Using the wrong part of the embodiment is inefficient and hinders progress. We propose HRL4IN, a novel Hierarchical RL architecture for Interactive Navigation tasks. HRL4IN exploits the exploration benefits of HRL over flat RL for long-horizon tasks thanks to temporally extended commitments towards subgoals. Different from other HRL solutions, HRL4IN handles the heterogeneous nature of the Interactive Navigation task by creating subgoals in different spaces in different phases of the task. Moreover, HRL4IN selects different parts of the embodiment to use for each phase, improving energy efficiency. We evaluate HRL4IN against flat PPO and HAC, a state-of-the-art HRL algorithm, on Interactive Navigation in two environments - a 2D grid-world environment and a 3D environment with physics simulation. We show that HRL4IN significantly outperforms its baselines in terms of task performance and energy efficiency. More information is available at https://sites.google.com/view/hrl4in.

The global business value derived from Artificial Intelligence (AI) is projected to reach over $3,9 trillion by 2022, according to industry analyst firm Gartner. The firm expects that in the next few years, Artificial Intelligence used to support data science and other algorithm-based applications is going to become the most common use for AI, comprising about 44 percent of the total. To face industry projections, the population needs to prepare by promoting education in AI. Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) is the world's first graduate-level AI university. Named after His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Armed Forces, the AI university will introduce a new model of academia and research to the field of Artificial Intelligence.

My hobbies are Reading books, Listening to music, Surfing the internet and Writing articles.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to transform our lives from the way we work to the way we live. It has already found its way into many domains and will continue to permeate every aspect of life, society, and work. Microsoft believes every business will rely on AI in five years. If you ask employees, however, they are concerned about job security. In a recent Docebo report, three in five people expressed concerns that AI technology will impact how they perform their job or daily tasks in the future.