Government
Toward Runtime-Throttleable Neural Networks
As deep neural network (NN) methods have matured, there has been increasing interest in deploying NN solutions to "edge computing" platforms such as mobile phones or embedded controllers. These platforms are often resource-constrained, especially in energy storage and power, but state-of-the-art NN architectures are designed with little regard for resource use. Existing techniques for reducing the resource footprint of NN models produce static models that occupy a single point in the trade-space between performance and resource use. This paper presents an approach to creating runtime-throttleable NNs that can adaptively balance performance and resource use in response to a control signal. Throttleable networks allow intelligent resource management, for example by allocating fewer resources in "easy" conditions or when battery power is low. We describe a generic formulation of throttling via block-level gating, apply it to create throttleable versions of several standard CNN architectures, and demonstrate that our approach allows smooth performance throttling over a wide range of operating points in image classification and object detection tasks, with only a small loss in peak accuracy.
Neural Consciousness Flow
Xu, Xiaoran, Feng, Wei, Sun, Zhiqing, Deng, Zhi-Hong
The ability of reasoning beyond data fitting is substantial to deep learning systems in order to make a leap forward towards artificial general intelligence. A lot of efforts have been made to model neural-based reasoning as an iterative decision-making process based on recurrent networks and reinforcement learning. Instead, inspired by the consciousness prior proposed by Yoshua Bengio, we explore reasoning with the notion of attentive awareness from a cognitive perspective, and formulate it in the form of attentive message passing on graphs, called neural consciousness flow (NeuCFlow). Aiming to bridge the gap between deep learning systems and reasoning, we propose an attentive computation framework with a three-layer architecture, which consists of an unconsciousness flow layer, a consciousness flow layer, and an attention flow layer. We implement the NeuCFlow model with graph neural networks (GNNs) and conditional transition matrices. Our attentive computation greatly reduces the complexity of vanilla GNN-based methods, capable of running on large-scale graphs. We validate our model for knowledge graph reasoning by solving a series of knowledge base completion (KBC) tasks. The experimental results show NeuCFlow significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art KBC methods, including the embedding-based and the path-based. The reproducible code can be found by the link below.
A Review of Deep Learning with Special Emphasis on Architectures, Applications and Recent Trends
Sengupta, Saptarshi, Basak, Sanchita, Saikia, Pallabi, Paul, Sayak, Tsalavoutis, Vasilios, Atiah, Frederick, Ravi, Vadlamani, Peters, Alan
Deep learning (DL) has solved a problem that as little as five years ago was thought by many to be intractable - the automatic recognition of patterns in data; and it can do so with accuracy that often surpasses human beings. It has solved problems beyond the realm of traditional, hand-crafted machine learning algorithms and captured the imagination of practitioners trying to make sense out of the flood of data that now inundates our society. As public awareness of the efficacy of DL increases so does the desire to make use of it. But even for highly trained professionals it can be daunting to approach the rapidly increasing body of knowledge produced by experts in the field. Where does one start? How does one determine if a particular model is applicable to their problem? How does one train and deploy such a network? A primer on the subject can be a good place to start. With that in mind, we present an overview of some of the key multilayer ANNs that comprise DL. We also discuss some new automatic architecture optimization protocols that use multi-agent approaches. Further, since guaranteeing system uptime is becoming critical to many computer applications, we include a section on using neural networks for fault detection and subsequent mitigation. This is followed by an exploratory survey of several application areas where DL has emerged as a game-changing technology: anomalous behavior detection in financial applications or in financial time-series forecasting, predictive and prescriptive analytics, medical image processing and analysis and power systems research. The thrust of this review is to outline emerging areas of application-oriented research within the DL community as well as to provide a reference to researchers seeking to use it in their work for what it does best: statistical pattern recognition with unparalleled learning capacity with the ability to scale with information.
Identifying Classes Susceptible to Adversarial Attacks
Pan, Rangeet, Islam, Md Johirul, Ahmed, Shibbir, Rajan, Hridesh
Despite numerous attempts to defend deep learning based image classifiers, they remain susceptible to the adversarial attacks. This paper proposes a technique to identify susceptible classes, those classes that are more easily subverted. To identify the susceptible classes we use distance-based measures and apply them on a trained model. Based on the distance among original classes, we create mapping among original classes and adversarial classes that helps to reduce the randomness of a model to a significant amount in an adversarial setting. We analyze the high dimensional geometry among the feature classes and identify the k most susceptible target classes in an adversarial attack. We conduct experiments using MNIST, Fashion MNIST, CIFAR-10 (ImageNet and ResNet-32) datasets. Finally, we evaluate our techniques in order to determine which distance-based measure works best and how the randomness of a model changes with perturbation.
A Value-based Trust Assessment Model for Multi-agent Systems
Chhogyal, Kinzang, Nayak, Abhaya, Ghose, Aditya, Dam, Hoa Khanh
An agent's assessment of its trust in another agent is commonly taken to be a measure of the reliability/predictability of the latter's actions. It is based on the trustor's past observations of the behaviour of the trustee and requires no knowledge of the inner-workings of the trustee. However, in situations that are new or unfamiliar, past observations are of little help in assessing trust. In such cases, knowledge about the trustee can help. A particular type of knowledge is that of values - things that are important to the trustor and the trustee. In this paper, based on the premise that the more values two agents share, the more they should trust one another, we propose a simple approach to trust assessment between agents based on values, taking into account if agents trust cautiously or boldly, and if they depend on others in carrying out a task.
IdeoTrace: A Framework for Ideology Tracing with a Case Study on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Manickam, Indu, Lan, Andrew S., Dasarathy, Gautam, Baraniuk, Richard G.
The 2016 United States presidential election has been characterized as a period of extreme divisiveness that was exacerbated on social media by the influence of fake news, trolls, and social bots. However, the extent to which the public became more polarized in response to these influences over the course of the election is not well understood. In this paper we propose IdeoTrace, a framework for (i) jointly estimating the ideology of social media users and news websites and (ii) tracing changes in user ideology over time. We apply this framework to the last two months of the election period for a group of 47508 Twitter users and demonstrate that both liberal and conservative users became more polarized over time.
Heuristics in Multi-Winner Approval Voting
Scheuerman, Jaelle, Harman, Jason L., Mattei, Nicholas, Venable, K. Brent
In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting. Moreover, scenarios such as committee or board elections require voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent may vote for as many candidates as they wish. Winners are chosen by tallying up the votes and choosing the top-$k$ candidates receiving the most votes. An agent may manipulate the vote to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way that does not reflect their true preferences. In complex and uncertain situations, agents may use heuristics to strategize, instead of incurring the additional effort required to compute the manipulation which most favors them. In this paper, we examine voting behavior in multi-winner approval voting scenarios with complete information. We show that people generally manipulate their vote to obtain a better outcome, but often do not identify the optimal manipulation. Instead, voters tend to prioritize the candidates with the highest utilities. Using simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these heuristics in situations where agents only have access to partial information.
Infusing domain knowledge in AI-based "black box" models for better explainability with application in bankruptcy prediction
Islam, Sheikh Rabiul, Eberle, William, Bundy, Sid, Ghafoor, Sheikh Khaled
Although "black box" models such as Artificial Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, and Ensemble Approaches continue to show superior performance in many disciplines, their adoption in the sensitive disciplines (e.g., finance, healthcare) is questionable due to the lack of interpretability and explainability of the model. In fact, future adoption of "black box" models is difficult because of the recent rule of "right of explanation" by the European Union where a user can ask for an explanation behind an algorithmic decision, and the newly proposed bill by the US government, the "Algorithmic Accountability Act", which would require companies to assess their machine learning systems for bias and discrimination and take corrective measures. Top Bankruptcy Prediction Models are A.I.-based and are in need of better explainability -the extent to which the internal working mechanisms of an AI system can be explained in human terms. Although explainable artificial intelligence is an emerging field of research, infusing domain knowledge for better explainability might be a possible solution. In this work, we demonstrate a way to collect and infuse domain knowledge into a "black box" model for bankruptcy prediction. Our understanding from the experiments reveals that infused domain knowledge makes the output from the black box model more interpretable and explainable.
In Yemen Conflict, Some See A New Age Of Drone Warfare
Iranian soldiers carry part of a target drone used in air-defense exercises. Iran is also turning some target drones into low-tech weapons for its proxies. Iranian soldiers carry part of a target drone used in air-defense exercises. Iran is also turning some target drones into low-tech weapons for its proxies. In January, a group of high-level military commanders gathered at an air base in Yemen.
HHS wants to use AI to help it 'Buy Smarter' Federal News Network
After a year and a half of development, the Department of Health and Human Services is ready to move its Buy Smarter Initiative into the production phase. Renamed "Reimagined -- Buy Smarter," it uses artificial intelligence to analyze large amounts of data to help with price comparisons and other money saving ideas. "Buy Smarter is an innovative opportunity for HHS to look at our category management, break down some stove pipes, and consolidate our requirements across the department," Lori Ruderman, senior advisor and co-lead for Buy Smarter, said on Federal Monthly Insights -- Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. "We've learned that within HHS, all of our different operational divisions and staff divisions, buy many of the same exact items, but they're buying them on separate contracts, they're duplicating effort, and missing out on tremendous economies of scale." In response, she said the department is leveraging new and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics process automation and natural language processing.