In the context of some machine learning applications, obtaining data instances is a relatively easy process but labeling them could become quite expensive or tedious. Such scenarios lead to datasets with few labeled instances and a larger number of unlabeled ones. Semi-supervised classification techniques combine labeled and unlabeled data during the learning phase in order to increase classifier's generalization capability. Regrettably, most successful semi-supervised classifiers do not allow explaining their outcome, thus behaving like black boxes. However, there is an increasing number of problem domains in which experts demand a clear understanding of the decision process. In this paper, we report on an extended experimental study presenting an interpretable self-labeling grey-box classifier that uses a black box to estimate the missing class labels and a white box to make the final predictions. Two different approaches for amending the self-labeling process are explored: a first one based on the confidence of the black box and the latter one based on measures from Rough Set Theory. The results of the extended experimental study support the interpretability by means of transparency and simplicity of our classifier, while attaining superior prediction rates when compared with state-of-the-art self-labeling classifiers reported in the literature.

Cloud platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform, are tremendously complex. Its main resource management systems include virtual machine (VM) and container (hereafter we refer to VMs and containers simply as "containers") scheduling, server and container health monitoring and repairs, power and energy management, and other management functions. Cloud platforms are also extremely expensive to build and operate, so providers have a strong incentive to optimize their use. A nascent approach is to leverage machine learning (ML) in the platforms' resource management using supervised learning techniques, such as gradient-boosted trees and neural networks, or reinforcement learning. We also discuss why ML is often preferable to traditional non-ML techniques.

The recently proposed mask-predict decoding algorithm has narrowed the performance gap between semi-autoregressive machine translation models and the traditional left-to-right approach. We introduce a new training method for conditional masked language models, SMART, which mimics the semi-autoregressive behavior of mask-predict, producing training examples that contain model predictions as part of their inputs. Models trained with SMART produce higher-quality translations when using mask-predict decoding, effectively closing the remaining performance gap with fully autoregressive models.

A Multi-Scale T ensor Network Architecture for Classification and Regression Justin Reyes 1 and E. Miles Stoudenmire 2 1 Department of Physics, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando, FL 32816, USA 2 Center for Computational Quantum Physics, Flatiron Institute, 162 5th Avenue, New Y ork, NY 10010, USA (Dated: January 24, 2020) We present an algorithm for supervised learning using tensor networks, employing a step of preprocessing the data by coarse-graining through a sequence of wavelet transformations. We represent these transformations as a set of tensor network layers identical to those in a multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) tensor network, and perform supervised learning and regression tasks through a model based on a matrix product state (MPS) tensor network acting on the coarse-grained data. Because the entire model consists of tensor contractions (apart from the initial nonlinear feature map), we can adaptively fine-grain the optimized MPS model backwards through the layers with essentially no loss in performance. The MPS itself is trained using an adaptive algorithm based on the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) algorithm. We test our methods by performing a classification task on audio data and a regression task on temperature time-series data, studying the dependence of training accuracy on the number of coarse-graining layers and showing how fine-graining through the network may be used to initialize models with access to finer-scale features. I. INTRODUCTION Computational techniques developed across the machine learning and physics fields have consistently generated promising methods and applications in both areas of study. The application of well established machine learning architectures and optimization techniques has enriched the physics community with advances such as modeling and recognizing topological quantum states [1-3], optimizing quantum error correction codes [4], or classifying quantum walks [5]. Conversely, techniques known as tensor networks which model high-dimensional functions and are closely connected to physical principles have begun to be explored more in applied mathematics and machine learning [6-16].

Label ranking is a prediction task which deals with learning a mapping between an instance and a ranking (i.e., order) of labels from a finite set, representing their relevance to the instance. Boosting is a well-known and reliable ensemble technique that was shown to often outperform other learning algorithms. While boosting algorithms were developed for a multitude of machine learning tasks, label ranking tasks were overlooked. In this paper, we propose a boosting algorithm which was specifically designed for label ranking tasks. Extensive evaluation of the proposed algorithm on 24 semi-synthetic and real-world label ranking datasets shows that it significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art label ranking algorithms.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides an effective means of leveraging unlabeled data to improve a model's performance. In this paper, we demonstrate the power of a simple combination of two common SSL methods: consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling. Our algorithm, FixMatch, first generates pseudo-labels using the model's predictions on weakly-augmented unlabeled images. For a given image, the pseudo-label is only retained if the model produces a high-confidence prediction. The model is then trained to predict the pseudo-label when fed a strongly-augmented version of the same image. Despite its simplicity, we show that FixMatch achieves state-of-the-art performance across a variety of standard semi-supervised learning benchmarks, including 94.93% accuracy on CIFAR-10 with 250 labels and 88.61% accuracy with 40 -- just 4 labels per class. Since FixMatch bears many similarities to existing SSL methods that achieve worse performance, we carry out an extensive ablation study to tease apart the experimental factors that are most important to FixMatch's success. We make our code available at https://github.com/google-research/fixmatch.

How can we enable machines to make sense of the world, and become better at learning? To approach this goal, I believe viewing intelligence in terms of many integral aspects, and also a universal two-term tradeoff between task performance and complexity, provides two feasible perspectives. In this thesis, I address several key questions in some aspects of intelligence, and study the phase transitions in the two-term tradeoff, using strategies and tools from physics and information. Firstly, how can we make the learning models more flexible and efficient, so that agents can learn quickly with fewer examples? Inspired by how physicists model the world, we introduce a paradigm and an AI Physicist agent for simultaneously learning many small specialized models (theories) and the domain they are accurate, which can then be simplified, unified and stored, facilitating few-shot learning in a continual way. Secondly, for representation learning, when can we learn a good representation, and how does learning depend on the structure of the dataset? We approach this question by studying phase transitions when tuning the tradeoff hyperparameter. In the information bottleneck, we theoretically show that these phase transitions are predictable and reveal structure in the relationships between the data, the model, the learned representation and the loss landscape. Thirdly, how can agents discover causality from observations? We address part of this question by introducing an algorithm that combines prediction and minimizing information from the input, for exploratory causal discovery from observational time series. Fourthly, to make models more robust to label noise, we introduce Rank Pruning, a robust algorithm for classification with noisy labels. I believe that building on the work of my thesis we will be one step closer to enable more intelligent machines that can make sense of the world.

Weakly supervised learning aims at coping with scarce labeled data. Previous weakly supervised studies typically assume that there is only one kind of weak supervision in data. In many applications, however, raw data usually contains more than one kind of weak supervision at the same time. For example, in user experience enhancement from Didi, one of the largest online ride-sharing platforms, the ride comment data contains severe label noise (due to the subjective factors of passengers) and severe label distribution bias (due to the sampling bias). We call such a problem as "compound weakly supervised learning". In this paper, we propose the CWSL method to address this problem based on Didi ride-sharing comment data. Specifically, an instance reweighting strategy is employed to cope with severe label noise in comment data, where the weights for harmful noisy instances are small. Robust criteria like AUC rather than accuracy and the validation performance are optimized for the correction of biased data label. Alternating optimization and stochastic gradient methods accelerate the optimization on large-scale data. Experiments on Didi ride-sharing comment data clearly validate the effectiveness. We hope this work may shed some light on applying weakly supervised learning to complex real situations.

This paper provides a systematic and comprehensive survey that reviews the latest research efforts focused on machine learning (ML) based performance improvement of wireless networks, while considering all layers of the protocol stack (PHY, MAC and network). First, the related work and paper contributions are discussed, followed by providing the necessary background on data-driven approaches and machine learning for non-machine learning experts to understand all discussed techniques. Then, a comprehensive review is presented on works employing ML-based approaches to optimize the wireless communication parameters settings to achieve improved network quality-of-service (QoS) and quality-of-experience (QoE). We first categorize these works into: radio analysis, MAC analysis and network prediction approaches, followed by subcategories within each. Finally, open challenges and broader perspectives are discussed.

An agreed upon definition of machine learning is, a computer program is said to have learned when it's performance measure P at task T improves with experience E. Under the definition of Supervised Learning, we get this diagram. Here the experience would be the training data required to improve the algorithm. In practice we put this data into the Design Matrix. Design Matrix [dəˈzīn ˈmātriks]: term -- if a single input can be represented as a vector, putting all of the training examples, i.e the vectors, into 1 matrix makes the entire input aspects of the training data. This is not all of the experience. We still need the labels, if the examples are the inputs.