This paper rigorously establishes that the existence of the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) in high-dimensional logistic regression models with Gaussian covariates undergoes a sharp `phase transition'. We introduce an explicit boundary curve $h_{\text{MLE}}$, parameterized by two scalars measuring the overall magnitude of the unknown sequence of regression coefficients, with the following property: in the limit of large sample sizes $n$ and number of features $p$ proportioned in such a way that $p/n \rightarrow \kappa$, we show that if the problem is sufficiently high dimensional in the sense that $\kappa > h_{\text{MLE}}$, then the MLE does not exist with probability one. Conversely, if $\kappa < h_{\text{MLE}}$, the MLE asymptotically exists with probability one.

The ASVspoof challenge series was born to spearhead research in anti-spoofing for automatic speaker verification (ASV). The two challenge editions in 2015 and 2017 involved the assessment of spoofing countermeasures (CMs) in isolation from ASV using an equal error rate (EER) metric. While a strategic approach to assessment at the time, it has certain shortcomings. First, the CM EER is not necessarily a reliable predictor of performance when ASV and CMs are combined. Second, the EER operating point is ill-suited to user authentication applications, e.g. telephone banking, characterised by a high target user prior but a low spoofing attack prior. We aim to migrate from CM- to ASV-centric assessment with the aid of a new tandem detection cost function (t-DCF) metric. It extends the conventional DCF used in ASV research to scenarios involving spoofing attacks. The t-DCF metric has 6 parameters: (i) false alarm and miss costs for both systems, and (ii) prior probabilities of target and spoof trials (with an implied third, nontarget prior). The study is intended to serve as a self-contained, tutorial-like presentation. We analyse with the t-DCF a selection of top-performing CM submissions to the 2015 and 2017 editions of ASVspoof, with a focus on the spoofing attack prior. Whereas there is little to choose between countermeasure systems for lower priors, system rankings derived with the EER and t-DCF show differences for higher priors. We observe some ranking changes. Findings support the adoption of the DCF-based metric into the roadmap for future ASVspoof challenges, and possibly for other biometric anti-spoofing evaluations.

In the propositional setting, the marginal problem is to find a (maximum-entropy) distribution that has some given marginals. We study this problem in a relational setting and make the following contributions. First, we compare two different notions of relational marginals. Second, we show a duality between the resulting relational marginal problems and the maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters of relational models, which generalizes a well-known duality from the propositional setting. Third, by exploiting the relational marginal formulation, we present a statistically sound method to learn the parameters of relational models that will be applied in settings where the number of constants differs between the training and test data. Furthermore, based on a relational generalization of marginal polytopes, we characterize cases where the standard estimators based on feature's number of true groundings needs to be adjusted and we quantitatively characterize the consequences of these adjustments. Fourth, we prove bounds on expected errors of the estimated parameters, which allows us to lower-bound, among other things, the effective sample size of relational training data.

Voice conversion (VC) aims at conversion of speaker characteristic without altering content. Due to training data limitations and modeling imperfections, it is difficult to achieve believable speaker mimicry without introducing processing artifacts; performance assessment of VC, therefore, usually involves both speaker similarity and quality evaluation by a human panel. As a time-consuming, expensive, and non-reproducible process, it hinders rapid prototyping of new VC technology. We address artifact assessment using an alternative, objective approach leveraging from prior work on spoofing countermeasures (CMs) for automatic speaker verification. Therein, CMs are used for rejecting `fake' inputs such as replayed, synthetic or converted speech but their potential for automatic speech artifact assessment remains unknown. This study serves to fill that gap. As a supplement to subjective results for the 2018 Voice Conversion Challenge (VCC'18) data, we configure a standard constant-Q cepstral coefficient CM to quantify the extent of processing artifacts. Equal error rate (EER) of the CM, a confusability index of VC samples with real human speech, serves as our artifact measure. Two clusters of VCC'18 entries are identified: low-quality ones with detectable artifacts (low EERs), and higher quality ones with less artifacts. None of the VCC'18 systems, however, is perfect: all EERs are < 30 % (the `ideal' value would be 50 %). Our preliminary findings suggest potential of CMs outside of their original application, as a supplemental optimization and benchmarking tool to enhance VC technology.

Do visual tasks have a relationship, or are they unrelated? For instance, could having surface normals simplify estimating the depth of an image? Intuition answers these questions positively, implying existence of a structure among visual tasks. Knowing this structure has notable values; it is the concept underlying transfer learning and provides a principled way for identifying redundancies across tasks, e.g., to seamlessly reuse supervision among related tasks or solve many tasks in one system without piling up the complexity. We proposes a fully computational approach for modeling the structure of space of visual tasks. This is done via finding (first and higher-order) transfer learning dependencies across a dictionary of twenty six 2D, 2.5D, 3D, and semantic tasks in a latent space. The product is a computational taxonomic map for task transfer learning. We study the consequences of this structure, e.g. nontrivial emerged relationships, and exploit them to reduce the demand for labeled data. For example, we show that the total number of labeled datapoints needed for solving a set of 10 tasks can be reduced by roughly 2/3 (compared to training independently) while keeping the performance nearly the same. We provide a set of tools for computing and probing this taxonomical structure including a solver that users can employ to devise efficient supervision policies for their use cases.

Tasks such as social network analysis, human behavior recognition, or modeling biochemical reactions, can be solved elegantly by using the probabilistic inference framework. However, standard probabilistic inference algorithms work at a propositional level, and thus cannot capture the symmetries and redundancies that are present in these tasks. Algorithms that exploit those symmetries have been devised in different research fields, for example by the lifted inference-, multiple object tracking-, and modeling and simulation-communities. The common idea, that we call state space abstraction, is to perform inference over compact representations of sets of symmetric states. Although they are concerned with a similar topic, the relationship between these approaches has not been investigated systematically. This survey provides the following contributions. We perform a systematic literature review to outline the state of the art in probabilistic inference methods exploiting symmetries. From an initial set of more than 4,000 papers, we identify 116 relevant papers. Furthermore, we provide new high-level categories that classify the approaches, based on the problem classes the different approaches can solve. Researchers from different fields that are confronted with a state space explosion problem in a probabilistic system can use this classification to identify possible solutions. Finally, based on this conceptualization, we identify potentials for future research, as some relevant application domains are not addressed by current approaches.

Although simple individually, artificial neurons provide state-of-the-art performance when interconnected in deep networks. Unknown to many, there exists an arguably even simpler and more versatile learning mechanism, namely, the Tsetlin Automaton. Merely by means of a single integer as memory, it learns the optimal action in stochastic environments. In this paper, we introduce the Tsetlin Machine, which solves complex pattern recognition problems with easy-to-interpret propositional formulas, composed by a collective of Tsetlin Automata. To eliminate the longstanding problem of vanishing signal-to-noise ratio, the Tsetlin Machine orchestrates the automata using a novel game. Our theoretical analysis establishes that the Nash equilibria of the game are aligned with the propositional formulas that provide optimal pattern recognition accuracy. This translates to learning without local optima, only global ones. We argue that the Tsetlin Machine finds the propositional formula that provides optimal accuracy, with probability arbitrarily close to unity. In four distinct benchmarks, the Tsetlin Machine outperforms both Neural Networks, SVMs, Random Forests, the Naive Bayes Classifier and Logistic Regression. It further turns out that the accuracy advantage of the Tsetlin Machine increases with lack of data. The Tsetlin Machine has a significant computational performance advantage since both inputs, patterns, and outputs are expressed as bits, while recognition of patterns relies on bit manipulation. The combination of accuracy, interpretability, and computational simplicity makes the Tsetlin Machine a promising tool for a wide range of domains, including safety-critical medicine. Being the first of its kind, we believe the Tsetlin Machine will kick-start completely new paths of research, with a potentially significant impact on the AI field and the applications of AI.

Deep learning approaches have shown remarkable performance in many areas of pattern recognition recently. In spite of their power in hierarchical feature extraction and classification, this type of neural network is computationally expensive and difficult to implement on hardware for portable devices. In an other vein of research on neural network architectures, spiking neural networks (SNNs) have been described as power-efficient models because of their sparse, spike-based communication framework. SNNs are brain-inspired such that they seek to mimic the accurate and efficient functionality of the brain. Recent studies try to take advantages of the both frameworks (deep learning and SNNs) to develop a deep architecture of SNNs to achieve high performance of recently proved deep networks while implementing bio-inspired, power-efficient platforms. Additionally, As the brain process different stimuli patterns through multi-layer SNNs that are communicating by spike trains via adaptive synapses, developing artificial deep SNNs can also be very helpful for understudying the computations done by biological neural circuits. Having both computational and experimental backgrounds, we are interested in including a comprehensive summary of recent advances in developing deep SNNs that may assist computer scientists interested in developing more advanced and efficient networks and help experimentalists to frame new hypotheses for neural information processing in the brain using a more realistic model.

The quality of training data is one of the crucial problems when a learning-centered approach is employed. This paper proposes a new method to investigate the quality of a large corpus designed for the recognizing textual entailment (RTE) task. The proposed method, which is inspired by a statistical hypothesis test, consists of two phases: the first phase is to introduce the predictability of textual entailment labels as a null hypothesis which is extremely unacceptable if a target corpus has no hidden bias, and the second phase is to test the null hypothesis using a Naive Bayes model. The experimental result of the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) corpus does not reject the null hypothesis. Therefore, it indicates that the SNLI corpus has a hidden bias which allows prediction of textual entailment labels from hypothesis sentences even if no context information is given by a premise sentence. This paper also presents the performance impact of NN models for RTE caused by this hidden bias.

As a data scientist who has been in the profession for several years now, I am often approached for career advice or guidance in course selection related to machine learning by students and career switchers on LinkedIn and Quora. Some questions revolve around educational paths and program selection, but many questions focus on what sort of algorithms or models are common in data science today. With a glut of algorithms from which to choose, it's hard to know where to start. Courses may include algorithms that aren't typically used in industry today, and courses may exclude very useful methods that aren't trending at the moment. Software-based programs may exclude important statistical concepts, and mathematically-based programs may skip over some of the key topics in algorithm design. I've put together a short guide for aspiring data scientists, particularly focused on statistical models and machine learning models (supervised and unsupervised); many of these topics are covered in textbooks, graduate-level statistics courses, data science bootcamps, and other training resources (some of which are included in the reference section of the article).