Humans are not only adept in recognizing what class an input instance belongs to (i.e., classification task), but perhaps more remarkably, they can imagine (i.e., generate) plausible instances of a desired class with ease, when prompted. Inspired by this, we propose a framework which allows transforming Cascade-Correlation Neural Networks (CCNNs) into probabilistic generative models, thereby enabling CCNNs to generate samples from a category of interest. CCNNs are a well-known class of deterministic, discriminative NNs, which autonomously construct their topology, and have been successful in giving accounts for a variety of psychological phenomena. Our proposed framework is based on a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, called the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm, which capitalizes on the gradient information of the target distribution to direct its explorations towards regions of high probability, thereby achieving good mixing properties. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework.

There's never any shortage of buzzwords in the IT world, but when it comes to A.I., they can be hard to tell apart. Here are five things you need to understand. Artificial intelligence refers to "a broad set of methods, algorithms and technologies that make software'smart' in a way that may seem human-like to an outside observer," said Lynne Parker, director of the division of Information and Intelligent Systems for the National Science Foundation. Machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, robotics and related topics are all part of A.I., in other words. "Some people may come up with distinctions between the two, but there is not a universal view that the two terms mean anything different," Parker said.

We focus on generative autoencoders, such as variational or adversarial autoencoders, which jointly learn a generative model alongside an inference model. Generative autoencoders are those which are trained to softly enforce a prior on the latent distribution learned by the inference model. We call the distribution to which the inference model maps observed samples, the learned latent distribution, which may not be consistent with the prior. We formulate a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling process, equivalent to iteratively decoding and encoding, which allows us to sample from the learned latent distribution. Since, the generative model learns to map from the learned latent distribution, rather than the prior, we may use MCMC to improve the quality of samples drawn from the generative model, especially when the learned latent distribution is far from the prior. Using MCMC sampling, we are able to reveal previously unseen differences between generative autoencoders trained either with or without a denoising criterion.

Discrete-time hidden Markov models are a broadly useful class of latent-variable models with applications in areas such as speech recognition, bioinformatics, and climate data analysis. It is common in practice to introduce temporal non-homogeneity into such models by making the transition probabilities dependent on time-varying exogenous input variables via a multinomial logistic parametrization. We extend such models to introduce additional non-homogeneity into the emission distribution using a generalized linear model (GLM), with data augmentation for sampling-based inference. However, the presence of the logistic function in the state transition model significantly complicates parameter inference for the overall model, particularly in a Bayesian context. To address this we extend the recently-proposed Polya-Gamma data augmentation approach to handle non-homogeneous hidden Markov models (NHMMs), allowing the development of an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling scheme. We apply our model and inference scheme to 30 years of daily rainfall in India, leading to a number of insights into rainfall-related phenomena in the region. Our proposed approach allows for fully Bayesian analysis of relatively complex NHMMs on a scale that was not possible with previous methods. Software implementing the methods described in the paper is available via the R package NHMM.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are effective models for reducing spectral variations and modeling spectral correlations in acoustic features for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Hybrid speech recognition systems incorporating CNNs with Hidden Markov Models/Gaussian Mixture Models (HMMs/GMMs) have achieved the state-of-the-art in various benchmarks. Meanwhile, Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) with Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which is proposed for labeling unsegmented sequences, makes it feasible to train an end-to-end speech recognition system instead of hybrid settings. However, RNNs are computationally expensive and sometimes difficult to train. In this paper, inspired by the advantages of both CNNs and the CTC approach, we propose an end-to-end speech framework for sequence labeling, by combining hierarchical CNNs with CTC directly without recurrent connections. By evaluating the approach on the TIMIT phoneme recognition task, we show that the proposed model is not only computationally efficient, but also competitive with the existing baseline systems. Moreover, we argue that CNNs have the capability to model temporal correlations with appropriate context information.

Major AI researchers and textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents", where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1955, defines it as "The science and engineering of making intelligent machines". AI research is highly technical and specialized, deeply divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other. Some of the division is due to social and cultural factors: subfields have grown up around particular institutions and the work of individual researchers. AI research is also divided by several technical issues.

Recent years have seen an increasing popularity of learning the sparse \emph{changes} in Markov Networks. Changes in the structure of Markov Networks reflect alternations of interactions between random variables under different regimes and provide insights into the underlying system. While each individual network structure can be complicated and difficult to learn, the overall change from one network to another can be simple. This intuition gave birth to an approach that \emph{directly} learns the sparse changes without modelling and learning the individual (possibly dense) networks. In this paper, we review such a direct learning method with some latest developments along this line of research.

We study probability measures induced by set functions with constraints. Such measures arise in a variety of real-world settings, where prior knowledge, resource limitations, or other pragmatic considerations impose constraints. We consider the task of rapidly sampling from such constrained measures, and develop fast Markov chain samplers for them. Our first main result is for MCMC sampling from Strongly Rayleigh (SR) measures, for which we present sharp polynomial bounds on the mixing time. As a corollary, this result yields a fast mixing sampler for Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs), yielding (to our knowledge) the first provably fast MCMC sampler for DPPs since their inception over four decades ago. Beyond SR measures, we develop MCMC samplers for probabilistic models with hard constraints and identify sufficient conditions under which their chains mix rapidly. We illustrate our claims by empirically verifying the dependence of mixing times on the key factors governing our theoretical bounds.

Like the course I just released on Hidden Markov Models, Recurrent Neural Networks are all about learning sequences - but whereas Markov Models are limited by the Markov assumption, Recurrent Neural Networks are not - and as a result, they are more expressive, and more powerful than anything we've seen on tasks that we haven't made progress on in decades. So what's going to be in this course and how will it build on the previous neural network courses and Hidden Markov Models? In the first section of the course we are going to add the concept of time to our neural networks. I'll introduce you to the Simple Recurrent Unit, also known as the Elman unit. We are going to revisit the XOR problem, but we're going to extend it so that it becomes the parity problem - you'll see that regular feedforward neural networks will have trouble solving this problem but recurrent networks will work because the key is to treat the input as a sequence.

Complex activity recognition is challenging due to the inherent uncertainty and diversity of performing a complex activity. Normally, each instance of a complex activity has its own configuration of atomic actions and their temporal dependencies. We propose in this paper an atomic action-based Bayesian model that constructs Allen's interval relation networks to characterize complex activities with structural varieties in a probabilistic generative way: By introducing latent variables from the Chinese restaurant process, our approach is able to capture all possible styles of a particular complex activity as a unique set of distributions over atomic actions and relations. We also show that local temporal dependencies can be retained and are globally consistent in the resulting interval network. Moreover, network structure can be learned from empirical data. A new dataset of complex hand activities has been constructed and made publicly available, which is much larger in size than any existing datasets. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets as well as our in-house dataset demonstrate the competitiveness of our approach.