Most network-based speech recognition methods are based on the assumption that the labels of two adjacent speech samples in the network are likely to be the same. However, assuming the pairwise relationship between speech samples is not complete. The information a group of speech samples that show very similar patterns and tend to have similar labels is missed. The natural way overcoming the information loss of the above assumption is to represent the feature data of speech samples as the hypergraph. Thus, in this paper, the three un-normalized, random walk, and symmetric normalized hypergraph Laplacian based semi-supervised learning methods applied to hypergraph constructed from the feature data of speech samples in order to predict the labels of speech samples are introduced. Experiment results show that the sensitivity performance measures of these three hypergraph Laplacian based semi-supervised learning methods are greater than the sensitivity performance measures of the Hidden Markov Model method (the current state of the art method applied to speech recognition problem) and graph based semi-supervised learning methods (i.e. the current state of the art network-based method for classification problems) applied to network created from the feature data of speech samples.

The problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution from its samples is a fundamental tenet of statistical learning. Over the past decade, it attracted significant research effort and has been solved for a variety of divergence measures. Surprisingly, an equally important problem, estimating an unknown Markov chain from its samples, is still far from understood. We consider two problems related to the min-max risk (expected loss) of estimating an unknown $k$-state Markov chain from its $n$ sequential samples: predicting the conditional distribution of the next sample with respect to the KL-divergence, and estimating the transition matrix with respect to a natural loss induced by KL or a more general $f$-divergence measure. For the first measure, we determine the min-max prediction risk to within a linear factor in the alphabet size, showing it is $\Omega(k\log\log n\ / n)$ and $\mathcal{O}(k^2\log\log n\ / n)$. For the second, if the transition probabilities can be arbitrarily small, then only trivial uniform risk upper bounds can be derived. We therefore consider transition probabilities that are bounded away from zero, and resolve the problem for essentially all sufficiently smooth $f$-divergences, including KL-, $L_2$-, Chi-squared, Hellinger, and Alpha-divergences.

This paper proposes a framework based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for automatic heart sound classification using short-segments of individual heart beats. We design a 1D-CNN that directly learns features from raw heart-sound signals, and a 2D-CNN that takes inputs of two- dimensional time-frequency feature maps based on Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). We further develop a time-frequency CNN ensemble (TF-ECNN) combining the 1D-CNN and 2D-CNN based on score-level fusion of the class probabilities. On the large PhysioNet CinC challenge 2016 database, the proposed CNN models outperformed traditional classifiers based on support vector machine and hidden Markov models with various hand-crafted time- and frequency-domain features. Best classification scores with 89.22% accuracy and 89.94% sensitivity were achieved by the ECNN, and 91.55% specificity and 88.82% modified accuracy by the 2D-CNN alone on the test set.

We explore a collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning setting where a team of agents attempts to solve cooperative tasks in partially-observable environments. In this scenario, learning an effective communication protocol is key. We propose a communication architecture that allows for targeted communication, where agents learn both what messages to send and who to send them to, solely from downstream task-specific reward without any communication supervision. Additionally, we introduce a multi-stage communication approach where the agents co-ordinate via multiple rounds of communication before taking actions in the environment. We evaluate our approach on a diverse set of cooperative multi-agent tasks, of varying difficulties, with varying number of agents, in a variety of environments ranging from 2D grid layouts of shapes and simulated traffic junctions to complex 3D indoor environments. We demonstrate the benefits of targeted as well as multi-stage communication. Moreover, we show that the targeted communication strategies learned by agents are both interpretable and intuitive.

Learning of RBMs using standard algorithms such as CD(k) involves gradient descent on negative log-likelihood. One of the terms in the gradient, which is expectation of visible and hidden units is intractable and is obtained through an MCMC estimate. In this work we show that the Hessian of the log-likelihood can be written in terms of covariances of hidden and visible units and hence all elements of the Hessian can also be estimated using the same MCMC samples with minimal extra computational costs. Since inverting the Hessian may be computationally expensive, we propose an algorithm that uses inverse of the diagonal approximation of the Hessian. This essentially results in parameter-specific adaptive learning rates for the gradient descent process. We show that this algorithm improves the efficiency of learning RBMs compared to state-of-art methods. Specifically we show that using the inverse of diagonal approximation of Hessian in the stochastic DC (difference of convex functions) program approach results in very efficient learning of RBMs. We use different evaluation metrics to test the probability distribution learnt by the RBM along with the traditional criterion of average test and train log-likelihood.

Disease progression models are instrumental in predicting individual-level health trajectories and understanding disease dynamics. Existing models are capable of providing either accurate predictions of patients' prognoses or clinically interpretable representations of disease pathophysiology, but not both. In this paper, we develop the phased attentive state space (PASS) model of disease progression, a deep probabilistic model that captures complex representations for disease progression while maintaining clinical interpretability. Unlike Markovian state space models which assume memoryless dynamics, PASS uses an attention mechanism to induce "memoryful" state transitions, whereby repeatedly updated attention weights are used to focus on past state realizations that best predict future states. This gives rise to complex, non-stationary state dynamics that remain interpretable through the generated attention weights, which designate the relationships between the realized state variables for individual patients. PASS uses phased LSTM units (with time gates controlled by parametrized oscillations) to generate the attention weights in continuous time, which enables handling irregularly-sampled and potentially missing medical observations. Experiments on data from a real-world cohort of patients show that PASS successfully balances the tradeoff between accuracy and interpretability: it demonstrates superior predictive accuracy and learns insightful individual-level representations of disease progression.

This paper concerns automated vehicles negotiating with other vehicles, typically human driven, in crossings with the goal to find a decision algorithm by learning typical behaviors of other vehicles. The vehicle observes distance and speed of vehicles on the intersecting road and use a policy that adapts its speed along its pre-defined trajectory to pass the crossing efficiently. Deep Q-learning is used on simulated traffic with different predefined driver behaviors and intentions. The results show a policy that is able to cross the intersection avoiding collision with other vehicles 98% of the time, while at the same time not being too passive. Moreover, inferring information over time is important to distinguish between different intentions and is shown by comparing the collision rate between a Deep Recurrent Q-Network at 0.85% and a Deep Q-learning at 1.75%.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have recently rapidly grown to facilitate a wide range of innovative applications that can fundamentally change the way cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are designed. CPSs are a modern generation of systems with synergic cooperation between computational and physical potentials that can interact with humans through several new mechanisms. The main advantages of using UAVs in CPS application is their exceptional features, including their mobility, dynamism, effortless deployment, adaptive altitude, agility, adjustability, and effective appraisal of real-world functions anytime and anywhere. Furthermore, from the technology perspective, UAVs are predicted to be a vital element of the development of advanced CPSs. Therefore, in this survey, we aim to pinpoint the most fundamental and important design challenges of multi-UAV systems for CPS applications. We highlight key and versatile aspects that span the coverage and tracking of targets and infrastructure objects, energy-efficient navigation, and image analysis using machine learning for fine-grained CPS applications. Key prototypes and testbeds are also investigated to show how these practical technologies can facilitate CPS applications. We present and propose state-of-the-art algorithms to address design challenges with both quantitative and qualitative methods and map these challenges with important CPS applications to draw insightful conclusions on the challenges of each application. Finally, we summarize potential new directions and ideas that could shape future research in these areas.

Eligibility traces are an effective technique to accelerate reinforcement learning by smoothly assigning credit to recently visited states. However, their online implementation is incompatible with modern deep reinforcement learning algorithms, which rely heavily on i.i.d. training data and offline learning. We utilize an efficient, recursive method for computing {\lambda}-returns offline that can provide the benefits of eligibility traces to any value-estimation or actor-critic method. We demonstrate how our method can be combined with DQN, DRQN, and A3C to greatly enhance the learning speed of these algorithms when playing Atari 2600 games, even under partial observability. Our results indicate several-fold improvements to sample efficiency on Seaquest and Q*bert. We expect similar results for other algorithms and domains not considered here, including those with continuous actions.

State space models (SSMs) are a flexible approach to modeling complex time series. However, inference in SSMs is often computationally prohibitive for long time series. Stochastic gradient MCMC (SGMCMC) is a popular method for scalable Bayesian inference for large independent data. Unfortunately when applied to dependent data, such as in SSMs, SGMCMC's stochastic gradient estimates are biased as they break crucial temporal dependencies. To alleviate this, we propose stochastic gradient estimators that control this bias by performing additional computation in a `buffer' to reduce breaking dependencies. Furthermore, we derive error bounds for this bias and show a geometric decay under mild conditions. Using these estimators, we develop novel SGMCMC samplers for discrete, continuous and mixed-type SSMs. Our experiments on real and synthetic data demonstrate the effectiveness of our SGMCMC algorithms compared to batch MCMC, allowing us to scale inference to long time series with millions of time points.