Bayesian max-margin models have shown superiority in various practical applications, such as text categorization, collaborative prediction, social network link prediction and crowdsourcing, and they conjoin the flexibility of Bayesian modeling and predictive strengths of max-margin learning. However, Monte Carlo sampling for these models still remains challenging, especially for applications that involve large-scale datasets. In this paper, we present the stochastic subgradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) methods, which are easy to implement and computationally efficient. We show the approximate detailed balance property of subgradient HMC which reveals a natural and validated generalization of the ordinary HMC. Furthermore, we investigate the variants that use stochastic subsampling and thermostats for better scalability and mixing. Using stochastic subgradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), we efficiently solve the posterior inference task of various Bayesian max-margin models and extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Conventional deep neural networks (DNN) for speech acoustic modeling rely on Gaussian mixture models (GMM) and hidden Markov model (HMM) to obtain binary class labels as the targets for DNN training. Subword classes in speech recognition systems correspond to context-dependent tied states or senones. The present work addresses some limitations of GMM-HMM senone alignments for DNN training. We hypothesize that the senone probabilities obtained from a DNN trained with binary labels can provide more accurate targets to learn better acoustic models. However, DNN outputs bear inaccuracies which are exhibited as high dimensional unstructured noise, whereas the informative components are structured and low-dimensional. We exploit principle component analysis (PCA) and sparse coding to characterize the senone subspaces. Enhanced probabilities obtained from low-rank and sparse reconstructions are used as soft-targets for DNN acoustic modeling, that also enables training with untranscribed data. Experiments conducted on AMI corpus shows 4.6% relative reduction in word error rate.

In this paper we propose cross-modal convolutional neural networks (X-CNNs), a novel biologically inspired type of CNN architectures, treating gradient descent-specialised CNNs as individual units of processing in a larger-scale network topology, while allowing for unconstrained information flow and/or weight sharing between analogous hidden layers of the network---thus generalising the already well-established concept of neural network ensembles (where information typically may flow only between the output layers of the individual networks). The constituent networks are individually designed to learn the output function on their own subset of the input data, after which cross-connections between them are introduced after each pooling operation to periodically allow for information exchange between them. This injection of knowledge into a model (by prior partition of the input data through domain knowledge or unsupervised methods) is expected to yield greatest returns in sparse data environments, which are typically less suitable for training CNNs. For evaluation purposes, we have compared a standard four-layer CNN as well as a sophisticated FitNet4 architecture against their cross-modal variants on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets with differing percentages of the training data being removed, and find that at lower levels of data availability, the X-CNNs significantly outperform their baselines (typically providing a 2--6% benefit, depending on the dataset size and whether data augmentation is used), while still maintaining an edge on all of the full dataset tests.

The Hidden Markov Model or HMM is all about learning sequences. A lot of the data that would be very useful for us to model is in sequences. Stock prices are sequences of prices. Language is a sequence of words. Credit scoring involves sequences of borrowing and repaying money, and we can use those sequences to predict whether or not you're going to default.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been touted as the next Industrial Revolution, with pervasive connectivity and the insights it can generate offering a new digital lens for viewing and managing the physical world. But in addition to the tangible process efficiencies and quality of life improvements expected from the IoT, it's also a stepping stone to perhaps the greatest achievement in human history: artificial intelligence (AI). In many ways the technological progression of AI and the IoT are intertwined. IoT will provide the information that fuels our data-driven economy, while AI is the engine that will consume it. Though both paradigms are still in their infancy, each's success is contingent upon the other's: The IoT can never reach its potential without a mechanism for autonomously processing large heterogeneous data sets, just as AI is incapable of expanding without being fed massive amounts of data.

Speech Translation has always been about giving source text or audio input and waiting for system to give translated output in desired form. In this paper, we present the Acoustic Dialect Decoder (ADD) - a voice to voice ear-piece translation device. We introduce and survey the recent advances made in the field of Speech Engineering, to employ in the ADD, particularly focusing on the three major processing steps of Recognition, Translation and Synthesis. We tackle the problem of machine understanding of natural language by designing a recognition unit for source audio to text, a translation unit for source language text to target language text, and a synthesis unit for target language text to target language speech. Speech from the surroundings will be recorded by the recognition unit present on the ear-piece and translation will start as soon as one sentence is successfully read. This way, we hope to give translated output as and when input is being read. The recognition unit will use Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) Based Tool-Kit (HTK), hybrid RNN systems with gated memory cells, and the synthesis unit, HMM based speech synthesis system HTS. This system will initially be built as an English to Tamil translation device.

Beijing National Lab for Condensed Matter Physics and Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China Despite their exceptional flexibility and popularity, the Monte Carlo methods often suffer from slow mixing times for challenging statistical physics problems. We present a general strategy to overcome this difficulty by adopting ideas and techniques from the machine learning community. We fit the unnormalized probability of the physical model to a feedforward neural network and reinterpret the architecture as a restricted Boltzmann machine. Then, exploiting its feature detection ability, we utilize the restricted Boltzmann machine for efficient Monte Carlo updates and to speed up the simulation of the original physical system. We implement these ideas for the Falicov-Kimball model and demonstrate improved acceptance ratio and autocorrelation time near the phase transition point. Monte Carlo method is one of the most flexible and powerful methods for studying many-body systems [1, 2]. Monte Carlo methods randomly sample configurations and obtain the answer as a statistical average.

We introduce a Maximum Entropy model able to capture the statistics of melodies in music. The model can be used to generate new melodies that emulate the style of the musical corpus which was used to train it. Instead of using the $n-$body interactions of $(n-1)-$order Markov models, traditionally used in automatic music generation, we use a $k-$nearest neighbour model with pairwise interactions only. In that way, we keep the number of parameters low and avoid over-fitting problems typical of Markov models. We show that long-range musical phrases don't need to be explicitly enforced using high-order Markov interactions, but can instead emerge from multiple, competing, pairwise interactions. We validate our Maximum Entropy model by contrasting how much the generated sequences capture the style of the original corpus without plagiarizing it. To this end we use a data-compression approach to discriminate the levels of borrowing and innovation featured by the artificial sequences. The results show that our modelling scheme outperforms both fixed-order and variable-order Markov models. This shows that, despite being based only on pairwise interactions, this Maximum Entropy scheme opens the possibility to generate musically sensible alterations of the original phrases, providing a way to generate innovation.

Autonomous driving is a multi-agent setting where the host vehicle must apply sophisticated negotiation skills with other road users when overtaking, giving way, merging, taking left and right turns and while pushing ahead in unstructured urban roadways. Since there are many possible scenarios, manually tackling all possible cases will likely yield a too simplistic policy. Moreover, one must balance between unexpected behavior of other drivers/pedestrians and at the same time not to be too defensive so that normal traffic flow is maintained. In this paper we apply deep reinforcement learning to the problem of forming long term driving strategies. We note that there are two major challenges that make autonomous driving different from other robotic tasks. First, is the necessity for ensuring functional safety - something that machine learning has difficulty with given that performance is optimized at the level of an expectation over many instances. Second, the Markov Decision Process model often used in robotics is problematic in our case because of unpredictable behavior of other agents in this multi-agent scenario. We make three contributions in our work. First, we show how policy gradient iterations can be used without Markovian assumptions. Second, we decompose the problem into a composition of a Policy for Desires (which is to be learned) and trajectory planning with hard constraints (which is not learned). The goal of Desires is to enable comfort of driving, while hard constraints guarantees the safety of driving. Third, we introduce a hierarchical temporal abstraction we call an "Option Graph" with a gating mechanism that significantly reduces the effective horizon and thereby reducing the variance of the gradient estimation even further.

Columbia University is offering free online course on Machine Learning. It is a subfield of computer science that evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence. In this course applicants will master the essentials of machine learning and algorithms to help improve learning from data without human intervention. The course will start on January 16, 2017. Columbia University is one of the world's most important centers of research and at the same time a distinctive and distinguished learning environment for undergraduates and graduate students in many scholarly and professional fields.