In this paper we address the instability issue of generative adversarial network (GAN) by proposing a new similarity metric in unitary space of Schur decomposition for 2D representations of audio and speech signals. We show that encoding departure from normality computed in this vector space into the generator optimization formulation helps to craft more comprehensive spectrograms. We demonstrate the effectiveness of binding this metric for enhancing stability in training with less mode collapse compared to baseline GANs. Experimental results on subsets of UrbanSound8k and Mozilla common voice datasets have shown considerable improvements on the quality of the generated samples measured by the Fr\'echet inception distance. Moreover, reconstructed signals from these samples, have achieved higher signal to noise ratio compared to regular LS-GANs.

IBM says it has made progress toward developing ways to estimate the severity of Parkinson's symptoms by analyzing physical activity as motor impairment increases. In a paper published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, scientists at IBM Research, Pfizer, the Spivack Center for Clinical and Translational Neuroscience, and Tufts created statistical representations of patients' movement that could be evaluated using AI either in-clinic or from a more natural setting, such as a patient's home. And at the 2020 Machine Learning for Healthcare Conference (MLHC), IBM and the Michael J. Fox Foundation intend to detail a disease progression model that pinpoints how far a person's Parkinson's has advanced. The human motor system relies on a series of discrete movements, like arm swinging while walking, running, or jogging, to perform tasks. These movements and the transitions linking them create patterns of activity that can be measured and analyzed for signs of Parkinson's, a disease that's anticipated to affect nearly 1 million people in the U.S. this year alone.

Picking an item in the presence of other objects can be challenging as it involves occlusions and partial views. Given object models, one approach is to perform object pose estimation and use the most likely candidate pose per object to pick the target without collisions. This approach, however, ignores the uncertainty of the perception process both regarding the target's and the surrounding objects' poses. This work proposes first a perception process for 6D pose estimation, which returns a discrete distribution of object poses in a scene. Then, an open-loop planning pipeline is proposed to return safe and effective solutions for moving a robotic arm to pick, which (a) minimizes the probability of collision with the obstructing objects; and (b) maximizes the probability of reaching the target item. The planning framework models the challenge as a stochastic variant of the Minimum Constraint Removal (MCR) problem. The effectiveness of the methodology is verified given both simulated and real data in different scenarios. The experiments demonstrate the importance of considering the uncertainty of the perception process in terms of safe execution. The results also show that the methodology is more effective than conservative MCR approaches, which avoid all possible object poses regardless of the reported uncertainty.

Multi-agent safe systems have become an increasingly important area of study as we can now easily have multiple AI-powered systems operating together. In such settings, we need to ensure the safety of not only each individual agent, but also the overall system. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-agent safe learning algorithm that enables decentralized safe navigation when there are multiple different agents in the environment. This algorithm makes mild assumptions about other agents and is trained in a decentralized fashion, i.e. with very little prior knowledge about other agents' policies. Experiments show our algorithm performs well with the robots running other algorithms when optimizing various objectives.

This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important since the mean indicates average returns and the variance indicates risk or fairness. However, the variance metric couples the rewards at all stages, the traditional dynamic programming is inapplicable as the principle of time consistency fails. We study this problem from a new perspective called the sensitivity-based optimization theory. A performance difference formula is derived and it can quantify the difference of the mean-variance combined metrics of MDPs under any two different policies. The difference formula can be utilized to generate new policies with strictly improved mean-variance performance. A necessary condition of the optimal policy and the optimality of deterministic policies are derived. We further develop an iterative algorithm with a form of policy iteration, which is proved to converge to local optima both in the mixed and randomized policy space. Specially, when the mean reward is constant in policies, the algorithm is guaranteed to converge to the global optimum. Finally, we apply our approach to study the fluctuation reduction of wind power in an energy storage system, which demonstrates the potential applicability of our optimization method.

Time series and sequential data have gained significant attention recently since many real-world processes in various domains such as finance, education, biology, and engineering can be modeled as time series. Although many algorithms and methods such as the Kalman filter, hidden Markov model, and long short term memory (LSTM) are proposed to make inferences and predictions for the data, their usage significantly depends on the application, type of the problem, available data, and sufficient accuracy or loss. In this paper, we compare the supervised and unsupervised hidden Markov model to LSTM in terms of the amount of data needed for training, complexity, and forecasting accuracy. Moreover, we propose various techniques to discretize the observations and convert the problem to a discrete hidden Markov model under stationary and non-stationary situations. Our results indicate that even an unsupervised hidden Markov model can outperform LSTM when a massive amount of labeled data is not available. Furthermore, we show that the hidden Markov model can still be an effective method to process the sequence data even when the first-order Markov assumption is not satisfied.

Online Courses Udemy Deep Learning: Convolutional Neural Networks in Python, Computer Vision and Data Science and Machine Learning combined! In Theano and TensorFlow Created by Lazy Programmer Inc. English [Auto-generated], Indonesian [Auto-generated], 6 more Students also bought Advanced AI: Deep Reinforcement Learning in Python Deep Learning: Recurrent Neural Networks in Python Unsupervised Machine Learning Hidden Markov Models in Python Bayesian Machine Learning in Python: A/B Testing Data Science: Supervised Machine Learning in Python Preview this course GET COUPON CODE Description This is the 3rd part in my Data Science and Machine Learning series on Deep Learning in Python. At this point, you already know a lot about neural networks and deep learning, including not just the basics like backpropagation, but how to improve it using modern techniques like momentum and adaptive learning rates. You've already written deep neural networks in Theano and TensorFlow, and you know how to run code using the GPU. This course is all about how to use deep learning for computer vision using convolutional neural networks.

Online Courses Udemy Data Science: Supervised Machine Learning in Python, Full Guide to Implementing Classic Machine Learning Algorithms in Python and with Sci-Kit Learn Created by Lazy Programmer Inc. English [Auto-generated], Spanish [Auto-generated] Students also bought Advanced AI: Deep Reinforcement Learning in Python Deep Learning: Convolutional Neural Networks in Python Deep Learning: Recurrent Neural Networks in Python Unsupervised Machine Learning Hidden Markov Models in Python Bayesian Machine Learning in Python: A/B Testing Preview this course GET COUPON CODE Description In recent years, we've seen a resurgence in AI, or artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Machine learning has led to some amazing results, like being able to analyze medical images and predict diseases on-par with human experts. Google's AlphaGo program was able to beat a world champion in the strategy game go using deep reinforcement learning. Machine learning is even being used to program self driving cars, which is going to change the automotive industry forever. Imagine a world with drastically reduced car accidents, simply by removing the element of human error.

A machine learning algorithm may be tasked with an optimization problem. Using reinforcement learning, the algorithm will attempt to optimize the actions taken within an environment, in order to maximize the potential reward. Where supervised learning techniques require correct input/output pairs to create a model, reinforcement learning uses Markov decision processes to determine an optimal balance of exploration and exploitation. Machine learning may use reinforcement learning by way of the Markov decision process when the probabilities and rewards of an outcome are unspecified or unknown.

Emotional voice conversion aims to convert the emotion of speech from one state to another while preserving the linguistic content and speaker identity. The prior studies on emotional voice conversion are mostly carried out under the assumption that emotion is speaker-dependent. We consider that there is a common code between speakers for emotional expression in a spoken language, therefore, a speaker-independent mapping between emotional states is possible. In this paper, we propose a speaker-independent emotional voice conversion framework, that can convert anyone's emotion without the need for parallel data. We propose a VAW-GAN based encoder-decoder structure to learn the spectrum and prosody mapping. We perform prosody conversion by using continuous wavelet transform (CWT) to model the temporal dependencies. We also investigate the use of F0 as an additional input to the decoder to improve emotion conversion performance. Experiments show that the proposed speaker-independent framework achieves competitive results for both seen and unseen speakers.