In this paper, we present an efficient and effective single-stage framework (DiverGAN) to generate diverse, plausible and semantically consistent images according to a natural-language description. DiverGAN adopts two novel word-level attention modules, i.e., a channel-attention module (CAM) and a pixel-attention module (PAM), which model the importance of each word in the given sentence while allowing the network to assign larger weights to the significant channels and pixels semantically aligning with the salient words. After that, Conditional Adaptive Instance-Layer Normalization (CAdaILN) is introduced to enable the linguistic cues from the sentence embedding to flexibly manipulate the amount of change in shape and texture, further improving visual-semantic representation and helping stabilize the training. Also, a dual-residual structure is developed to preserve more original visual features while allowing for deeper networks, resulting in faster convergence speed and more vivid details. Furthermore, we propose to plug a fully-connected layer into the pipeline to address the lack-of-diversity problem, since we observe that a dense layer will remarkably enhance the generative capability of the network, balancing the trade-off between a low-dimensional random latent code contributing to variants and modulation modules that use high-dimensional and textual contexts to strength feature maps. Inserting a linear layer after the second residual block achieves the best variety and quality. Both qualitative and quantitative results on benchmark data sets demonstrate the superiority of our DiverGAN for realizing diversity, without harming quality and semantic consistency.

Graph Neural Network (GNN) is a powerful tool to perform standard machine learning on graphs. To have a Euclidean representation of every node in the Non-Euclidean graph-like data, GNN follows neighbourhood aggregation and combination of information recursively along the edges of the graph. Despite having many GNN variants in the literature, no model can deal with graphs having nodes with interval-valued features. This article proposes an Interval-ValuedGraph Neural Network, a novel GNN model where, for the first time, we relax the restriction of the feature space being countable. Our model is much more general than existing models as any countable set is always a subset of the universal set $R^{n}$, which is uncountable. Here, to deal with interval-valued feature vectors, we propose a new aggregation scheme of intervals and show its expressive power to capture different interval structures. We validate our theoretical findings about our model for graph classification tasks by comparing its performance with those of the state-of-the-art models on several benchmark network and synthetic datasets.

Explainability of black-box machine learning models is crucial, in particular when deployed in critical applications such as medicine or autonomous cars. Existing approaches produce explanations for the predictions of models, however, how to assess the quality and reliability of such explanations remains an open question. In this paper we take a step further in order to provide the practitioner with tools to judge the trustworthiness of an explanation. To this end, we produce estimates of the uncertainty of a given explanation by measuring the ordinal consensus amongst a set of diverse bootstrapped surrogate explainers. While we encourage diversity by using ensemble techniques, we propose and analyse metrics to aggregate the information contained within the set of explainers through a rating scheme. We empirically illustrate the properties of this approach through experiments on state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network ensembles. Furthermore, through tailored visualisations, we show specific examples of situations where uncertainty estimates offer concrete actionable insights to the user beyond those arising from standard surrogate explainers.

We consider the problem of generating private synthetic versions of real-world graphs containing private information while maintaining the utility of generated graphs. Differential privacy is a gold standard for data privacy, and the introduction of the differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) algorithm has facilitated the training of private neural models in a number of domains. Recent advances in graph generation via deep generative networks have produced several high performing models. We evaluate and compare state-of-the-art models including adjacency matrix based models and edge based models, and show a practical implementation that favours the edge-list approach utilizing the Gaussian noise mechanism, when evaluated on commonly used graph datasets. Based on our findings, we propose a generative model that can reproduce the properties of real-world networks while maintaining edge-differential privacy. The proposed model is based on a stochastic neural network that generates discrete edge-list samples and is trained using the Wasserstein GAN objective with the DP-SGD optimizer. Being the first approach to combine these beneficial properties, our model contributes to further research on graph data privacy.

Electronic Medical Records (EHR) are extremely sparse. Only a small proportion of events (symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments) are observed in the lifetime of an individual. The high degree of missingness of EHR can be attributed to a large number of factors, including device failure, privacy concerns, or other unexpected reasons. Unfortunately, many traditional imputation methods are not well suited for highly sparse data and scale poorly to high dimensional datasets. In this paper, we propose a graph-based imputation method that is both robust to sparsity and to unreliable unmeasured events. Our approach compares favourably to several standard and state-of-the-art imputation methods in terms of performance and runtime. Moreover, results indicate that the model learns to embed different event types in a clinically meaningful way. Our work can facilitate the diagnosis of novel diseases based on the clinical history of past events, with the potential to increase our understanding of the landscape of comorbidities.

Benefiting from the strong ability of the pre-trained model, the research on Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) has made great progress in recent years. However, due to massive computation, large and complex models are incapable of empowering their ability for industrial use. On the other hand, for low-resource scenarios, the prevalent decode method, such as Conditional Random Field (CRF), fails to exploit the full information of the training data. This work proposes a fast and accurate CWS framework that incorporates a light-weighted model and an upgraded decode method (PCRF) towards industrially low-resource CWS scenarios. First, we distill a Transformer-based student model as an encoder, which not only accelerates the inference speed but also combines open knowledge and domain-specific knowledge. Second, the perplexity score to evaluate the language model is fused into the CRF module to better identify the word boundaries. Experiments show that our work obtains relatively high performance on multiple datasets with as low as 14\% of time consumption compared with the original BERT-based model. Moreover, under the low-resource setting, we get superior results in comparison with the traditional decoding methods.

Natural language understanding's relation extraction makes innovative and encouraging novel business concepts possible and facilitates new digitilized decision-making processes. Current approaches allow the extraction of relations with a fixed number of entities as attributes. Extracting relations with an arbitrary amount of attributes requires complex systems and costly relation-trigger annotations to assist these systems. We introduce multi-attribute relation extraction (MARE) as an assumption-less problem formulation with two approaches, facilitating an explicit mapping from business use cases to the data annotations. Avoiding elaborated annotation constraints simplifies the application of relation extraction approaches. The evaluation compares our models to current state-of-the-art event extraction and binary relation extraction methods. Our approaches show improvement compared to these on the extraction of general multi-attribute relations.

In keypoint estimation tasks such as human pose estimation, heatmap-based regression is the dominant approach despite possessing notable drawbacks: heatmaps intrinsically suffer from quantization error and require excessive computation to generate and post-process. Motivated to find a more efficient solution, we propose a new heatmap-free keypoint estimation method in which individual keypoints and sets of spatially related keypoints (i.e., poses) are modeled as objects within a dense single-stage anchor-based detection framework. Hence, we call our method KAPAO (pronounced "Ka-Pow!") for Keypoints And Poses As Objects. We apply KAPAO to the problem of single-stage multi-person human pose estimation by simultaneously detecting human pose objects and keypoint objects and fusing the detections to exploit the strengths of both object representations. In experiments, we observe that KAPAO is significantly faster and more accurate than previous methods, which suffer greatly from heatmap post-processing. Moreover, the accuracy-speed trade-off is especially favourable in the practical setting when not using test-time augmentation. Our large model, KAPAO-L, achieves an AP of 70.6 on the Microsoft COCO Keypoints validation set without test-time augmentation while being 2.5x faster than the next best single-stage model, whose accuracy is 4.0 AP less. Furthermore, KAPAO excels in the presence of heavy occlusion. On the CrowdPose test set, KAPAO-L achieves new state-of-the-art accuracy for a single-stage method with an AP of 68.9.

Symbolic regression is the process of identifying mathematical expressions that fit observed output from a black-box process. It is a discrete optimization problem generally believed to be NP-hard. Prior approaches to solving the problem include neural-guided search (e.g. using reinforcement learning) and genetic programming. In this work, we introduce a hybrid neural-guided/genetic programming approach to symbolic regression and other combinatorial optimization problems. We propose a neural-guided component used to seed the starting population of a random restart genetic programming component, gradually learning better starting populations. On a number of common benchmark tasks to recover underlying expressions from a dataset, our method recovers 65% more expressions than a recently published top-performing model using the same experimental setup. We demonstrate that running many genetic programming generations without interdependence on the neural-guided component performs better for symbolic regression than alternative formulations where the two are more strongly coupled. Finally, we introduce a new set of 22 symbolic regression benchmark problems with increased difficulty over existing benchmarks.

BioSig Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: BSGM), a medical technology company commercializing an innovative biomedical signal processing platform designed to improve signal fidelity and uncover the full range of ECG and intra-cardiac signals, today announced that the Company entered into a feasibility study with The Technion Research & Development Foundation Ltd. Based in Haifa, Israel, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology is a public research university offering degrees in science, engineering, and related fields, such as medicine, industrial management, and education. Over the years, the Technion established itself as a leading academic institution in Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is currently ranked as number one in AI in Europe and 15th in the world, with 100 faculty members engaged in areas across the AI spectrum. The feasibility program with BioSig will be led by Asst.