Elvet can deal with any system of coupled ordinary or partial differential equations with arbitrary initial and boundary conditions. It can also minimize any functional that depends on a collection of functions of several variables while imposing constraints on them. The solution to any of these problems is represented as a neural network trained to produce the desired function.

In humans, Attention is a core property of all perceptual and cognitive operations. Given our limited ability to process competing sources, attention mechanisms select, modulate, and focus on the information most relevant to behavior. For decades, concepts and functions of attention have been studied in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computing. For the last six years, this property has been widely explored in deep neural networks. Currently, the state-of-the-art in Deep Learning is represented by neural attention models in several application domains. This survey provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of developments in neural attention models. We systematically reviewed hundreds of architectures in the area, identifying and discussing those in which attention has shown a significant impact. We also developed and made public an automated methodology to facilitate the development of reviews in the area. By critically analyzing 650 works, we describe the primary uses of attention in convolutional, recurrent networks and generative models, identifying common subgroups of uses and applications. Furthermore, we describe the impact of attention in different application domains and their impact on neural networks' interpretability. Finally, we list possible trends and opportunities for further research, hoping that this review will provide a succinct overview of the main attentional models in the area and guide researchers in developing future approaches that will drive further improvements.

Our goal is to develop stable, accurate, and robust semantic scene understanding methods for wide-area scene perception and understanding, especially in challenging outdoor environments. To achieve this, we are exploring and evaluating a range of related technology and solutions, including AI-driven multimodal scene perception, fusion, processing, and understanding. This work reports our efforts on the evaluation of a state-of-the-art approach for semantic segmentation with multiple RGB and depth sensing data. We employ four large datasets composed of diverse urban and terrain scenes and design various experimental methods and metrics. In addition, we also develop new strategies of multi-datasets learning to improve the detection and recognition of unseen objects. Extensive experiments, implementations, and results are reported in the paper.

Our project task was to create a model that, given a speaker ID, chat history, and an utterance query, can predict the response utterance in a conversation. The model is personalized for each speaker. This task can be a useful tool for building speech bots that talk in a human-like manner in a live conversation. Further, we succeeded at using dense-vector encoding clustering to be able to retrieve relevant historical dialogue context, a useful strategy for overcoming the input limitations of neural-based models when predictions require longer-term references from the dialogue history. In this paper, we have implemented a state-of-the-art model using pre-training and fine-tuning techniques built on transformer architecture and multi-headed attention blocks for the Switchboard corpus. We also show how efficient vector clustering algorithms can be used for real-time utterance predictions that require no training and therefore work on offline and encrypted message histories.

End-to-end models reach state-of-the-art performance for speech recognition, but global soft attention is not monotonic, which might lead to convergence problems, to instability, to bad generalisation, cannot be used for online streaming, and is also inefficient in calculation. Monotonicity can potentially fix all of this. There are several ad-hoc solutions or heuristics to introduce monotonicity, but a principled introduction is rarely found in literature so far. In this paper, we present a mathematically clean solution to introduce monotonicity, by introducing a new latent variable which represents the audio position or segment boundaries. We compare several monotonic latent models to our global soft attention baseline such as a hard attention model, a local windowed soft attention model, and a segmental soft attention model. We can show that our monotonic models perform as good as the global soft attention model. We perform our experiments on Switchboard 300h. We carefully outline the details of our training and release our code and configs.

The use of deep 3D point cloud models in safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving, dictates the need to certify the robustness of these models to semantic transformations. This is technically challenging as it requires a scalable verifier tailored to point cloud models that handles a wide range of semantic 3D transformations. In this work, we address this challenge and introduce 3DCertify, the first verifier able to certify robustness of point cloud models. 3DCertify is based on two key insights: (i) a generic relaxation based on first-order Taylor approximations, applicable to any differentiable transformation, and (ii) a precise relaxation for global feature pooling, which is more complex than pointwise activations (e.g., ReLU or sigmoid) but commonly employed in point cloud models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of 3DCertify by performing an extensive evaluation on a wide range of 3D transformations (e.g., rotation, twisting) for both classification and part segmentation tasks. For example, we can certify robustness against rotations by $\pm60^\circ$ for 95.7% of point clouds, and our max pool relaxation increases certification by up to 15.6%.

Inspired by two basic mechanisms in animal visual systems, we introduce a feature transform technique that imposes invariance properties in the training of deep neural networks. The resulting algorithm requires less parameter tuning, trains well with an initial learning rate 1.0, and easily generalizes to different tasks. We enforce scale invariance with local statistics in the data to align similar samples generated in diverse situations. To accelerate convergence, we enforce a GL(n)-invariance property with global statistics extracted from a batch that the gradient descent solution should remain invariant under basis change. Tested on ImageNet, MS COCO, and Cityscapes datasets, our proposed technique requires fewer iterations to train, surpasses all baselines by a large margin, seamlessly works on both small and large batch size training, and applies to different computer vision tasks of image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation.

Recently, there are unprecedented data growth originating from different online platforms which contribute to big data in terms of volume, velocity, variety and veracity (4Vs). Given this nature of big data which is unstructured, performing analytics to extract meaningful information is currently a great challenge to big data analytics. Collecting and analyzing unstructured textual data allows decision makers to study the escalation of comments/posts on our social media platforms. Hence, there is need for automatic big data analysis to overcome the noise and the non-reliability of these unstructured dataset from the digital media platforms. However, current machine learning algorithms used are performance driven focusing on the classification/prediction accuracy based on known properties learned from the training samples. With the learning task in a large dataset, most machine learning models are known to require high computational cost which eventually leads to computational complexity. In this work, two supervised machine learning algorithms are combined with text mining techniques to produce a hybrid model which consists of Na\"ive Bayes and support vector machines (SVM). This is to increase the efficiency and accuracy of the results obtained and also to reduce the computational cost and complexity. The system also provides an open platform where a group of persons with a common interest can share their comments/messages and these comments classified automatically as legal or illegal. This improves the quality of conversation among users. The hybrid model was developed using WEKA tools and Java programming language. The result shows that the hybrid model gave 96.76% accuracy as against the 61.45% and 69.21% of the Na\"ive Bayes and SVM models respectively.

We study the problem of dynamic visual reasoning on raw videos. This is a challenging problem; currently, state-of-the-art models often require dense supervision on physical object properties and events from simulation, which are impractical to obtain in real life. In this paper, we present the Dynamic Concept Learner (DCL), a unified framework that grounds physical objects and events from video and language. DCL first adopts a trajectory extractor to track each object over time and to represent it as a latent, object-centric feature vector. Building upon this object-centric representation, DCL learns to approximate the dynamic interaction among objects using graph networks. DCL further incorporates a semantic parser to parse questions into semantic programs and, finally, a program executor to run the program to answer the question, levering the learned dynamics model. After training, DCL can detect and associate objects across the frames, ground visual properties, and physical events, understand the causal relationship between events, make future and counterfactual predictions, and leverage these extracted presentations for answering queries. DCL achieves state-of-the-art performance on CLEVRER, a challenging causal video reasoning dataset, even without using ground-truth attributes and collision labels from simulations for training. We further test DCL on a newly proposed video-retrieval and event localization dataset derived from CLEVRER, showing its strong generalization capacity.

The Flatland competition aimed at finding novel approaches to solve the vehicle re-scheduling problem (VRSP). The VRSP is concerned with scheduling trips in traffic networks and the re-scheduling of vehicles when disruptions occur, for example the breakdown of a vehicle. While solving the VRSP in various settings has been an active area in operations research (OR) for decades, the ever-growing complexity of modern railway networks makes dynamic real-time scheduling of traffic virtually impossible. Recently, multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has successfully tackled challenging tasks where many agents need to be coordinated, such as multiplayer video games. However, the coordination of hundreds of agents in a real-life setting like a railway network remains challenging and the Flatland environment used for the competition models these real-world properties in a simplified manner. Submissions had to bring as many trains (agents) to their target stations in as little time as possible. While the best submissions were in the OR category, participants found many promising MARL approaches. Using both centralized and decentralized learning based approaches, top submissions used graph representations of the environment to construct tree-based observations. Further, different coordination mechanisms were implemented, such as communication and prioritization between agents. This paper presents the competition setup, four outstanding solutions to the competition, and a cross-comparison between them.