Can the look and the feel of a website give information about the trustworthiness of an article? In this paper, we propose to use a promising, yet neglected aspect in detecting the misinformativeness: the overall look of the domain webpage. To capture this overall look, we take screenshots of news articles served by either misinformative or trustworthy web domains and leverage a tensor decomposition based semi-supervised classification technique. The proposed approach i.e., VizFake is insensitive to a number of image transformations such as converting the image to grayscale, vectorizing the image and losing some parts of the screenshots. VizFake leverages a very small amount of known labels, mirroring realistic and practical scenarios, where labels (especially for known misinformative articles), are scarce and quickly become dated. The F1 score of VizFake on a dataset of 50k screenshots of news articles spanning more than 500 domains is roughly 85% using only 5% of ground truth labels. Furthermore, tensor representations of VizFake, obtained in an unsupervised manner, allow for exploratory analysis of the data that provides valuable insights into the problem. Finally, we compare VizFake with deep transfer learning, since it is a very popular black-box approach for image classification and also well-known text text-based methods. VizFake achieves competitive accuracy with deep transfer learning models while being two orders of magnitude faster and not requiring laborious hyper-parameter tuning.

Catastrophic forgetting remains a severe hindrance to the broad application of artificial neural networks (ANNs), however, it continues to be a poorly understood phenomenon. Despite the extensive amount of work on catastrophic forgetting, we argue that it is still unclear how exactly the phenomenon should be quantified, and, moreover, to what degree all of the choices we make when designing learning systems affect the amount of catastrophic forgetting. We use various testbeds from the reinforcement learning and supervised learning literature to (1) provide evidence that the choice of which modern gradient-based optimization algorithm is used to train an ANN has a significant impact on the amount of catastrophic forgetting and show that--surprisingly--in many instances classical algorithms such as vanilla SGD experience less catastrophic forgetting than the more modern algorithms such as Adam. We empirically compare four different existing metrics for quantifying catastrophic forgetting and (2) show that the degree to which the learning systems experience catastrophic forgetting is sufficiently sensitive to the metric used that a change from one principled metric to another is enough to change the conclusions of a study dramatically. Our results suggest that a much more rigorous experimental methodology is required when looking at catastrophic forgetting. Based on our results, we recommend inter-task forgetting in supervised learning must be measured with both retention and relearning metrics concurrently, and intra-task forgetting in reinforcement learning must--at the very least--be measured with pairwise interference.

Deep learning methods, where a computational model learns an intricate representation of a large-scale dataset, yielded dramatic performance improvements in speech recognition and computer vision [LeCun et al., 2015]. When we have seen such improvements, a common factor is the availability of large-scale training data [Deng et al., 2009, Bellemare et al., 2013]. For ad hoc ranking in information retrieval, which is a core problem in the field, we did not initially see dramatic improvements in performance from deep learning methods. This led to questions about whether deep learning methods were helping at all [Yang et al., 2019a]. If large training data sets are a factor, one explanation for this could be that the training sets were too small.

Attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) models have achieved promising performance in speech recognition. However, because the decoder predicts text tokens (such as characters or words) in an autoregressive manner, it is difficult for an AED model to predict all tokens in parallel. This makes the inference speed relatively slow. We believe that because the encoder already captures the whole speech utterance, which has the token-level relationship implicitly, we can predict a token without explicitly autoregressive language modeling. When the prediction of a token does not rely on other tokens, the parallel prediction of all tokens in the sequence is realizable. Based on this idea, we propose a non-autoregressive speech recognition model called LASO (Listen Attentively, and Spell Once). The model consists of an encoder, a decoder, and a position dependent summarizer (PDS). The three modules are based on basic attention blocks. The encoder extracts high-level representations from the speech. The PDS uses positional encodings corresponding to tokens to convert the acoustic representations into token-level representations. The decoder further captures token-level relationships with the self-attention mechanism. At last, the probability distribution on the vocabulary is computed for each token position. Therefore, speech recognition is re-formulated as a position-wise classification problem. Further, we propose a cross-modal transfer learning method to refine semantics from a large-scale pre-trained language model BERT for improving the performance.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming a trusted advisor in people's lives. A new concern arises if AI persuades people to break ethical rules for profit. Employing a large-scale behavioural experiment (N = 1,572), we test whether AI-generated advice can corrupt people. We further test whether transparency about AI presence, a commonly proposed policy, mitigates potential harm of AI-generated advice. Using the Natural Language Processing algorithm, GPT-2, we generated honesty-promoting and dishonesty-promoting advice. Participants read one type of advice before engaging in a task in which they could lie for profit. Testing human behaviour in interaction with actual AI outputs, we provide first behavioural insights into the role of AI as an advisor. Results reveal that AI-generated advice corrupts people, even when they know the source of the advice. In fact, AI's corrupting force is as strong as humans'.

The Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system is a core technology of the next generation communication. With the growing complexity of CSI in massive MIMO system, traditional compressive sensing based CSI feedback has become a bottleneck problem that is limited in piratical. Recently, numerous deep learning based CSI feedback approaches demonstrate the efficiency and potential. However, the existing methods lack a reasonable interpretation of the deep learning model and the accuracy of the model decreases significantly as the CSI compression rate increases. In this paper, from the intrinsic properties of CSI data itself, we devised the corresponding deep learning building blocks to compose a novel neural network CQNet and experiment result shows CQNet outperform the state-of-the-art method with less computational overhead by achieving an average performance improvement of 8.07% in both outdoor and indoor scenarios. In addition, this paper also investigates the reasons for the decrease in model accuracy at large compression rates and proposes a strategy to embed a quantization layer to achieve effective compression, by which the original accuracy loss of 67.19% on average is reduced to 21.96% on average, and the compression rate is increased by 8 times on the original benchmark. The massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology is considered one of the core technologies of the next generation communication system, e.g., 5G. By equipping large number of antennas, base station (BS) can sufficiently utilize spatial diversity to improve channel capacity.

Clustering performs an essential role in many real world applications, such as market research, pattern recognition, data analysis, and image processing. However, due to the high dimensionality of the input feature values, the data being fed to clustering algorithms usually contains noise and thus could lead to in-accurate clustering results. While traditional dimension reduction and feature selection algorithms could be used to address this problem, the simple heuristic rules used in those algorithms are based on some particular assumptions. When those assumptions does not hold, these algorithms then might not work. In this paper, we propose DAC, Deep Autoencoder-based Clustering, a generalized data-driven framework to learn clustering representations using deep neuron networks. Experiment results show that our approach could effectively boost performance of the K-Means clustering algorithm on a variety types of datasets.

Although model-based and model-free approaches to learning the control of systems have achieved impressive results on standard benchmarks, generalization to task variations is still lacking. Recent results suggest that generalization for standard architectures improves only after obtaining exhaustive amounts of data. We give evidence that generalization capabilities are in many cases bottlenecked by the inability to generalize on the combinatorial aspects of the problem. Furthermore, we show that for a certain subclass of the MDP framework, this can be alleviated by neuro-algorithmic architectures. Many control problems require long-term planning that is hard to solve generically with neural networks alone. We introduce a neuro-algorithmic policy architecture consisting of a neural network and an embedded time-dependent shortest path solver. These policies can be trained end-to-end by blackbox differentiation. We show that this type of architecture generalizes well to unseen variations in the environment already after seeing a few examples.

In this paper, we introduce the first large vocabulary speech recognition system (LVSR) for the Central Kurdish language, named Jira. The Kurdish language is an Indo-European language spoken by more than 30 million people in several countries, but due to the lack of speech and text resources, there is no speech recognition system for this language. To fill this gap, we introduce the first speech corpus and pronunciation lexicon for the Kurdish language. Regarding speech corpus, we designed a sentence collection in which the ratio of di-phones in the collection resembles the real data of the Central Kurdish language. The designed sentences are uttered by 576 speakers in a controlled environment with noise-free microphones (called AsoSoft Speech-Office) and in Telegram social network environment using mobile phones (denoted as AsoSoft Speech-Crowdsourcing), resulted in 43.68 hours of speech. Besides, a test set including 11 different document topics is designed and recorded in two corresponding speech conditions (i.e., Office and Crowdsourcing). Furthermore, a 60K pronunciation lexicon is prepared in this research in which we faced several challenges and proposed solutions for them. The Kurdish language has several dialects and sub-dialects that results in many lexical variations. Our methods for script standardization of lexical variations and automatic pronunciation of the lexicon tokens are presented in detail. To setup the recognition engine, we used the Kaldi toolkit. A statistical tri-gram language model that is extracted from the AsoSoft text corpus is used in the system. Several standard recipes including HMM-based models (i.e., mono, tri1, tr2, tri2, tri3), SGMM, and DNN methods are used to generate the acoustic model. These methods are trained with AsoSoft Speech-Office and AsoSoft Speech-Crowdsourcing and a combination of them. The best performance achieved by the SGMM acoustic model which results in 13.9% of the average word error rate (on different document topics) and 4.9% for the general topic.

Neural networks reached around 2013 human-level performance in image classification tasks, giving rise to the phenomenon of deep learning as we know it today. But accuracy is not everything, and researchers started to wonder how robust these models are, how much neural networks really "understand" and what they actually "see". In an attempt to (also) answer this question, (Szegedy et al., 2013) described two interesting aspects of deep neural networks. The first aspect concerned the way in which networks store information, but it was the second aspect which immediately attracted the attention of the scientific community: given a correctly classified image, it is possible to add artificially crafted noise imperceptible to the human eye, to create a second image which is very likely to be misclassified. This problem is intertwined to that of understanding how information is encoded in neural networks (Samek et al., 2017). In supervised learning guided by stochastic gradient descent (SGD), the features encoded in hidden neurons are learned as a byproduct of the reduction of the classification error in the output layer. The statistical properties of features encoded by intermediate neurons remain poorly understood, as well as their contribution to the classification performance of the network. In recent years, the topic of adversarial examples has grown to become a field in its own right, that is currently witnessing an arms race in which the attackers are ahead: for every defence proposed, new ways to get around it and new attacks are invented on a weekly basis (Yuan et al., 2018).