Can the powerful backpropagation of error (backprop) reinforcement learning algorithm be formulated in a manner suitable for implementation in neural circuitry? The primary challenge is to ensure that any candidate formulation uses only local information, rather than relying on global (error) signals, as in orthodox backprop. Recently several algorithms for approximating backprop using only local signals, such as predictive coding and equilibrium-prop, have been proposed. However, these algorithms typically impose other requirements which challenge biological plausibility: for example, requiring complex and precise connectivity schemes (predictive coding), or multiple sequential backwards phases with information being stored across phases (equilibrium-prop). Here, we propose a novel local algorithm, Activation Relaxation (AR), which is motivated by constructing the backpropagation gradient as the equilibrium point of a dynamical system. Our algorithm converges robustly and exactly to the correct backpropagation gradients, requires only a single type of neuron, utilises only a single backwards phase, and can perform credit assignment on arbitrary computation graphs. We illustrate these properties by training deep neural networks on visual classification tasks, and we describe simplifications to the algorithm which remove further obstacles to neurobiological implementation (for example, the weight-transport problem, and the use of nonlinear derivatives), while preserving performance.

Recent work has shown that large text-based neural language models, trained with conventional supervised learning objectives, acquire a surprising propensity for few- and one-shot learning. Here, we show that an embodied agent situated in a simulated 3D world, and endowed with a novel dual-coding external memory, can exhibit similar one-shot word learning when trained with conventional reinforcement learning algorithms. After a single introduction to a novel object via continuous visual perception and a language prompt ("This is a dax"), the agent can re-identify the object and manipulate it as instructed ("Put the dax on the bed"). In doing so, it seamlessly integrates short-term, within-episode knowledge of the appropriate referent for the word "dax" with long-term lexical and motor knowledge acquired across episodes (i.e. "bed" and "putting"). We find that, under certain training conditions and with a particular memory writing mechanism, the agent's one-shot word-object binding generalizes to novel exemplars within the same ShapeNet category, and is effective in settings with unfamiliar numbers of objects. We further show how dual-coding memory can be exploited as a signal for intrinsic motivation, stimulating the agent to seek names for objects that may be useful for later executing instructions. Together, the results demonstrate that deep neural networks can exploit meta-learning, episodic memory and an explicitly multi-modal environment to account for 'fast-mapping', a fundamental pillar of human cognitive development and a potentially transformative capacity for agents that interact with human users.

Deep learning provides efficient and accurate prediction of treatment response. Transfer learning can be used in radiological task with insufficient image datasets. Tumor microenvironment and signaling pathways are linked with radiological prediction. Deep learning is promising to predict treatment response. We aimed to evaluate and validate the predictive performance of the CT-based model using deep learning features for predicting pathologic complete response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (nCRT) in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC).

Concept drift is a phenomenon in which the distribution of a data stream changes over time in unforeseen ways, causing prediction models built on historical data to become inaccurate. While a variety of automated methods have been developed to identify when concept drift occurs, there is limited support for analysts who need to understand and correct their models when drift is detected. In this paper, we present a visual analytics method, DriftVis, to support model builders and analysts in the identification and correction of concept drift in streaming data. DriftVis combines a distribution-based drift detection method with a streaming scatterplot to support the analysis of drift caused by the distribution changes of data streams and to explore the impact of these changes on the model's accuracy. A quantitative experiment and two case studies on weather prediction and text classification have been conducted to demonstrate our proposed tool and illustrate how visual analytics can be used to support the detection, examination, and correction of concept drift.

Data-driven design of mechanical metamaterials is an increasingly popular method to combat costly physical simulations and immense, often intractable, geometrical design spaces. Using a precomputed dataset of unit cells, a multiscale structure can be quickly filled via combinatorial search algorithms, and machine learning models can be trained to accelerate the process. However, the dependence on data induces a unique challenge: An imbalanced dataset containing more of certain shapes or physical properties can be detrimental to the efficacy of data-driven approaches. In answer, we posit that a smaller yet diverse set of unit cells leads to scalable search and unbiased learning. To select such subsets, we propose METASET, a methodology that 1) uses similarity metrics and positive semi-definite kernels to jointly measure the closeness of unit cells in both shape and property spaces, and 2) incorporates Determinantal Point Processes for efficient subset selection. Moreover, METASET allows the trade-off between shape and property diversity so that subsets can be tuned for various applications. Through the design of 2D metamaterials with target displacement profiles, we demonstrate that smaller, diverse subsets can indeed improve the search process as well as structural performance. By eliminating inherent overlaps in a dataset of 3D unit cells created with symmetry rules, we also illustrate that our flexible method can distill unique subsets regardless of the metric employed. Our diverse subsets are provided publicly for use by any designer.

We propose a generative framework for joint sequence labeling and sentence-level classification. Our model performs multiple sequence labeling tasks at once using a single, shared natural language output space. Unlike prior discriminative methods, our model naturally incorporates label semantics and shares knowledge across tasks. Our framework is general purpose, performing well on few-shot, low-resource, and high-resource tasks. We demonstrate these advantages on popular named entity recognition, slot labeling, and intent classification benchmarks. We set a new state-of-the-art for few-shot slot labeling, improving substantially upon the previous 5-shot ($75.0\% \rightarrow 90.9\%$) and 1-shot ($70.4\% \rightarrow 81.0\%$) state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, our model generates large improvements ($46.27\% \rightarrow 63.83\%$) in low-resource slot labeling over a BERT baseline by incorporating label semantics. We also maintain competitive results on high-resource tasks, performing within two points of the state-of-the-art on all tasks and setting a new state-of-the-art on the SNIPS dataset.

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable empirical successes in the domains of computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing, sparking an interest in the theory behind their architectures and training. However, deep neural networks are often found to be highly overparameterized making them computationally expensive with large amounts of memory and computational power, which may take up to weeks on a modern multi-GPU server for large datasets such as ImageNet Deng et al. [7]. Hence, they are often unsuitable for smaller devices like embedded electronics, and there is a pressing demand for techniques to optimize models with reduced model size, faster inference and lower power consumption. Sparse networks, that is, neural networks in which a large subset of the model parameters are zero, have emerged as one of the leading approaches for reducing model parameter count. It has been shown empirically that deep neural networks can achieve state-of-the-art results under high levels of sparsity [17, 14, 22].

We investigate the physics-constrained training of an encoder-decoder neural network for approximating the Fokker-Planck-Landau collision operator in the 5-dimensional kinetic fusion simulation in XGC. To train this network, we propose a stochastic augmented Lagrangian approach that utilizes pyTorch's native stochastic gradient descent method to solve the inner unconstrained minimization subproblem, paired with a heuristic update for the penalty factor and Lagrange multipliers in the outer augmented Lagrangian loop. Our training results for a single ion species case, with self-collisions and collision against electrons, show that the proposed stochastic augmented Lagrangian approach can achieve higher model prediction accuracy than training with a fixed penalty method for our application problem, with the accuracy high enough for practical applications in kinetic simulations.

Anomaly detectors are often designed to catch statistical anomalies. End-users typically do not have interest in all of the detected outliers, but only those relevant to their application. Given an existing black-box sequential anomaly detector, this paper proposes a method to improve its user relevancy using a small number of human feedback. As our first contribution, the method is agnostic to the detector: it only assumes access to its anomaly scores, without requirement on any additional information inside it. Inspired by a fact that anomalies are of different types, our approach identifies these types and utilizes user feedback to assign relevancy to types. This relevancy score, as our second contribution, is used to adjust the subsequent anomaly selection process. Empirical results on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our approach yields significant improvements on precision and recall over a range of anomaly detectors.

Graphs can be used to effectively represent complex data structures. Learning these irregular data in graphs is challenging and still suffers from shallow learning. Applying deep learning on graphs has recently showed good performance in many applications in social analysis, bioinformatics etc. A message passing graph convolution network is such a powerful method which has expressive power to learn graph structures. Meanwhile, circRNA is a type of non-coding RNA which plays a critical role in human diseases. Identifying the associations between circRNAs and diseases is important to diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases. However, there are limited number of known associations between them and conducting biological experiments to identify new associations is time consuming and expensive. As a result, there is a need of building efficient and feasible computation methods to predict potential circRNA-disease associations. In this paper, we propose a novel graph convolution network framework to learn features from a graph built with multi-source similarity information to predict circRNA-disease associations. First we use multi-source information of circRNA similarity, disease and circRNA Gaussian Interaction Profile (GIP) kernel similarity to extract the features using first graph convolution. Then we predict disease associations for each circRNA with second graph convolution. Proposed framework with five-fold cross validation on various experiments shows promising results in predicting circRNA-disease association and outperforms other existing methods.