In this paper, we report an industry-academia collaborative study on the distribution method of fashion products using an artificial intelligence (AI) technique combined with an optimization method. To meet the current fashion trend of short product lifetimes and an increasing variety of styles, the company produces limited volumes of a large variety of styles. However, due to the limited volume of each style, some styles may not be distributed to some off-line stores. As a result, this high-variety, low-volume strategy presents another challenge to distribution managers. We collaborated with KOLON F/C, one of the largest fashion business units in South Korea, to develop models and an algorithm to optimally distribute the products to the stores based on the visual images of the products. The team developed a deep learning model that effectively represents the styles of clothes based on their visual image. Moreover, the team created an optimization model that effectively determines the product mix for each store based on the image representation of clothes. In the past, computers were only considered to be useful for conducting logical calculations, and visual perception and cognition were considered to be difficult computational tasks. The proposed approach is significant in that it uses both AI (perception and cognition) and mathematical optimization (logical calculation) to address a practical supply chain problem, which is why the study was called "Breaking Moravec's Paradox."

Neural architecture search (NAS) with an accuracy predictor that predicts the accuracy of candidate architectures has drawn increasing interests due to its simplicity and effectiveness. Previous works employ neural network based predictors which unfortunately cannot well exploit the tabular data representations of network architectures. As decision tree-based models can better handle tabular data, in this paper, we propose to leverage gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) as the predictor for NAS and demonstrate that it can improve the prediction accuracy and help to find better architectures than neural network based predictors. Moreover, considering that a better and compact search space can ease the search process, we propose to prune the search space gradually according to important features derived from GBDT using an interpreting tool named SHAP. In this way, NAS can be performed by first pruning the search space (using GBDT as a pruner) and then searching a neural architecture (using GBDT as a predictor), which is more efficient and effective. Experiments on NASBench-101 and ImageNet demonstrate the effectiveness of GBDT for NAS: (1) NAS with GBDT predictor finds top-10 architecture (among all the architectures in the search space) with $0.18\%$ test regret on NASBench-101, and achieves $24.2\%$ top-1 error rate on ImageNet; and (2) GBDT based search space pruning and neural architecture search further achieves $23.5\%$ top-1 error rate on ImageNet.

The Internet of Things (IoT), hailed as the enabler of the next industrial revolution, will require ubiquitous connectivity, context-aware and dynamic service mobility, and extreme security through the wireless network infrastructure. Artificial Intelligence (AI), thus, will play a major role in the underlying network infrastructure. However, a number of challenges will surface while using the concepts, tools and algorithms of AI in wireless networks used by IoT. In this article, the main challenges in using AI in the wireless network infrastructure that facilitate end-to-end IoT communication are highlighted with potential generalized solution and future research directions.

Machine-aided programming tools such as type predictors and code summarizers are increasingly learning-based. However, most code representation learning approaches rely on supervised learning with task-specific annotated datasets. We propose Contrastive Code Representation Learning (ContraCode), a self-supervised algorithm for learning task-agnostic semantic representations of programs via contrastive learning. Our approach uses no human-provided labels, relying only on the raw text of programs. In particular, we design an unsupervised pretext task by generating textually divergent copies of source functions via automated source-to-source compiler transforms that preserve semantics. We train a neural model to identify variants of an anchor program within a large batch of negatives. To solve this task, the network must extract program features representing the functionality, not form, of the program. This is the first application of instance discrimination to code representation learning to our knowledge. We pre-train models over 1.8m unannotated JavaScript methods mined from GitHub. ContraCode pre-training improves code summarization accuracy by 7.9% over supervised approaches and 4.8% over RoBERTa pre-training. Moreover, our approach is agnostic to model architecture; for a type inference task, contrastive pre-training consistently improves the accuracy of existing baselines.

The Apperception Engine is an unsupervised learning system. Given a sequence of sensory inputs, it constructs a symbolic causal theory that both explains the sensory sequence and also satisfies a set of unity conditions. The unity conditions insist that the constituents of the theory - objects, properties, and laws - must be integrated into a coherent whole. Once a theory has been constructed, it can be applied to predict future sensor readings, retrodict earlier readings, or impute missing readings. In this paper, we evaluate the Apperception Engine in a diverse variety of domains, including cellular automata, rhythms and simple nursery tunes, multi-modal binding problems, occlusion tasks, and sequence induction intelligence tests. In each domain, we test our engine's ability to predict future sensor values, retrodict earlier sensor values, and impute missing sensory data. The engine performs well in all these domains, significantly outperforming neural net baselines and state of the art inductive logic programming systems. These results are significant because neural nets typically struggle to solve the binding problem (where information from different modalities must somehow be combined together into different aspects of one unified object) and fail to solve occlusion tasks (in which objects are sometimes visible and sometimes obscured from view). We note in particular that in the sequence induction intelligence tests, our system achieved human-level performance. This is notable because our system is not a bespoke system designed specifically to solve intelligence tests, but a general-purpose system that was designed to make sense of any sensory sequence.

In this work, we present TGLS, a novel framework to unsupervised Text Generation by Learning from Search. We start by applying a strong search algorithm (in particular, simulated annealing) towards a heuristically defined objective that (roughly) estimates the quality of sentences. Then, a conditional generative model learns from the search results, and meanwhile smooth out the noise of search. The alternation between search and learning can be repeated for performance bootstrapping. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TGLS on two real-world natural language generation tasks, paraphrase generation and text formalization. Our model significantly outperforms unsupervised baseline methods in both tasks. Especially, it achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art supervised methods in paraphrase generation.

Smart FinTech has emerged as a new area that synthesizes and transforms AI and finance, and broadly data science, machine learning, economics, etc. Smart FinTech also transforms and drives new economic and financial businesses, services and systems, and plays an increasingly important role in economy, technology and society transformation. This article presents a highly summarized research overview of smart FinTech, including FinTech businesses and challenges, various FinTech-associated data and repositories, FinTech-driven business decision and optimization, areas in smart FinTech, and research methods and techniques for smart FinTech.

In this work, we present a learning-based approach to analysis cyberspace configuration. Unlike prior methods, our approach has the ability to learn from past experience and improve over time. In particular, as we train over a greater number of agents as attackers, our method becomes better at rapidly finding attack paths for previously hidden paths, especially in multiple domain cyberspace. To achieve these results, we pose finding attack paths as a Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem and train an agent to find multiple domain attack paths. To enable our RL policy to find more hidden attack paths, we ground representation introduction an multiple domain action select module in RL. By designing a simulated cyberspace experimental environment to verify our method. Our objective is to find more hidden attack paths, to analysis the weakness of cyberspace configuration. The experimental results show that our method can find more hidden multiple domain attack paths than existing baselines methods.

The Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a challenging graph task in combinatorial optimization that requires reasoning about both local node neighborhoods and global graph structure. In this paper, we propose to use the novel Graph Learning Network (GLN), a generative approach, to approximately solve the TSP. GLN model learns directly the pattern of TSP instances as training dataset, encodes the graph properties, and merge the different node embeddings to output node-to-node an optimal tour directly or via graph search technique that validates the final tour. The preliminary results of the proposed novel approach proves its applicability to this challenging problem providing a low optimally gap with significant computation saving compared to the optimal solution.

This paper proposes PuRL - a deep reinforcement learning (RL) based algorithm for pruning neural networks. Unlike current RL based model compression approaches where feedback is given only at the end of each episode to the agent, PuRL provides rewards at every pruning step. This enables PuRL to achieve sparsity and accuracy comparable to current state-of-the-art methods, while having a much shorter training cycle. PuRL achieves more than 80% sparsity on the ResNet-50 model while retaining a Top-1 accuracy of 75.37% on the ImageNet dataset. Through our experiments we show that PuRL is also able to sparsify already efficient architectures like MobileNet-V2. In addition to performance characterisation experiments, we also provide a discussion and analysis of the various RL design choices that went into the tuning of the Markov Decision Process underlying PuRL. Lastly, we point out that PuRL is simple to use and can be easily adapted for various architectures.