Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is an emerging technique that performs learning and reasoning on graph data. It operates feature learning on the graph structure, through aggregating the features of the neighbor nodes to obtain the embedding of each target node. Owing to the strong representation power, recent research shows that GCN achieves state-of-the-art performance on several tasks such as recommendation and linked document classification. Despite its effectiveness, we argue that existing designs of GCN forgo modeling cross features, making GCN less effective for tasks or data where cross features are important. Although neural network can approximate any continuous function, including the multiplication operator for modeling feature crosses, it can be rather inefficient to do so (i.e., wasting many parameters at the risk of overfitting) if there is no explicit design. To this end, we design a new operator named Cross-feature Graph Convolution, which explicitly models the arbitrary-order cross features with complexity linear to feature dimension and order size. We term our proposed architecture as Cross-GCN, and conduct experiments on three graphs to validate its effectiveness. Extensive analysis validates the utility of explicitly modeling cross features in GCN, especially for feature learning at lower layers.

We show that Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) can be efficiently trained by permuting neuron connections. We introduce a new family of methods to train DNNs called Permute to Train (P2T). Two implementations of P2T are presented: Stochastic Gradient Permutation and Lookahead Permutation. The former computes permutation based on gradient, and the latter depends on another optimizer to derive the permutation. We empirically show that our proposed method, despite only swapping randomly weighted connections, achieves comparable accuracy to that of Adam on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 datasets. It opens up possibilities for new ways to train and regularize DNNs.

In realistic scenarios, multivariate timeseries evolve over case-by-case time-scales. This is particularly clear in medicine, where the rate of clinical events varies by ward, patient, and application. Increasingly complex models have been shown to effectively predict patient outcomes, but have failed to adapt granularity to these inherent temporal resolutions. As such, we introduce a novel, more realistic, approach to generating patient outcome predictions at an adaptive rate based on uncertainty accumulation in Bayesian recurrent models. We use a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and a Bayesian embedding layer with a new aggregation method to demonstrate adaptive prediction timing. Our model predicts more frequently when events are dense or the model is certain of event latent representations, and less frequently when readings are sparse or the model is uncertain. At 48 hours after patient admission, our model achieves equal performance compared to its static-windowed counterparts, while generating patient- and event-specific prediction timings that lead to improved predictive performance over the crucial first 12 hours of the patient stay.

Processing data streams arriving at high speed requires the development of models that can provide fast and accurate predictions. Although deep neural networks are the state-of-the-art for many machine learning tasks, their performance in real-time data streaming scenarios is a research area that has not yet been fully addressed. Nevertheless, there have been recent efforts to adapt complex deep learning models for streaming tasks by reducing their processing rate. The design of the asynchronous dual-pipeline deep learning framework allows to predict over incoming instances and update the model simultaneously using two separate layers. The aim of this work is to assess the performance of different types of deep architectures for data streaming classification using this framework. We evaluate models such as multi-layer perceptrons, recurrent, convolutional and temporal convolutional neural networks over several time-series datasets that are simulated as streams. The obtained results indicate that convolutional architectures achieve a higher performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

When learning policies for robot control, the real-world data required is typically prohibitively expensive to acquire, so learning in simulation is a popular strategy. Unfortunately, such polices are often not transferable to the real world due to a mismatch between the simulation and reality, called 'reality gap'. Domain randomization methods tackle this problem by randomizing the physics simulator (source domain) according to a distribution over domain parameters during training in order to obtain more robust policies that are able to overcome the reality gap. Most domain randomization approaches sample the domain parameters from a fixed distribution. This solution is suboptimal in the context of sim-to-real transferability, since it yields policies that have been trained without explicitly optimizing for the reward on the real system (target domain). Additionally, a fixed distribution assumes there is prior knowledge about the uncertainty over the domain parameters. Thus, we propose Bayesian Domain Randomization (BayRn), a black box sim-to-real algorithm that solves tasks efficiently by adapting the domain parameter distribution during learning by sampling the real-world target domain. BayRn utilizes Bayesian optimization to search the space of source domain distribution parameters which produce a policy that maximizes the real-word objective, allowing for adaptive distributions during policy optimization. We experimentally validate the proposed approach by comparing against two baseline methods on a nonlinear under-actuated swing-up task. Our results show that BayRn is capable to perform direct sim-to-real transfer, while significantly reducing the required prior knowledge.

A standard method for improving the robustness of neural networks is adversarial training, where the network is trained on adversarial examples that are close to the training inputs. This produces classifiers that are robust, but it often decreases clean accuracy. Prior work even posits that the tradeoff between robustness and accuracy may be inevitable. We investigate this tradeoff in more depth through the lens of local Lipschitzness. In many image datasets, the classes are separated in the sense that images with different labels are not extremely close in $\ell_\infty$ distance. Using this separation as a starting point, we argue that it is possible to achieve both accuracy and robustness by encouraging the classifier to be locally smooth around the data. More precisely, we consider classifiers that are obtained by rounding locally Lipschitz functions. Theoretically, we show that such classifiers exist for any dataset such that there is a positive distance between the support of different classes. Empirically, we compare the local Lipschitzness of classifiers trained by several methods. Our results show that having a small Lipschitz constant correlates with achieving high clean and robust accuracy, and therefore, the smoothness of the classifier is an important property to consider in the context of adversarial examples. Code available at https://github.com/yangarbiter/robust-local-lipschitz .

Message passing neural networks have recently evolved into a state-of-the-art approach to representation learning on graphs. Existing methods perform synchronous message passing along all edges in multiple subsequent rounds and consequently suffer from various shortcomings: Propagation schemes are inflexible since they are restricted to $k$-hop neighborhoods and insensitive to actual demands of information propagation. Further, long-range dependencies cannot be modeled adequately and learned representations are based on correlations of fixed locality. These issues prevent existing methods from reaching their full potential in terms of prediction performance. Instead, we consider a novel asynchronous message passing approach where information is pushed only along the most relevant edges until convergence. Our proposed algorithm can equivalently be formulated as a single synchronous message passing iteration using a suitable neighborhood function, thus sharing the advantages of existing methods while addressing their central issues. The resulting neural network utilizes a node-adaptive receptive field derived from meaningful sparse node neighborhoods. In addition, by learning and combining node representations over differently sized neighborhoods, our model is able to capture correlations on multiple scales. We further propose variants of our base model with different inductive bias. Empirical results are provided for semi-supervised node classification on five real-world datasets following a rigorous evaluation protocol. We find that our models outperform competitors on all datasets in terms of accuracy with statistical significance. In some cases, our models additionally provide faster runtime.

In this paper, we study the dynamics of gradient descent in learning neural networks for classification problems. Unlike in existing works, we consider the linearly non-separable case where the training data of different classes lie in orthogonal subspaces. We show that when the network has sufficient (but not exceedingly large) number of neurons, (1) the corresponding minimization problem has a desirable landscape where all critical points are global minima with perfect classification; (2) gradient descent is guaranteed to converge to the global minima in this case. Moreover, we discovered a geometric condition on the network weights so that when it is satisfied, the weight evolution transitions from a slow phase of weight direction spreading to a fast phase of weight convergence. The geometric condition says that the convex hull of the weights projected on the unit sphere contains the origin.

Stochastic optimization algorithms, such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants, are mainstream methods for training deep networks in practice. However, the theoretical mechanism behind gradient noise still remains to be further investigated. Deep learning is known to find flat minima with a large neighboring region in parameter space from which each weight vector has similar small error. In this paper, we focus on a fundamental problem in deep learning, "How can deep learning usually find flat minima among so many minima?" To answer the question, we develop a density diffusion theory (DDT) for revealing the fundamental dynamical mechanism of SGD and deep learning. More specifically, we study how escape time from loss valleys to the outside of valleys depends on minima sharpness, gradient noise and hyperparameters. One of the most interesting findings is that stochastic gradient noise from SGD can help escape from sharp minima exponentially faster than flat minima, while white noise can only help escape from sharp minima polynomially faster than flat minima. We also find large-batch training requires exponentially many iterations to pass through sharp minima and find flat minima. We present direct empirical evidence supporting the proposed theoretical results.

In this tutorial you will learn how to use my pre-configured NVIDIA Jetson Nano .img If you've ever configured an NVIDIA product such as the TX1, TX2, and even the Nano, you know that working with NVIDIA's Jetpack and installing libraries is far from straightforward. It is developed and supported by my team here at PyImageSearch to save you time and bring you up to speed quickly for developing your own embedded CV/DL projects and for following along with my new book Raspberry Pi for Computer Vision. If you purchase a copy of the Complete Bundle of Raspberry Pi for Computer Vision, you'll gain access to this accompanying .img. All you have to do is (1) download the .img