Predicting outcomes and planning interactions with the physical world are long-standing goals for machine learning. A variety of such tasks involves continuous physical systems, which can be described by partial differential equations (PDEs) with many degrees of freedom. Existing methods that aim to control the dynamics of such systems are typically limited to relatively short time frames or a small number of interaction parameters. We present a novel hierarchical predictor-corrector scheme which enables neural networks to learn to understand and control complex nonlinear physical systems over long time frames. We propose to split the problem into two distinct tasks: planning and control. To this end, we introduce a predictor network that plans optimal trajectories and a control network that infers the corresponding control parameters. Both stages are trained end-to-end using a differentiable PDE solver. We demonstrate that our method successfully develops an understanding of complex physical systems and learns to control them for tasks involving PDEs such as the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations.

Recent years have witnessed widespread adoption of machine learning (ML)/deep learning (DL) techniques due to their superior performance for a variety of healthcare applications ranging from the prediction of cardiac arrest from one-dimensional heart signals to computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) using multi-dimensional medical images. Notwithstanding the impressive performance of ML/DL, there are still lingering doubts regarding the robustness of ML/DL in healthcare settings (which is traditionally considered quite challenging due to the myriad security and privacy issues involved), especially in light of recent results that have shown that ML/DL are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we present an overview of various application areas in healthcare that leverage such techniques from security and privacy point of view and present associated challenges. In addition, we present potential methods to ensure secure and privacy-preserving ML for healthcare applications. Finally, we provide insight into the current research challenges and promising directions for future research.

There exists a Classification accuracy gap of about 20% between our best methods of generating Unsupervisedly Learned Representations and the accuracy rates achieved by (naturally Unsupervisedly Learning) humans. We are at our fourth decade at least in search of this class of paradigms. It thus may well be that we are looking in the wrong direction. We present in this paper a possible solution to this puzzle. We demonstrate that Reinforcement Learning schemes can learn representations, which may be used for Pattern Recognition tasks such as Classification, achieving practically the same accuracy as that of humans. Our main modest contribution lies in the observations that: a. when applied to a real world environment (e.g. nature itself) Reinforcement Learning does not require labels, and thus may be considered a natural candidate for the long sought, accuracy competitive Unsupervised Learning method, and b. in contrast, when Reinforcement Learning is applied in a simulated or symbolic processing environment (e.g. a computer program) it does inherently require labels and should thus be generally classified, with some exceptions, as Supervised Learning. The corollary of these observations is that further search for Unsupervised Learning competitive paradigms which may be trained in simulated environments like many of those found in research and applications may be futile.

Learning suitable and well-performing dialogue behaviour in statistical spoken dialogue systems has been in the focus of research for many years. While most work which is based on reinforcement learning employs an objective measure like task success for modelling the reward signal, we use a reward based on user satisfaction estimation. We propose a novel estimator and show that it outperforms all previous estimators while learning temporal dependencies implicitly. Furthermore, we apply this novel user satisfaction estimation model live in simulated experiments where the satisfaction estimation model is trained on one domain and applied in many other domains which cover a similar task. We show that applying this model results in higher estimated satisfaction, similar task success rates and a higher robustness to noise.

We propose a statistical learning-based traffic speed estimation method that uses sparse vehicle trajectory information. Using a convolutional encoder-decoder based architecture, we show that a well trained neural network can learn spatio-temporal traffic speed dynamics from time-space diagrams. We demonstrate this for a homogeneous road section using simulated vehicle trajectories and then validate it using real-world data from NGSIM. Our results show that with probe vehicle penetration levels as low as 5\%, the proposed estimation method can provide a sound reconstruction of macroscopic traffic speeds and reproduce realistic shockwave patterns, implying applicability in a variety of traffic conditions. We further discuss the model's reconstruction mechanisms and confirm its ability to differentiate various traffic behaviors such as congested and free-flow traffic states, transition dynamics, and shockwave propagation.

This paper shows that deep learning (DL) representations of data produced by generative adversarial nets (GANs) are random vectors which fall within the class of so-called \textit{concentrated} random vectors. Further exploiting the fact that Gram matrices, of the type $G = X^T X$ with $X=[x_1,\ldots,x_n]\in \mathbb{R}^{p\times n}$ and $x_i$ independent concentrated random vectors from a mixture model, behave asymptotically (as $n,p\to \infty$) as if the $x_i$ were drawn from a Gaussian mixture, suggests that DL representations of GAN-data can be fully described by their first two statistical moments for a wide range of standard classifiers. Our theoretical findings are validated by generating images with the BigGAN model and across different popular deep representation networks.

Deep learning methods are the gold standard for non-linear statistical modeling in computer vision and in natural language processing but are rarely used in psychometrics. To bridge this gap, we present a novel deep learning algorithm for exploratory item factor analysis (IFA). Our approach combines a deep artificial neural network (ANN) model called a variational autoencoder (VAE) with recent work that uses regularization for exploratory factor analysis. We first provide overviews of ANNs and VAEs. We then describe how to conduct exploratory IFA with a VAE and demonstrate our approach in two empirical examples and in two simulated examples. Our empirical results were consistent with existing psychological theory across random starting values. Our simulations suggest that the VAE consistently recovers the data generating factor pattern with moderate-sized samples. Secondary loadings were underestimated with a complex factor structure and intercept parameter estimates were moderately biased with both simple and complex factor structures. All models converged in minutes, even with hundreds of thousands of observations, hundreds of items, and tens of factors. We conclude that the VAE offers a powerful new approach to fitting complex statistical models in psychological and educational measurement.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides an effective means of leveraging unlabeled data to improve a model's performance. In this paper, we demonstrate the power of a simple combination of two common SSL methods: consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling. Our algorithm, FixMatch, first generates pseudo-labels using the model's predictions on weakly-augmented unlabeled images. For a given image, the pseudo-label is only retained if the model produces a high-confidence prediction. The model is then trained to predict the pseudo-label when fed a strongly-augmented version of the same image. Despite its simplicity, we show that FixMatch achieves state-of-the-art performance across a variety of standard semi-supervised learning benchmarks, including 94.93% accuracy on CIFAR-10 with 250 labels and 88.61% accuracy with 40 -- just 4 labels per class. Since FixMatch bears many similarities to existing SSL methods that achieve worse performance, we carry out an extensive ablation study to tease apart the experimental factors that are most important to FixMatch's success. We make our code available at https://github.com/google-research/fixmatch.

Analyzing the urban trajectory in cities has become an important topic in data mining. How can we model the human mobility consisting of stay and travel from the raw trajectory data? How can we infer such a mobility model from the single trajectory information? How can we further generalize the mobility inference to accommodate the real-world trajectory data that is sparsely sampled over time? In this paper, based on formal and rigid definitions of the stay/travel mobility, we propose a single trajectory inference algorithm that utilizes a generic long-tailed sparsity pattern in the large-scale trajectory data. The algorithm guarantees a 100\% precision in the stay/travel inference with a provable lower-bound in the recall. Furthermore, we introduce an encoder-decoder learning architecture that admits multiple trajectories as inputs. The architecture is optimized for the mobility inference problem through customized embedding and learning mechanism. Evaluations with three trajectory data sets of 40 million urban users validate the performance guarantees of the proposed inference algorithm and demonstrate the superiority of our deep learning model, in comparison to well-known sequence learning methods. On extremely sparse trajectories, the deep learning model achieves a 2$\times$ overall accuracy improvement from the single trajectory inference algorithm, through proven scalability and generalizability to large-scale versatile training data.

As the prevalence of deep learning in computer vision, adversarial samples that weaken the neural networks emerge in large numbers, revealing their deep-rooted defects. Most adversarial attacks calculate an imperceptible perturbation in image space to fool the DNNs. In this strategy, the perturbation looks like noise and thus could be mitigated. Attacks in feature space produce semantic perturbation, but they could only deal with low resolution samples. The reason lies in the great number of coupled features to express a high-resolution image. In this paper, we propose Attack by Identifying Effective Features (AIEF), which learns different weights for features to attack. Effective features, those with great weights, influence the victim model much but distort the image little, and thus are more effective for attack. By attacking mostly on them, AIEF produces high resolution adversarial samples with acceptable distortions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of AIEF by attacking on different tasks with different generative models.