Each gene has its own evolutionary history which can substantially differ from the evolutionary histories of other genes. For example, some individual genes or operons can be affected by specific horizontal gene transfer or hybridization events. Thus, the evolutionary history of each gene should be represented by its own phylogenetic tree which may display different evolutionary patterns from the species tree, or Tree of Life, that represents the main patterns of vertical descent. Here, we present a new efficient method for inferring single or multiple consensus trees and supertrees for a given set of phylogenetic trees (i.e. The output of the traditional tree consensus methods is a unique consensus tree or supertree.

Once again, a robot can do something I cannot do. Researchers at the artificial intelligence lab OpenAI just revealed that its humanoid robotic hand can solve a Rubik's cube. The researchers utilized a pair of neural networks to make it happen. The team has been working on this project, named Dactyl, since the middle of 2017, and they felt showing their robotic hand could solve a Rubik's cube would show it had adequate dexterity. It can now solve the cube about 60 percent of the time.

But can some of the same tools--specifically those that power computer vision--be used to remove the drudgery and long hours VFX artists face when it comes to rotoscoping? Oscar Estrada, a recent graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology's Motion Picture Science program, was determined to find out. Estrada presented his research Oct. 21, the opening day of the SMPTE 2019 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. In his presentation, "Rotoscope Automation with Deep Learning," Estrada laid out his thesis research looking at whether the use of a convolutional neural network could be used to extract a person or persons from a video clip without human intervention. Convolutional neural networks are particularly well-suited to the task of rotoscoping as opposed to other neural network techniques, especially when large images like 4K are at play, he said.

We introduce a new interpretation of sparse variational approximations for Gaussian processes using inducing points which can lead to more scalable algorithms than previous methods. It is based on decomposing a Gaussian process as a sum of two independent processes: one in the subspace spanned by the inducing basis and the other in the orthogonal complement to this subspace. We show that this formulation recovers existing approximations and at the same time allows to obtain tighter lower bounds on the marginal likelihood and new stochastic variational inference algorithms. We demonstrate the efficiency of these algorithms in several Gaussian process models ranging from standard regression to multi-class classification using (deep) convo-lutional Gaussian processes and report state-of-the-art results on CIF AR-10 with purely GPbased models.

Making computer programming language more understandable and easy for the human is a longstanding problem. From assembly language to present day's object-oriented programming, concepts came to make programming easier so that a programmer can focus on the logic and the architecture rather than the code and language itself. To go a step further in this journey of removing human-computer language barrier, this paper proposes machine learning approach using Recurrent Neural Network(RNN) and Long-Short Term Memory(LSTM) to convert human language into programming language code. The programmer will write expressions for codes in layman's language, and the machine learning model will translate it to the targeted programming language. The proposed approach yields result with 74.40% accuracy. This can be further improved by incorporating additional techniques, which are also discussed in this paper. Keywords: Text to code, machine learning, machine translation, NLP, RNN, LSTM 1 Introduction Removing computer-human language barrier is an inevitable advancement researchers are thriving to achieve for decades. One of the stages of this advancement will be coding through natural human language instead of traditional programming language. On naturalness of computer programming D. Knuth said, arXiv:1910.11471v1

Many recent works have discussed the propensity, or lack thereof, for emergent languages to exhibit properties of natural languages. A favorite in the literature is learning compositionality. We note that most of those works have focused on communicative bandwidth as being of primary importance. While important, it is not the only contributing factor. In this paper, we investigate the learning biases that affect the efficacy and compositionality of emergent languages. Our foremost contribution is to explore how capacity of a neural network impacts its ability to learn a compositional language. We additionally introduce a set of evaluation metrics with which we analyze the learned languages. Our hypothesis is that there should be a specific range of model capacity and channel bandwidth that induces compositional structure in the resulting language and consequently encourages systematic generalization. While we empirically see evidence for the bottom of this range, we curiously do not find evidence for the top part of the range and believe that this is an open question for the community.

Estimating machine learning performance 'in the wild' is both an important and unsolved problem. In this paper, we seek to examine, understand, and predict the pointwise competence of classification models. Our contributions are twofold: First, we establish a statistically rigorous definition of competence that generalizes the common notion of classifier confidence; second, we present the ALICE (Accurate Layerwise Interpretable Competence Estimation) Score, a pointwise competence estimator for any classifier. By considering distributional, data, and model uncertainty, ALICE empirically shows accurate competence estimation in common failure situations such as class-imbalanced datasets, out-of-distribution datasets, and poorly trained models. Our contributions allow us to accurately predict the competence of any classification model given any input and error function. We compare our score with state-of-the-art confidence estimators such as model confidence and Trust Score, and show significant improvements in competence prediction over these methods on datasets such as DIGITS, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100.

Transfer learning, where a model is first pre-trained on a data-rich task before being fine-tuned on a downstream task, has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP). The effectiveness of transfer learning has given rise to a diversity of approaches, methodology, and practice. In this paper, we explore the landscape of transfer learning techniques for NLP by introducing a unified framework that converts every language problem into a text-to-text format. Our systematic study compares pre-training objectives, architectures, unlabeled datasets, transfer approaches, and other factors on dozens of language understanding tasks. By combining the insights from our exploration with scale and our new "Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus", we achieve state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks covering summarization, question answering, text classification, and more. To facilitate future work on transfer learning for NLP, we release our dataset, pre-trained models, and code.

The importance of automated Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) grows the more common human-machine interactions become, which will only continue to increase dramatically with time. A common method to describe human sentiment or feeling is the categorical model the `7 basic emotions', consisting of `Angry', `Disgust', `Fear', `Happiness', `Sadness', `Surprise' and `Neutral'. The `Emotion Recognition in the Wild' (EmotiW) competition is now in its 7th year and has become the standard benchmark for measuring FER performance. The focus of this paper is the EmotiW sub-challenge of classifying videos in the `Acted Facial Expression in the Wild' (AFEW) dataset, consisting of both visual and audio modalities, into one of the above classes. Machine learning has exploded as a research topic in recent years, with advancements in `Deep Learning' a key part of this. Although Deep Learning techniques have been widely applied to the FER task by entrants in previous years, this paper has two main contributions: (i) to apply the latest `state-of-the-art' visual and temporal networks and (ii) exploring various methods of fusing features extracted from the visual and audio elements to enrich the information available to the final model making the prediction. There are a number of complex issues that arise when trying to classify emotions for `in-the-wild' video sequences, which the above two approaches attempt to directly address. There are some positive findings when comparing the results of this paper to past submissions, indicating that further research into the proposed methods and fine-tuning of the models deployed, could result in another step forwards in the field of automated FER.

ABSTRACT With growing consumer adoption of online grocery shopping through platforms such as Amazon Fresh, Instacart, and Walmart Grocery, there is a pressing business need to provide relevant recommendations throughout the customer journey. In this paper, we introduce a production within-basket grocery recommendation system, RTT2V ec, which generates real-time personalized product recommendations to supplement the user's current grocery basket. We conduct extensive offline evaluation of our system and demonstrate a 9.4% uplift in prediction metrics over baseline state-of-the-art within-basket recommendation models. We also propose an approximate inference technique 11.6x times faster than exact inference approaches. In production, our system has resulted in an increase in average basket size, improved product discovery, and enabled faster user checkout.