This paper presents a novel adaptively connected neural network (ACNet) to improve the traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) {in} two aspects. First, ACNet employs a flexible way to switch global and local inference in processing the internal feature representations by adaptively determining the connection status among the feature nodes (e.g., pixels of the feature maps) \footnote{In a computer vision domain, a node refers to a pixel of a feature map{, while} in {the} graph domain, a node denotes a graph node.}. We can show that existing CNNs, the classical multilayer perceptron (MLP), and the recently proposed non-local network (NLN) \cite{nonlocalnn17} are all special cases of ACNet. Second, ACNet is also capable of handling non-Euclidean data. Extensive experimental analyses on {a variety of benchmarks (i.e.,} ImageNet-1k classification, COCO 2017 detection and segmentation, CUHK03 person re-identification, CIFAR analysis, and Cora document categorization) demonstrate that {ACNet} cannot only achieve state-of-the-art performance but also overcome the limitation of the conventional MLP and CNN \footnote{Corresponding author: Liang Lin (linliang@ieee.org)}. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/wanggrun/Adaptively-Connected-Neural-Networks}.

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms perform simulation-based search to improve policies online. During search, the simulation policy is adapted to explore the most promising lines of play. MCTS has been used by state-of-the-art programs for many problems, however a disadvantage to MCTS is that it estimates the values of states with Monte Carlo averages, stored in a search tree; this does not scale to games with very high branching factors. We propose an alternative simulation-based search method, Policy Gradient Search (PGS), which adapts a neural network simulation policy online via policy gradient updates, avoiding the need for a search tree. In Hex, PGS achieves comparable performance to MCTS, and an agent trained using Expert Iteration with PGS was able defeat MoHex 2.0, the strongest open-source Hex agent, in 9x9 Hex.

We tackle the problem of automatic portrait matting on mobile devices. The proposed model is aimed at attaining real-time inference on mobile devices with minimal degradation of model performance. Our model MMNet, based on multi-branch dilated convolution with linear bottleneck blocks, outperforms the state-of-the-art model and is orders of magnitude faster. The model can be accelerated four times to attain 30 FPS on Xiaomi Mi 5 device with moderate increase in the gradient error. Under the same conditions, our model has an order of magnitude less number of parameters and is faster than Mobile DeepLabv3 while maintaining comparable performance. The accompanied implementation can be found at \url{https://github.com/hyperconnect/MMNet}.

Reinforcement learning combined with deep neural networks has performed remarkably well in many genres of game recently. It surpassed human-level performance in fixed game environments and turn-based two player board games. However, no research has ever shown a result that surpassed human level in modern complex fighting games, to the best of our knowledge. This is due to the inherent difficulties of modern fighting games, including vast action spaces, real-time constraints, and performance generalizations required for various opponents. We overcame these challenges and made 1v1 battle AI agents for the commercial game, "Blade & Soul". The trained agents competed against five professional gamers and achieved 62% of win rate.This paper presents a practical reinforcement learning method including a novel self-play curriculum and data skipping techniques. Through the curriculum, three different styles of agents are created by reward shaping, and are trained against each other for robust performance. Additionally, this paper suggests data skipping techniques which increased data efficiency and facilitated explorations in vast spaces.

Surface inspection systems are an important application domain for computer vision, as they are used for defect detection and classification in the manufacturing industry. Existing systems use hand-crafted features which require extensive domain knowledge to create. Even though Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven successful in many large-scale challenges, industrial inspection systems have yet barely realized their potential due to two significant challenges: real-time processing speed requirements and specialized narrow domain-specific datasets which are sometimes limited in size. In this paper, we propose CNN models that are specifically designed to handle capacity and real-time speed requirements of surface inspection systems. To train and evaluate our network models, we created a surface image dataset containing more than 22000 labeled images with many types of surface materials and achieved 98.0% accuracy in binary defect classification. To solve the class imbalance problem in our datasets, we introduce neural data augmentation methods which are also applicable to similar domains that suffer from the same problem. Our results show that deep learning based methods are feasible to be used in surface inspection systems and outperform traditional methods in accuracy and inference time by considerable margins.

Information Theory (IT) has been used in Machine Learning (ML) from early days of this field. In the last decade, advances in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have led to surprising improvements in many applications of ML. The result has been a paradigm shift in the community toward revisiting previous ideas and applications in this new framework. Ideas from IT are no exception. One of the ideas which is being revisited by many researchers in this new era, is Information Bottleneck (IB); a formulation of information extraction based on IT. The IB is promising in both analyzing and improving DNNs. The goal of this survey is to review the IB concept and demonstrate its applications in deep learning. The information theoretic nature of IB, makes it also a good candidate in showing the more general concept of how IT can be used in ML. Two important concepts are highlighted in this narrative on the subject, i) the concise and universal view that IT provides on seemingly unrelated methods of ML, demonstrated by explaining how IB relates to minimal sufficient statistics, stochastic gradient descent, and variational auto-encoders, and ii) the common technical mistakes and problems caused by applying ideas from IT, which is discussed by a careful study of some recent methods suffering from them.

For non-convex optimization in machine learning, this paper proves that every local minimum achieves the global optimality of the perturbable gradient basis model at any differentiable point. As a result, non-convex machine learning is theoretically as supported as convex machine learning with a hand-crafted basis in terms of the loss at differentiable local minima, except in the case when a preference is given to the hand-crafted basis over the perturbable gradient basis. The proofs of these results are derived under mild assumptions. Accordingly, the proven results are directly applicable to many machine learning models, including practical deep neural networks, without any modification of practical methods. Furthermore, as special cases of our general results, this paper improves or complements several state-of-the-art theoretical results in the literature with a simple and unified proof technique.

Sketching is more fundamental to human cognition than speech. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved the state-of-the-art in speech-related tasks but have not made significant development in generating stroke-based sketches a.k.a sketches in vector format. Though there are Variational Auto Encoders (VAEs) for generating sketches in vector format, there is no Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture for the same. In this paper, we propose a standalone GAN architecture SkeGAN and a VAE-GAN architecture VASkeGAN, for sketch generation in vector format. SkeGAN is a stochastic policy in Reinforcement Learning (RL), capable of generating both multidimensional continuous and discrete outputs. VASkeGAN hybridizes a VAE and a GAN, in order to couple the efficient representation of data by VAE with the powerful generating capabilities of a GAN, to produce visually appealing sketches. We also propose a new metric called the Ske-score which quantifies the quality of vector sketches. We have validated that SkeGAN and VASkeGAN generate visually appealing sketches by using Human Turing Test and Ske-score.

We investigated the training of a shared model for both text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC) tasks. We propose using an extended model architecture of Tacotron, that is a multi-source sequence-to-sequence model with a dual attention mechanism as the shared model for both the TTS and VC tasks. This model can accomplish these two different tasks respectively according to the type of input. An end-to-end speech synthesis task is conducted when the model is given text as the input while a sequence-to-sequence voice conversion task is conducted when it is given the speech of a source speaker as the input. Waveform signals are generated by using WaveNet, which is conditioned by using a predicted mel-spectrogram. We propose jointly training a shared model as a decoder for a target speaker that supports multiple sources. Listening experiments show that our proposed multi-source encoder-decoder model can efficiently achieve both the TTS and VC tasks.

We study how to leverage off-the-shelf visual and linguistic data to cope with out-of-vocabulary answers in visual question answering task. Existing large-scale visual datasets with annotations such as image class labels, bounding boxes and region descriptions are good sources for learning rich and diverse visual concepts. However, it is not straightforward how the visual concepts can be captured and transferred to visual question answering models due to missing link between question dependent answering models and visual data without question. We tackle this problem in two steps: 1) learning a task conditional visual classifier, which is capable of solving diverse question-specific visual recognition tasks, based on unsupervised task discovery and 2) transferring the task conditional visual classifier to visual question answering models. Specifically, we employ linguistic knowledge sources such as structured lexical database (e.g. WordNet) and visual descriptions for unsupervised task discovery, and transfer a learned task conditional visual classifier as an answering unit in a visual question answering model. We empirically show that the proposed algorithm generalizes to out-of-vocabulary answers successfully using the knowledge transferred from the visual dataset.