Most research in reading comprehension has focused on answering questions based on individual documents or even single paragraphs. We introduce a neural model which integrates and reasons relying on information spread within documents and across multiple documents. We frame it as an inference problem on a graph. Mentions of entities are nodes of this graph while edges encode relations between different mentions (e.g., within- and cross-document co-reference). Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are applied to these graphs and trained to perform multi-step reasoning. Our Entity-GCN method is scalable and compact, and it achieves state-of-the-art results on a multi-document question answering dataset, WikiHop (Welbl et al., 2018).

Learning a shared dialog structure from a set of task-oriented dialogs is an important challenge in computational linguistics. The learned dialog structure can shed light on how to analyze human dialogs, and more importantly contribute to the design and evaluation of dialog systems. We propose to extract dialog structures using a modified VRNN model with discrete latent vectors. Different from existing HMM-based models, our model is based on variational-autoencoder (VAE). Such model is able to capture more dynamics in dialogs beyond the surface forms of the language. We find that qualitatively, our method extracts meaningful dialog structure, and quantitatively, outperforms previous models on the ability to predict unseen data. We further evaluate the model's effectiveness in a downstream task, the dialog system building task. Experiments show that, by integrating the learned dialog structure into the reward function design, the model converges faster and to a better outcome in a reinforcement learning setting.

I want to do a PhD in Computer Vision as research is my passion. For the past one year, I've been reading different papers, doing different courses and projects. But, when it comes to research, I'm not able to product ideas which are feasible. I've been trying to come up with a good method to tackle the problem of Image captioning since it involved having knowledge in both CV and NLP. I've been thinking about it trying to find a new solution from January of 2019.

Data-dependent hashing has recently attracted attention due to being able to support efficient retrieval and storage of high-dimensional data such as documents, images, and videos. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based hashing method called "Supervised Discrete Hashing with Relaxation" (SDHR) based on "Supervised Discrete Hashing" (SDH). SDH uses ordinary least squares regression and traditional zero-one matrix encoding of class label information as the regression target (code words), thus fixing the regression target. In SDHR, the regression target is instead optimized. The optimized regression target matrix satisfies a large margin constraint for correct classification of each example. Compared with SDH, which uses the traditional zero-one matrix, SDHR utilizes the learned regression target matrix and, therefore, more accurately measures the classification error of the regression model and is more flexible. As expected, SDHR generally outperforms SDH. Experimental results on two large-scale image datasets (CIFAR-10 and MNIST) and a large-scale and challenging face dataset (FRGC) demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SDHR.

To help bridge the gap between internet vision-style problems and the goal of vision for embodied perception we instantiate a large-scale navigation task - Embodied Question Answering [1] in photo-realistic environments (Matterport 3D). We thoroughly study navigation policies that utilize 3D point clouds, RGB images, or their combination. Our analysis of these models reveals several key findings. We find that two seemingly naive navigation baselines, forward-only and random, are strong navigators and challenging to outperform, due to the specific choice of the evaluation setting presented by [1]. We find a novel lossweighting Figure 1: We extend EmbodiedQA [1] to photorealstic environments, scheme we call Inflection Weighting to be important our agent is spawned in a perceptually and semantically when training recurrent models for navigation with behavior novel environment and tasked with answering a cloning and are able to out perform the baselines question about that environment. We examine the agent's with this technique. We find that point clouds provide a ability to navigate the environment and answer the question richer signal than RGB images for learning obstacle avoidance, by perceiving its environment through point clouds, RGB motivating the use (and continued study) of 3D deep images, or a combination of the two.

This paper presents a recognition system for handwritten Pashto letters. However, handwritten character recognition is a challenging task. These letters not only differ in shape and style but also vary among individuals. The recognition becomes further daunting due to the lack of standard datasets for inscribed Pashto letters. In this work, we have designed a database of moderate size, which encompasses a total of 4488 images, stemming from 102 distinguishing samples for each of the 44 letters in Pashto. The recognition framework uses zoning feature extractor followed by K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) and Neural Network (NN) classifiers for classifying individual letter. Based on the evaluation of the proposed system, an overall classification accuracy of approximately 70.05% is achieved by using KNN while 72% is achieved by using NN.

The techniques of deep learning have become the state of the art methodology for executing complicated tasks from various domains of computer vision, natural language processing, and several other areas. Due to its rapid development and promising benchmarks in those fields, researchers started experimenting with this technique to perform in the area of, especially in intrusion detection related tasks. Deep learning is a subset and a natural extension of classical Machine learning and an evolved model of neural networks. This paper contemplates and discusses all the methodologies related to the leading edge Deep learning and Neural network models purposing to the arena of Intrusion Detection Systems.

In this paper, we develop a novel Aligned-Spatial Graph Convolutional Network (ASGCN) model to learn effective features for graph classification. Our idea is to transform arbitrary-sized graphs into fixed-sized aligned grid structures, and define a new spatial graph convolution operation associated with the grid structures. We show that the proposed ASGCN model not only reduces the problems of information loss and imprecise information representation arising in existing spatially-based Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) models, but also bridges the theoretical gap between traditional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models and spatially-based GCN models. Moreover, the proposed ASGCN model can adaptively discriminate the importance between specified vertices during the process of spatial graph convolution, explaining the effectiveness of the proposed model. Experiments on standard graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Learning-based hashing algorithms are ``hot topics" because they can greatly increase the scale at which existing methods operate. In this paper, we propose a new learning-based hashing method called ``fast supervised discrete hashing" (FSDH) based on ``supervised discrete hashing" (SDH). Regressing the training examples (or hash code) to the corresponding class labels is widely used in ordinary least squares regression. Rather than adopting this method, FSDH uses a very simple yet effective regression of the class labels of training examples to the corresponding hash code to accelerate the algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this strategy has not previously been used for hashing. Traditional SDH decomposes the optimization into three sub-problems, with the most critical sub-problem - discrete optimization for binary hash codes - solved using iterative discrete cyclic coordinate descent (DCC), which is time-consuming. However, FSDH has a closed-form solution and only requires a single rather than iterative hash code-solving step, which is highly efficient. Furthermore, FSDH is usually faster than SDH for solving the projection matrix for least squares regression, making FSDH generally faster than SDH. For example, our results show that FSDH is about 12-times faster than SDH when the number of hashing bits is 128 on the CIFAR-10 data base, and FSDH is about 151-times faster than FastHash when the number of hashing bits is 64 on the MNIST data-base. Our experimental results show that FSDH is not only fast, but also outperforms other comparative methods.

Acoustic scenes are rich and redundant in their content. In Given the rich content of acoustic scenes, they typically this work, we present a spatiotemporal attention pooling layer contain a lot of irrelevant and redundant information. This fact coupled with a convolutional recurrent neural network to learn naturally gives rise to the question of how to encourage a deep from patterns that are discriminative while suppressing those learning model to automatically discover and focus on discriminative that are irrelevant for acoustic scene classification. The convolutional patterns and suppress irrelevant ones from the acoustic layers in this network learn invariant features from scenes for better classification. We seek to address that question time-frequency input. The bidirectional recurrent layers are in this work using an attention mechanism [15]. To this end, we then able to encode the temporal dynamics of the resulting convolutional propose a spatiotemporal attention pooling layer in combination features. Afterwards, a two-dimensional attention with a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN), inspired mask is formed via the outer product of the spatial and temporal by their success in the audio event detection task [16, 17].