In this work, a dense recurrent convolutional neural network (DRCNN) was constructed to detect sleep disorders including arousal, apnea and hypopnea using available Polysomnography (PSG) measurement channels provided in the 2018 PhysioNet challenge database. Our model structure is composed of multiple dense convolutional units (DCU) followed by a bidirectional long-short term memory (LSTM) layer followed by a softmax output layer. The sleep events including sleep stages, arousal regions and multiple types of apnea and hypopnea are manually annotated by experts which enables us to train our proposed network using a multi-task learning mechanism. Three binary cross-entropy loss functions corresponding to sleep/wake, arousal presence/absence and apnea-hypopnea/normal detection tasks are summed up to generate our overall network loss function that is optimized using the Adam method. Our model performance was evaluated using two metrics: the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). To measure our model generalization, 4-fold cross-validation was also performed. For training, our model was applied to full night recording data. Finally, the average AUPRC and AUROC values associated with the arousal detection task were 0.505 and 0.922, respectively on our testing dataset. An ensemble of four models trained on different data folds improved the AUPRC and AUROC to 0.543 and 0.931, respectively. Our proposed algorithm achieved the first place in the official stage of the 2018 PhysioNet challenge for detecting sleep arousals with AUPRC of $0.54$ on the blind testing dataset.

Offline Signature Verification (OSV) is a challenging pattern recognition task, especially in presence of skilled forgeries that are not available during training. This study aims to tackle its challenges and meet the substantial need for generalization for OSV by examining different loss functions for Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). We adopt our new approach to OSV by asking two questions: 1. which classification loss provides more generalization for feature learning in OSV? , and 2. How integration of different losses into a unified multi-loss function lead to an improved learning framework? These questions are studied based on analysis of three loss functions, including cross entropy, Cauchy-Schwarz divergence, and hinge loss. According to complementary features of these losses, we combine them into a dynamic multi-loss function and propose a novel ensemble framework for simultaneous use of them in CNN. Our proposed Multi-Loss Snapshot Ensemble (MLSE) consists of several sequential trials. In each trial, a dominant loss function is selected from the multi-loss set, and the remaining losses act as a regularizer. Different trials learn diverse representations for each input based on signature identification task. This multi-representation set is then employed for the verification task. An ensemble of SVMs is trained on these representations, and their decisions are finally combined according to the selection of most generalizable SVM for each user. We conducted two sets of experiments based on two different protocols of OSV, i.e., writer-dependent and writer-independent on three signature datasets: GPDS-Synthetic, MCYT, and UT-SIG. Based on the writer-dependent OSV protocol, we achieved substantial improvements over the best EERs in the literature. The results of the second set of experiments also confirmed the robustness to the arrival of new users enrolled in the OSV system.

In the space of only a few years, deep generative modeling has revolutionized how we think of artificial creativity, yielding autonomous systems which produce original images, music, and text. Inspired by these successes, researchers are now applying deep generative modeling techniques to the generation and optimization of molecules - in our review we found 45 papers on the subject published in the past two years. These works point to a future where such systems will be used to generate lead molecules, greatly reducing resources spent downstream synthesizing and characterizing bad leads in the lab. In this review we survey the increasingly complex landscape of models and representation schemes that have been proposed. The four classes of techniques we describe are recursive neural networks, autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, and reinforcement learning. After first discussing some of the mathematical fundamentals of each technique, we draw high level connections and comparisons with other techniques and expose the pros and cons of each. Several important high level themes emerge as a result of this work, including the shift away from the SMILES string representation of molecules towards more sophisticated representations such as graph grammars and 3D representations, the importance of reward function design, the need for better standards for benchmarking and testing, and the benefits of adversarial training and reinforcement learning over maximum likelihood based training.

Machine learning, especially deep neural networks, has been rapidly developed in fields including computer vision, speech recognition and reinforcement learning. Although Mini-batch SGD is one of the most popular stochastic optimization methods in training deep networks, it shows a slow convergence rate due to the large noise in gradient approximation. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this problem by building more efficient batch selection method based on typicality sampling, which reduces the error of gradient estimation in conventional Minibatch SGD. We analyze the convergence rate of the resulting typical batch SGD algorithm and compare convergence properties between Minibatch SGD and the algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that our batch selection scheme works well and more complex Minibatch SGD variants can benefit from the proposed batch selection strategy.

In this paper we present a curated dataset from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) mission in a format suitable for machine learning research. Beginning from level 1 scientific products we have processed various instrumental corrections, downsampled to manageable spatial and temporal resolutions, and synchronized observations spatially and temporally. We illustrate the use of this dataset with two example applications: forecasting future EVE irradiance from present EVE irradiance and translating HMI observations into AIA observations. For each application we provide metrics and baselines for future model comparison. We anticipate this curated dataset will facilitate machine learning research in heliophysics and the physical sciences generally, increasing the scientific return of the SDO mission. This work is a direct result of the 2018 NASA Frontier Development Laboratory Program. Please see the appendix for access to the dataset.

Excellent painters can use only a few strokes to create a fantastic painting, which is a symbol of human intelligence and art. Reversing the simulator to interpret images is also a challenging task of computer vision in recent years. In this paper, we present SARA, a stroke-based artistic rendering agent that combines the neural renderer and deep reinforcement learning (DRL), allowing the machine to learn the ability to deconstruct images using strokes and create amazing visual effects. Our agent is an end-to-end program that converts natural images into paintings. The training process does not require the experience of human painting or stroke tracking data.

We apply recent advances in deep generative modeling to the task of imitation learning from biological agents. Specifically, we apply variations of the variational recurrent neural network model to a multi-agent setting where we learn policies of individual uncoordinated agents acting based on their perceptual inputs and their hidden belief state. We learn stochastic policies for these agents directly from observational data, without constructing a reward function. An inference network learned jointly with the policy allows for efficient inference over the agent's belief state given a sequence of its current perceptual inputs and the prior actions it performed, which lets us extrapolate observed sequences of behavior into the future while maintaining uncertainty estimates over future trajectories. We test our approach on a dataset of flies interacting in a 2D environment, where we demonstrate better predictive performance than existing approaches which learn deterministic policies with recurrent neural networks. We further show that the uncertainty estimates over future trajectories we obtain are well calibrated, which makes them useful for a variety of downstream processing tasks.

In this paper, we aim at providing an introduction to the gradient descent based optimization algorithms for learning deep neural network models. Deep learning models involving multiple nonlinear projection layers are very challenging to train. Nowadays, most of the deep learning model training still relies on the back propagation algorithm actually. In back propagation, the model variables will be updated iteratively until convergence with gradient descent based optimization algorithms. Besides the conventional vanilla gradient descent algorithm, many gradient descent variants have also been proposed in recent years to improve the learning performance, including Momentum, Adagrad, Adam, Gadam, etc., which will all be introduced in this paper respectively.

Abstract--Given an environment with continuous state spaces and discrete actions, we investigate using a Double Deep Q-learning Reinforcement Agent to find optimal policies using the LunarLander-v2 OpenAI gym environment. I. INTRODUCTION For this study, we examine performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for continuous state space MDPs, specifically OpenAI Gym's LunarLander-v2. In this environment, the goal is for the RL agent to learn to land successfully on a landing pad located a coordinate points (0,0) in the frame. The agent receives -0.03 points for firing its main engine for each frame, and landing on the landing pad is 100-140 points, which can be lost if the agent moves away from the pad. Each leg contact with the ground is 10 points.

Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) have been extremely successful in solving intensive computer vision tasks. The convolutional filters used in CNNs have played a major role in this success, by extracting useful features from the inputs. Recently researchers have tried to boost the performance of CNNs by re-calibrating the feature maps produced by these filters, e.g., Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks (SENets). These approaches have achieved better performance by \textit{Exciting} up the important channels or feature maps while diminishing the rest. However, in the process, architectural complexity has increased. We propose an architectural block that introduces much lower complexity than the existing methods of CNN performance boosting while performing significantly better than them. We carry out experiments on the CIFAR, ImageNet and MS-COCO datasets, and show that the proposed block can challenge the state-of-the-art results. Our method boosts the ResNet-50 architecture to perform comparably to the ResNet-152 architecture, which is a three times deeper network, on classification. We also show experimentally that our method is not limited to classification but also generalizes well to other tasks such as object detection.