This paper proposes a deep speech enhancement method which exploits the high potential of residual connections in a wide neural network architecture, a topology known as Wide Residual Network. This is supported on single dimensional convolutions computed alongside the time domain, which is a powerful approach to process contextually correlated representations through the temporal domain, such as speech feature sequences. We find the residual mechanism extremely useful for the enhancement task since the signal always has a linear shortcut and the non-linear path enhances it in several steps by adding or subtracting corrections. The enhancement capacity of the proposal is assessed by objective quality metrics and the performance of a speech recognition system. This was evaluated in the framework of the REVERB Challenge dataset, including simulated and real samples of reverberated and noisy speech signals. Results showed that enhanced speech from the proposed method succeeded for both, the enhancement task with intelligibility purposes and the speech recognition system. The DNN model, trained with artificial synthesized reverberation data, was able to deal with far-field reverberated speech from real scenarios. Furthermore, the method was able to take advantage of the residual connection achieving to enhance signals with low noise level, which is usually a strong handicap of traditional enhancement methods.

Convolution is an efficient technique to obtain abstract feature representations using hierarchical layers in deep networks. Although performing convolution in Euclidean geometries is fairly straightforward, its extension to other topological spaces---such as a sphere ($\mathbb{S}^2$) or a unit ball ($\mathbb{B}^3$)---entails unique challenges. In this work, we propose a novel `\emph{volumetric convolution}' operation that can effectively convolve arbitrary functions in $\mathbb{B}^3$. We develop a theoretical framework for \emph{volumetric convolution} based on Zernike polynomials and efficiently implement it as a differentiable and an easily pluggable layer for deep networks. Furthermore, our formulation leads to derivation of a novel formula to measure the symmetry of a function in $\mathbb{B}^3$ around an arbitrary axis, that is useful in 3D shape analysis tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of proposed volumetric convolution operation on a possible use-case i.e., 3D object recognition task.

We investigate adversarial learning in the case when only an unnormalized form of the density can be accessed, rather than samples. With insights so garnered, adversarial learning is extended to the case for which one has access to an unnormalized form u(x) of the target density function, but no samples. Further, new concepts in GAN regularization are developed, based on learning from samples or from u(x). The proposed method is compared to alternative approaches, with encouraging results demonstrated across a range of applications, including deep soft Q-learning.

This paper proposes a new Quantum Spatial Graph Convolutional Neural Network (QSGCNN) model that can directly learn a classification function for graphs of arbitrary sizes. Unlike state-of-the-art Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCNN) models, the proposed QSGCNN model incorporates the process of identifying transitive aligned vertices between graphs, and transforms arbitrary sized graphs into fixed-sized aligned vertex grid structures. In order to learn representative graph characteristics, a new quantum spatial graph convolution is proposed and employed to extract multi-scale vertex features, in terms of quantum information propagation between grid vertices of each graph. Since the quantum spatial convolution preserves the grid structures of the input vertices (i.e., the convolution layer does not change the original spatial sequence of vertices), the proposed QSGCNN model allows to directly employ the traditional convolutional neural network architecture to further learn from the global graph topology, providing an end-to-end deep learning architecture that integrates the graph representation and learning in the quantum spatial graph convolution layer and the traditional convolutional layer for graph classifications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed QSGCNN model in relation to existing state-of-the-art methods. The proposed QSGCNN model addresses the shortcomings of information loss and imprecise information representation arising in existing GCN models associated with the use of SortPooling or SumPooling layers. Experiments on benchmark graph classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed QSGCNN model.

We report on an extensive study of the benefits and limitations of current deep learning approaches to object recognition in robot vision scenarios, introducing a novel dataset used for our investigation. To avoid the biases in currently available datasets, we consider a natural human-robot interaction setting to design a data-acquisition protocol for visual object recognition on the iCub humanoid robot. Analyzing the performance of off-the-shelf models trained off-line on large-scale image retrieval datasets, we show the necessity for knowledge transfer. We evaluate different ways in which this last step can be done, and identify the major bottlenecks affecting robotic scenarios. By studying both object categorization and identification problems, we highlight key differences between object recognition in robotics applications and in image retrieval tasks, for which the considered deep learning approaches have been originally designed. In a nutshell, our results confirm the remarkable improvements yield by deep learning in this setting, while pointing to specific open challenges that need be addressed for seamless deployment in robotics.

We investigate whether quantum annealers with select chip layouts can outperform classical computers in reinforcement learning tasks. We associate a transverse field Ising spin Hamiltonian with a layout of qubits similar to that of a deep Boltzmann machine (DBM) and use simulated quantum annealing (SQA) to numerically simulate quantum sampling from this system. We design a reinforcement learning algorithm in which the set of visible nodes representing the states and actions of an optimal policy are the first and last layers of the deep network. In absence of a transverse field, our simulations show that DBMs are trained more effectively than restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM) with the same number of nodes. We then develop a framework for training the network as a quantum Boltzmann machine (QBM) in the presence of a significant transverse field for reinforcement learning. This method also outperforms the reinforcement learning method that uses RBMs.

A CNN works well for identifying simple patterns within your data which will then be used to form more complex patterns within higher layers. A 1D CNN is very effective when you expect to derive interesting features from shorter (fixed-length) segments of the overall data set and where the location of the feature within the segment is not of high relevance. This applies well to the analysis of time sequences of sensor data (such as gyroscope or accelerometer data). It also applies to the analysis of any kind of signal data over a fixed-length period (such as audio signals). Another application is NLP (although here LSTM networks are more promising since the proximity of words might not always be a good indicator for a trainable pattern).

Deep learning has become the go-to "AI" technique for image recognition and classification. It has reached a stage where a programmer doesn't even have to create their own models, thanks to a large number available off the shelf, pre-trained and ready for download. Training these models is essentially an optimisation exercise, something that involves some complicated (well, relatively) maths in order to reduce the number of errors on each cycle by adjusting a large number of internal weighting factors. At the end of the training phase, you should have a neural net that can accomplish the task it has been assigned. The problem with neural nets (and deep learning) is that once they have been trained, we don't know what's going on inside them.

Every new year brings new expectations and hopes for technology markets. In the case of machine learning, the space is moving so fast that is hard to differentiate hype from reality. Many of the ground-breaking advancements in machine learning or artificial intelligence(AI) research are simply unpractical to apply in real world solutions and many of the basic artifacts needed to streamline the adoption of machine learning technologies in real world scenarios are still missing. At Invector Labs, we spend a lot of time building large scale machine learning solutions. As a result, we are in constant exposure to different machine learning technology stacks as well as the latest research from academic institutions.

Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a type of neural network architecture specially made to deal with visual data. In this article we will discuss the architecture of CNN and implement it on CIFAR-10 dataset in part-2. The main benefit of using a CNN over simple ANN on visual data is that CNN's are constrained to deal with image data exclusively. As we described above, a simple ConvNet is a sequence of layers, and every layer of a ConvNet transforms one volume of activations to another through a differentiable function. We use three main types of layers to build ConvNet architectures: Convolutional Layer, Pooling Layer, and Fully-Connected Layer (exactly as seen in regular Neural Networks).