In this paper, we introduce self-distillation and online clustering for self-supervised speech representation learning (DinoSR) which combines masked language modeling, self-distillation, and online clustering. We show that these concepts complement each other and result in a strong representation learning model for speech. DinoSR first extracts contextualized embeddings from the input audio with a teacher network, then runs an online clustering system on the embeddings to yield a machine-discovered phone inventory, and finally uses the discretized tokens to guide a student network. We show that DinoSR surpasses previous state-of-the-art performance in several downstream tasks, and provide a detailed analysis of the model and the learned discrete units. The source code will be made available after the anonymity period.

One of the biggest expense in software development is the maintenance. Therefore, it is critical to comprehend what triggers maintenance and if it may be predicted. Numerous research have demonstrated that specific methods of assessing the complexity of created programs may produce useful prediction models to ascertain the possibility of maintenance due to software failures. As a routine it is performed prior to the release, and setting up the models frequently calls for certain, object-oriented software measurements. It is not always the case that software developers have access to these measurements. In this paper, the machine learning is applied on the available data to calculate the cumulative software failure levels. A technique to forecast a software`s residual defectiveness using machine learning can be looked into as a solution to the challenge of predicting residual flaws. Software metrics and defect data were separated out of the static source code repository. Static code is used to create software metrics, and reported bugs in the repository are used to gather defect information. By using a correlation method, metrics that had no connection to the defect data were removed. This makes it possible to analyze all the data without pausing the programming process. Large, sophisticated software`s primary issue is that it is impossible to control everything manually, and the cost of an error can be quite expensive. Developers may miss errors during testing as a consequence, which will raise maintenance costs. Finding a method to accurately forecast software defects is the overall objective.

Constrained clustering is a semi-supervised task that employs a limited amount of labelled data, formulated as constraints, to incorporate domain-specific knowledge and to significantly improve clustering accuracy. Previous work has considered exact optimization formulations that can guarantee optimal clustering while satisfying all constraints, however these approaches lack interpretability. Recently, decision-trees have been used to produce inherently interpretable clustering solutions, however existing approaches do not support clustering constraints and do not provide strong theoretical guarantees on solution quality. In this work, we present a novel SAT-based framework for interpretable clustering that supports clustering constraints and that also provides strong theoretical guarantees on solution quality. We also present new insight into the trade-off between interpretability and satisfaction of such user-provided constraints. Our framework is the first approach for interpretable and constrained clustering. Experiments with a range of real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our approach can produce high-quality and interpretable constrained clustering solutions.

Contrastive learning has been widely studied in sentence representation learning. However, earlier works mainly focus on the construction of positive examples, while in-batch samples are often simply treated as negative examples. This approach overlooks the importance of selecting appropriate negative examples, potentially leading to a scarcity of hard negatives and the inclusion of false negatives. To address these issues, we propose ClusterNS (Clustering-aware Negative Sampling), a novel method that incorporates cluster information into contrastive learning for unsupervised sentence representation learning. We apply a modified K-means clustering algorithm to supply hard negatives and recognize in-batch false negatives during training, aiming to solve the two issues in one unified framework. Experiments on semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks demonstrate that our proposed ClusterNS compares favorably with baselines in unsupervised sentence representation learning. Our code has been made publicly available.

The bipartite graph structure has shown its promising ability in facilitating the subspace clustering and spectral clustering algorithms for large-scale datasets. To avoid the post-processing via k-means during the bipartite graph partitioning, the constrained Laplacian rank (CLR) is often utilized for constraining the number of connected components (i.e., clusters) in the bipartite graph, which, however, neglects the distribution (or normalization) of these connected components and may lead to imbalanced or even ill clusters. Despite the significant success of normalized cut (Ncut) in general graphs, it remains surprisingly an open problem how to enforce a one-step normalized cut for bipartite graphs, especially with linear-time complexity. In this paper, we first characterize a novel one-step bipartite graph cut (OBCut) criterion with normalized constraints, and theoretically prove its equivalence to a trace maximization problem. Then we extend this cut criterion to a scalable subspace clustering approach, where adaptive anchor learning, bipartite graph learning, and one-step normalized bipartite graph partitioning are simultaneously modeled in a unified objective function, and an alternating optimization algorithm is further designed to solve it in linear time. Experiments on a variety of general and large-scale datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.

We propose a structure-preserving model-reduction methodology for large-scale dynamic networks with tightly-connected components. First, the coherent groups are identified by a spectral clustering algorithm on the graph Laplacian matrix that models the network feedback. Then, a reduced network is built, where each node represents the aggregate dynamics of each coherent group, and the reduced network captures the dynamic coupling between the groups. We provide an upper bound on the approximation error when the network graph is randomly generated from a weight stochastic block model. Finally, numerical experiments align with and validate our theoretical findings.

We consider the well-studied Robust $(k, z)$-Clustering problem, which generalizes the classic $k$-Median, $k$-Means, and $k$-Center problems. Given a constant $z\ge 1$, the input to Robust $(k, z)$-Clustering is a set $P$ of $n$ weighted points in a metric space $(M,\delta)$ and a positive integer $k$. Further, each point belongs to one (or more) of the $m$ many different groups $S_1,S_2,\ldots,S_m$. Our goal is to find a set $X$ of $k$ centers such that $\max_{i \in [m]} \sum_{p \in S_i} w(p) \delta(p,X)^z$ is minimized. This problem arises in the domains of robust optimization [Anthony, Goyal, Gupta, Nagarajan, Math. Oper. Res. 2010] and in algorithmic fairness. For polynomial time computation, an approximation factor of $O(\log m/\log\log m)$ is known [Makarychev, Vakilian, COLT $2021$], which is tight under a plausible complexity assumption even in the line metrics. For FPT time, there is a $(3^z+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm, which is tight under GAP-ETH [Goyal, Jaiswal, Inf. Proc. Letters, 2023]. Motivated by the tight lower bounds for general discrete metrics, we focus on \emph{geometric} spaces such as the (discrete) high-dimensional Euclidean setting and metrics of low doubling dimension, which play an important role in data analysis applications. First, for a universal constant $\eta_0 >0.0006$, we devise a $3^z(1-\eta_{0})$-factor FPT approximation algorithm for discrete high-dimensional Euclidean spaces thereby bypassing the lower bound for general metrics. We complement this result by showing that even the special case of $k$-Center in dimension $\Theta(\log n)$ is $(\sqrt{3/2}- o(1))$-hard to approximate for FPT algorithms. Finally, we complete the FPT approximation landscape by designing an FPT $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation scheme (EPAS) for the metric of sub-logarithmic doubling dimension.

Rutting of asphalt pavements is a crucial design criterion in various pavement design guides. A good road transportation base can provide security for the transportation of oil and gas in road transportation. This study attempts to develop a robust artificial intelligence model to estimate different asphalt pavements' rutting depth clips, temperature, and load axes as primary characteristics. The experiment data were obtained from 19 asphalt pavements with different crude oil sources on a 2.038 km long full-scale field accelerated pavement test track (RIOHTrack, Road Track Institute) in Tongzhou, Beijing. In addition, this paper also proposes to build complex networks with different pavement rutting depths through complex network methods and the Louvain algorithm for community detection. The most critical structural elements can be selected from different asphalt pavement rutting data, and similar structural elements can be found. An extreme learning machine algorithm with residual correction (RELM) is designed and optimized using an independent adaptive particle swarm algorithm. The experimental results of the proposed method are compared with several classical machine learning algorithms, with predictions of Average Root Mean Squared Error, Average Mean Absolute Error, and Average Mean Absolute Percentage Error for 19 asphalt pavements reaching 1.742, 1.363, and 1.94\% respectively. The experiments demonstrate that the RELM algorithm has an advantage over classical machine learning methods in dealing with non-linear problems in road engineering. Notably, the method ensures the adaptation of the simulated environment to different levels of abstraction through the cognitive analysis of the production environment parameters.

Clustering data is an unsupervised learning approach that aims to divide a set of data points into multiple groups. It is a crucial yet demanding subject in machine learning and data mining. Its successful applications span various fields. However, conventional clustering techniques necessitate the consideration of balance significance in specific applications. Therefore, this paper addresses the challenge of imbalanced clustering problems and presents a new method for balanced clustering by utilizing entropy-aware similarity, which can be defined as the degree of balances. We have coined the term, entropy-aware similarity for balanced clustering (EASB), which maximizes balance during clustering by complementary clustering of unbalanced data and incorporating entropy in a novel similarity formula that accounts for both angular differences and distances. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated on actual melanoma medial data, specifically the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) 2019 and 2020 challenge datasets, to demonstrate how it can successfully cluster the data while preserving balance. Lastly, we can confirm that the proposed method exhibited outstanding performance in detecting melanoma, comparing to classical methods.

We propose a node clustering method for time-varying graphs based on the assumption that the cluster labels are changed smoothly over time. Clustering is one of the fundamental tasks in many science and engineering fields including signal processing, machine learning, and data mining. Although most existing studies focus on the clustering of nodes in static graphs, we often encounter time-varying graphs for time-series data, e.g., social networks, brain functional connectivity, and point clouds. In this paper, we formulate a node clustering of time-varying graphs as an optimization problem based on spectral clustering, with a smoothness constraint of the node labels. We solve the problem with a primal-dual splitting algorithm. Experiments on synthetic and real-world time-varying graphs are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.