In recent years, various well-designed algorithms have empowered music platforms to provide content based on one's preferences. Music genres are defined through various aspects, including acoustic features and cultural considerations. Music genre classification works well with content-based filtering, which recommends content based on music similarity to users. Given a considerable dataset, one premise is automatic annotation using machine learning or deep learning methods that can effectively classify audio files. The effectiveness of systems largely depends on feature and model selection, as different architectures and features can facilitate each other and yield different results. In this study, we conduct a comparative study investigating the performances of three models: a proposed convolutional neural network (CNN), the VGG16 with fully connected layers (FC), and an eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) approach on different features: 30-second Mel spectrogram and 3-second Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). The results show that the MFCC XGBoost model outperformed the others. Furthermore, applying data segmentation in the data preprocessing phase can significantly enhance the performance of the CNNs.

As a fundamental problem in computer vision, point cloud registration aims to seek the optimal transformation for aligning a pair of point clouds. In most existing methods, the information flows are usually forward transferring, thus lacking the guidance from high-level information to low-level information. Besides, excessive high-level information may be overly redundant, and directly using it may conflict with the original low-level information. In this paper, we propose a novel Iterative Feedback Network (IFNet) for unsupervised point cloud registration, in which the representation of low-level features is efficiently enriched by rerouting subsequent high-level features. Specifically, our IFNet is built upon a series of Feedback Registration Block (FRB) modules, with each module responsible for generating the feedforward rigid transformation and feedback high-level features. These FRB modules are cascaded and recurrently unfolded over time. Further, the Feedback Transformer is designed to efficiently select relevant information from feedback high-level features, which is utilized to refine the low-level features. What's more, we incorporate a geometry-awareness descriptor to empower the network for making full use of most geometric information, which leads to more precise registration results. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior registration performance of our IFNet.

This study develops a graph search algorithm to find the optimal discrimination path for the binary classification problem. The objective function is defined as the difference of variations between the true positive (TP) and false positive (FP). It uses the depth first search (DFS) algorithm to find the top-down paths for discrimination. It proposes a dynamic optimization procedure to optimize TP at the upper levels and then reduce FP at the lower levels. To accelerate computing speed with improving accuracy, it proposes a reduced histogram algorithm with variable bin size instead of looping over all data points, to find the feature threshold of discrimination. The algorithm is applied on top of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model for a binary classification problem on whether a person is fit or unfit. It significantly improves TP and reduces FP of the SVM results (e.g., reduced FP by 90% with a loss of only\ 5% TP). The graph search auto-generates 39 ranked discrimination paths within 9 seconds on an input of total 328,464 objects, using a dual-core Laptop computer with a processor of 2.59 GHz.

Despite groundbreaking success in image and text learning, deep learning has not achieved significant improvements against traditional machine learning (ML) when it comes to tabular data. This performance gap underscores the need for data-centric treatment and benchmarking of learning algorithms. Recently, attention and contrastive learning breakthroughs have shifted computer vision and natural language processing paradigms. However, the effectiveness of these advanced deep models on tabular data is sparsely studied using a few data sets with very large sample sizes, reporting mixed findings after benchmarking against a limited number of baselines. We argue that the heterogeneity of tabular data sets and selective baselines in the literature can bias the benchmarking outcomes. This article extensively evaluates state-of-the-art attention and contrastive learning methods on a wide selection of 28 tabular data sets (14 easy and 14 hard-to-classify) against traditional deep and machine learning. Our data-centric benchmarking demonstrates when traditional ML is preferred over deep learning and vice versa because no best learning method exists for all tabular data sets. Combining between-sample and between-feature attentions conquers the invincible traditional ML on tabular data sets by a significant margin but fails on high dimensional data, where contrastive learning takes a robust lead. While a hybrid attention-contrastive learning strategy mostly wins on hard-to-classify data sets, traditional methods are frequently superior on easy-to-classify data sets with presumably simpler decision boundaries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmarking paper with statistical analyses of attention and contrastive learning performances on a diverse selection of tabular data sets against traditional deep and machine learning baselines to facilitate further advances in this field.

We study the ability of LLMs to generate feedback for scientific papers and develop MARG, a feedback generation approach using multiple LLM instances that engage in internal discussion. By distributing paper text across agents, MARG can consume the full text of papers beyond the input length limitations of the base LLM, and by specializing agents and incorporating sub-tasks tailored to different comment types (experiments, clarity, impact) it improves the helpfulness and specificity of feedback. In a user study, baseline methods using GPT-4 were rated as producing generic or very generic comments more than half the time, and only 1.7 comments per paper were rated as good overall in the best baseline. Our system substantially improves the ability of GPT-4 to generate specific and helpful feedback, reducing the rate of generic comments from 60% to 29% and generating 3.7 good comments per paper (a 2.2x improvement).

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) has been praised by researchers for its ability to capture intricate shapes and structures within data. TDA is considered robust in handling noisy and high-dimensional datasets, and its interpretability is believed to promote an intuitive understanding of model behavior. However, claims regarding the power and usefulness of TDA have only been partially tested in application domains where TDA-based models are compared to other graph machine learning approaches, such as graph neural networks. We meticulously test claims on TDA through a comprehensive set of experiments and validate their merits. Our results affirm TDA's robustness against outliers and its interpretability, aligning with proponents' arguments. However, we find that TDA does not significantly enhance the predictive power of existing methods in our specific experiments, while incurring significant computational costs. We investigate phenomena related to graph characteristics, such as small diameters and high clustering coefficients, to mitigate the computational expenses of TDA computations. Our results offer valuable perspectives on integrating TDA into graph machine learning tasks.

The Boltzmann distribution of a protein provides a roadmap to all of its functional states. Normalizing flows are a promising tool for modeling this distribution, but current methods are intractable for typical pharmacological targets; they become computationally intractable due to the size of the system, heterogeneity of intramolecular potential energy, and long-range interactions. To remedy these issues, we present a novel flow architecture that utilizes split channels and gated attention to efficiently learn the conformational distribution of proteins defined by internal coordinates. We show that by utilizing a 2-Wasserstein loss, one can smooth the transition from maximum likelihood training to energy-based training, enabling the training of Boltzmann Generators for macromolecules. We evaluate our model and training strategy on villin headpiece HP35(nle-nle), a 35-residue subdomain, and protein G, a 56-residue protein. We demonstrate that standard architectures and training strategies, such as maximum likelihood alone, fail while our novel architecture and multi-stage training strategy are able to model the conformational distributions of protein G and HP35. The structural ensemble of a protein determines its functions. The probabilities of the ground and metastable states of a protein at equilibrium for a given temperature determine the interactions of the protein with other proteins, effectors, and drugs, which are keys for pharmaceutical development. However, enumeration of the equilibrium conformations and their probabilities is infeasible. Since complete knowledge is inaccessible, we must adopt a sampling approach. Conventional approaches toward sampling the equilibrium ensemble rely on Markov-chain Monte Carlo or molecular dynamics (MD). These approaches explore the local energy landscape adjacent a starting point; however, they are limited by their inability to penetrate high energy barriers. In addition, MD simulations are expensive and scale poorly with system size.

We propose a methodology, based on machine learning and optimization, for selecting a solver configuration for a given instance. First, we employ a set of solved instances and configurations in order to learn a performance function of the solver. Secondly, we formulate a mixed-integer nonlinear program where the objective/constraints explicitly encode the learnt information, and which we solve, upon the arrival of an unknown instance, to find the best solver configuration for that instance, based on the performance function. The main novelty of our approach lies in the fact that the configuration set search problem is formulated as a mathematical program, which allows us to a) enforce hard dependence and compatibility constraints on the configurations, and b) solve it efficiently with off-the-shelf optimization tools.

Automatically understanding funny moments (i.e., the moments that make people laugh) when watching comedy is challenging, as they relate to various features, such as body language, dialogues and culture. In this paper, we propose FunnyNet-W, a model that relies on cross- and self-attention for visual, audio and text data to predict funny moments in videos. Unlike most methods that rely on ground truth data in the form of subtitles, in this work we exploit modalities that come naturally with videos: (a) video frames as they contain visual information indispensable for scene understanding, (b) audio as it contains higher-level cues associated with funny moments, such as intonation, pitch and pauses and (c) text automatically extracted with a speech-to-text model as it can provide rich information when processed by a Large Language Model. To acquire labels for training, we propose an unsupervised approach that spots and labels funny audio moments. We provide experiments on five datasets: the sitcoms TBBT, MHD, MUStARD, Friends, and the TED talk UR-Funny. Extensive experiments and analysis show that FunnyNet-W successfully exploits visual, auditory and textual cues to identify funny moments, while our findings reveal FunnyNet-W's ability to predict funny moments in the wild. FunnyNet-W sets the new state of the art for funny moment detection with multimodal cues on all datasets with and without using ground truth information.

In this manuscript, we present various proposed methods estimate the prevalence of disease, a critical prerequisite for the adequate interpretation of screening tests. To address the limitations of these approaches, which revolve primarily around their a posteriori nature, we introduce a novel method to estimate the pretest probability of disease, a priori, utilizing the Logit function from the logistic regression model. This approach is a modification of McGee's heuristic, originally designed for estimating the posttest probability of disease. In a patient presenting with $n_\theta$ signs or symptoms, the minimal bound of the pretest probability, $\phi$, can be approximated by: $\phi \approx \frac{1}{5}{ln\left[\displaystyle\prod_{\theta=1}^{i}\kappa_\theta\right]}$ where $ln$ is the natural logarithm, and $\kappa_\theta$ is the likelihood ratio associated with the sign or symptom in question.