A new gradient-based optimization approach by automatically scheduling the learning rate has been proposed recently, which is called Binary Forward Exploration (BFE). The Adaptive version of BFE has also been discussed thereafter. In this paper, the improved algorithms based on them will be investigated, in order to optimize the efficiency and robustness of the new methodology. This improved approach provides a new perspective to scheduling the update of learning rate and will be compared with the stochastic gradient descent, aka SGD algorithm with momentum or Nesterov momentum and the most successful adaptive learning rate algorithm e.g. Adam. The goal of this method does not aim to beat others but provide a different viewpoint to optimize the gradient descent process. This approach combines the advantages of the first-order and second-order optimizations in the aspects of speed and efficiency.

Clinical diagnosis of the eye is performed over multifarious data modalities including scalar clinical labels, vectorized biomarkers, two-dimensional fundus images, and three-dimensional Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) scans. Clinical practitioners use all available data modalities for diagnosing and treating eye diseases like Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) or Diabetic Macular Edema (DME). Enabling usage of machine learning algorithms within the ophthalmic medical domain requires research into the relationships and interactions between all relevant data over a treatment period. Existing datasets are limited in that they neither provide data nor consider the explicit relationship modeling between the data modalities. In this paper, we introduce the Ophthalmic Labels for Investigating Visual Eye Semantics (OLIVES) dataset that addresses the above limitation. This is the first OCT and near-IR fundus dataset that includes clinical labels, biomarker labels, disease labels, and time-series patient treatment information from associated clinical trials. The dataset consists of 1268 near-IR fundus images each with at least 49 OCT scans, and 16 biomarkers, along with 4 clinical labels and a disease diagnosis of DR or DME. In total, there are 96 eyes' data averaged over a period of at least two years with each eye treated for an average of 66 weeks and 7 injections. We benchmark the utility of OLIVES dataset for ophthalmic data as well as provide benchmarks and concrete research directions for core and emerging machine learning paradigms within medical image analysis.

With the rising participation of the common mass in social media, it is increasingly common now for policymakers/journalists to create online polls on social media to understand the political leanings of people in specific locations. The caveat here is that only influential people can make such an online polling and reach out at a mass scale. Further, in such cases, the distribution of voters is not controllable and may be, in fact, biased. On the other hand,if we can interpret the publicly available data over social media to probe the political inclination of users, we will be able to have controllable insights about the survey population, keep the cost of survey low and also collect publicly available data without involving the concerned persons. Hence we introduce a self-attentive semi-supervised framework for political inclination detection to further that objective. The advantage of our model is that it neither needs huge training data nor does it need to store social network parameters. Nevertheless, it achieves an accuracy of 93.7\% with no annotated data; further, with only a few annotated examples per class it achieves competitive performance. We found that the model is highly efficient even in resource-constrained settings, and insights drawn from its predictions match the manual survey outcomes when applied to diverse real-life scenarios.

In classification problems, a classifier is a function that mimics the relationship between the data vectors and their class labels. Support vector machine(SVM) is a popular classifier, which was proposed by Cortes and Vapnik [1] as a maximum margin classifier. The success of the SVM has encouraged further research into extensions to the more general multiclass cases, which has been an active topic of research interest [2-4]. Shilton et al.[5] proposed the conicsegmentation support vector machine (CS-SVM) by introducing the concept of target space into the problem formulation and showed that some other multiclassfication model are special cases of this framework. The standard CS-SVM is dealing with the situation where the exact values of the data points are known.

In previous work a novel Edge Lightweight Searchable Attribute-based encryption (ELSA) method was proposed to support Industry 4.0 and specifically Industrial Internet of Things applications. In this paper, we aim to improve ELSA by minimising the lookup table size and summarising the data records by integrating Machine Learning (ML) methods suitable for execution at the edge. This integration will eliminate records of unnecessary data by evaluating added value to further processing. Thus, resulting in the minimization of both the lookup table size, the cloud storage and the network traffic taking full advantage of the edge architecture benefits. We demonstrate our mini-ELSA expanded method on a well-known power plant dataset. Our results demonstrate a reduction of storage requirements by 21% while improving execution time by 1.27x.

Deep neural networks have become the gold-standard approach for the automated segmentation of 3D medical images. Their full acceptance by clinicians remains however hampered by the lack of intelligible uncertainty assessment of the provided results. Most approaches to quantify their uncertainty, such as the popular Monte Carlo dropout, restrict to some measure of uncertainty in prediction at the voxel level. In addition not to be clearly related to genuine medical uncertainty, this is not clinically satisfying as most objects of interest (e.g. brain lesions) are made of groups of voxels whose overall relevance may not simply reduce to the sum or mean of their individual uncertainties. In this work, we propose to go beyond voxel-wise assessment using an innovative Graph Neural Network approach, trained from the outputs of a Monte Carlo dropout model. This network allows the fusion of three estimators of voxel uncertainty: entropy, variance, and model's confidence; and can be applied to any lesion, regardless of its shape or size. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach for uncertainty estimate on a task of Multiple Sclerosis lesions segmentation.

We define a novel concept called extended word alignment in order to improve post-editing assistance efficiency. Based on extended word alignment, we further propose a novel task called refined word-level QE that outputs refined tags and word-level correspondences. Compared to original word-level QE, the new task is able to directly point out editing operations, thus improves efficiency. To extract extended word alignment, we adopt a supervised method based on mBERT. To solve refined word-level QE, we firstly predict original QE tags by training a regression model for sequence tagging based on mBERT and XLM-R. Then, we refine original word tags with extended word alignment. In addition, we extract source-gap correspondences, meanwhile, obtaining gap tags. Experiments on two language pairs show the feasibility of our method and give us inspirations for further improvement.

Multiclass probability estimation is the problem of estimating conditional probabilities of a data point belonging to a class given its covariate information. It has broad applications in statistical analysis and data science. Recently a class of weighted Support Vector Machines (wSVMs) has been developed to estimate class probabilities through ensemble learning for $K$-class problems (Wu, Zhang and Liu, 2010; Wang, Zhang and Wu, 2019), where $K$ is the number of classes. The estimators are robust and achieve high accuracy for probability estimation, but their learning is implemented through pairwise coupling, which demands polynomial time in $K$. In this paper, we propose two new learning schemes, the baseline learning and the One-vs-All (OVA) learning, to further improve wSVMs in terms of computational efficiency and estimation accuracy. In particular, the baseline learning has optimal computational complexity in the sense that it is linear in $K$. Though not being most efficient in computation, the OVA offers the best estimation accuracy among all the procedures under comparison. The resulting estimators are distribution-free and shown to be consistent. We further conduct extensive numerical experiments to demonstrate finite sample performance.

Leveraging quantum effects in metrology such as entanglement and coherence allows one to measure parameters with enhanced sensitivity. However, time-dependent noise can disrupt such Heisenberg-limited amplification. We propose a quantum-metrology method based on the quantum-signal-processing framework to overcome these realistic noise-induced limitations in practical quantum metrology. Our algorithm separates the gate parameter $\varphi$~(single-qubit Z phase) that is susceptible to time-dependent error from the target gate parameter $\theta$~(swap-angle between |10> and |01> states) that is largely free of time-dependent error. Our method achieves an accuracy of $10^{-4}$ radians in standard deviation for learning $\theta$ in superconducting-qubit experiments, outperforming existing alternative schemes by two orders of magnitude. We also demonstrate the increased robustness in learning time-dependent gate parameters through fast Fourier transformation and sequential phase difference. We show both theoretically and numerically that there is an interesting transition of the optimal metrology variance scaling as a function of circuit depth $d$ from the pre-asymptotic regime $d \ll 1/\theta$ to Heisenberg limit $d \to \infty$. Remarkably, in the pre-asymptotic regime our method's estimation variance on time-sensitive parameter $\varphi$ scales faster than the asymptotic Heisenberg limit as a function of depth, $\text{Var}(\hat{\varphi})\approx 1/d^4$. Our work is the first quantum-signal-processing algorithm that demonstrates practical application in laboratory quantum computers.

In recent years, decentralized learning has emerged as a powerful tool not only for large-scale machine learning, but also for preserving privacy. One of the key challenges in decentralized learning is that the data distribution held by each node is statistically heterogeneous. To address this challenge, the primal-dual algorithm called the Edge-Consensus Learning (ECL) was proposed and was experimentally shown to be robust to the heterogeneity of data distributions. However, the convergence rate of the ECL is provided only when the objective function is convex, and has not been shown in a standard machine learning setting where the objective function is non-convex. Furthermore, the intuitive reason why the ECL is robust to the heterogeneity of data distributions has not been investigated. In this work, we first investigate the relationship between the ECL and Gossip algorithm and show that the update formulas of the ECL can be regarded as correcting the local stochastic gradient in the Gossip algorithm. Then, we propose the Generalized ECL (G-ECL), which contains the ECL as a special case, and provide the convergence rates of the G-ECL in both (strongly) convex and non-convex settings, which do not depend on the heterogeneity of data distributions. Through synthetic experiments, we demonstrate that the numerical results of both the G-ECL and ECL coincide with the convergence rate of the G-ECL.