We present a framework that enables estimation of low-dimensional sub-resolution reservoir properties directly from seismic data, without requiring the solution of a high dimensional seismic inverse problem. Our workflow is based on the Bayesian evidential learning approach and exploits learning the direct relation between seismic data and reservoir properties to efficiently estimate reservoir properties. The theoretical framework we develop allows incorporation of non-linear statistical models for seismic estimation problems. Uncertainty quantification is performed with Approximate Bayesian Computation. With the help of a synthetic example of estimation of reservoir net-to-gross and average fluid saturations in sub-resolution thin-sand reservoir, several nuances are foregrounded regarding the applicability of unsupervised and supervised learning methods for seismic estimation problems. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by estimating posterior uncertainty of reservoir net-to-gross in sub-resolution thin-sand reservoir from an offshore delta dataset using 3D pre-stack seismic data.

The use of high-fidelity computational simulations promises to enable high-throughput hypothesis testing and optimisation of cancer therapies. However, increasing realism comes at the cost of increasing computational requirements. This article explores the use of surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms to optimise the targeted delivery of a therapeutic compound to cancerous tumour cells with the multicellular simulator, PhysiCell. The use of both Gaussian process models and multi-layer perceptron neural network surrogate models are investigated. We find that evolutionary algorithms are able to effectively explore the parameter space of biophysical properties within the agent-based simulations, minimising the resulting number of cancerous cells after a period of simulated treatment. Both model-assisted algorithms are found to outperform a standard evolutionary algorithm, demonstrating their ability to perform a more effective search within the very small evaluation budget. This represents the first use of efficient evolutionary algorithms within a high-throughput multicellular computing approach to find therapeutic design optima that maximise tumour regression.

We propose moment-based variational inference as a flexible framework for approximate smoothing of latent Markov jump processes. The main ingredient of our approach is to partition the set of all transitions of the latent process into classes. This allows to express the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the approximate and the exact posterior process in terms of a set of moment functions that arise naturally from the chosen partition. To illustrate possible choices of the partition, we consider special classes of jump processes that frequently occur in applications. We then extend the results to parameter inference and demonstrate the method on several examples.

This paper develops a new deep neural network optimized equalization framework for massive multiple input multiple output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems that employ low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) at the base station (BS). The use of low-resolution ADCs could largely reduce hardware complexity and circuit power consumption, however, makes the channel station information almost blind to the BS, hence causing difficulty in solving the equalization problem. In this paper, we consider a supervised learning architecture, where the goal is to learn a representative function that can predict the targets (constellation points) from the inputs (outputs of the low-resolution ADCs) based on the labeled training data (pilot signals). Specially, our main contributions are two-fold: 1) First, we design a new activation function, whose outputs are close to the constellation points when the parameters are finally optimized, to help us fully exploit the stochastic gradient descent method for the discrete optimization problem. 2) Second, an unsupervised loss is designed and then added to the optimization objective, aiming to enhance the representation ability (so-called generalization). The experimental results reveal that the proposed equalizer is robust to different channel taps (i.e., Gaussian, and Poisson), significantly outperforms the linearized MMSE equalizer, and shows potential for pilot saving.

We consider the multi-class classification problem when the training data and the out-of-sample test data may have different distributions and propose a method called BCOPS (balanced and conformal optimized prediction set) that constructs a prediction set C(x) which tries to optimize out-of-sample performance, aiming to include the correct class as often as possible, but also detecting outliers x, for which the method returns no prediction (corresponding to C(x) equal to the empty set). BCOPS combines supervised-learning algorithms with the method of conformal prediction to minimize a misclassification loss averaged over the out-of-sample distribution. The constructed prediction sets have a finite-sample coverage guarantee without distributional assumptions. We also develop a variant of BCOPS in the online setting where we optimize the misclassification loss averaged over a proxy of the out-of-sample distribution. We also describe new methods for the evaluation of out-of-sample performance with mismatched data. We prove asymptotic consistency and efficiency of the proposed methods under suitable assumptions and illustrate our methods on real data examples.

In this paper, we study adaptive online convex optimization, and aim to design a universal algorithm that achieves optimal regret bounds for multiple common types of loss functions. Existing universal methods are limited in the sense that they are optimal for only a subclass of loss functions. To address this limitation, we propose a novel online method, namely Maler, which enjoys the optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$, $O(d\log T)$ and $O(\log T)$ regret bounds for general convex, exponentially concave, and strongly convex functions respectively. The essential idea is to run multiple types of learning algorithms with different learning rates in parallel, and utilize a meta algorithm to track the best one on the fly. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Events in the world may be caused by other, unobserved events. We consider sequences of events in continuous time. Given a probability model of complete sequences, we propose particle smoothing---a form of sequential importance sampling---to impute the missing events in an incomplete sequence. We develop a trainable family of proposal distributions based on a type of bidirectional continuous-time LSTM: Bidirectionality lets the proposals condition on future observations, not just on the past as in particle filtering. Our method can sample an ensemble of possible complete sequences (particles), from which we form a single consensus prediction that has low Bayes risk under our chosen loss metric. We experiment in multiple synthetic and real domains, using different missingness mechanisms, and modeling the complete sequences in each domain with a neural Hawkes process (Mei & Eisner 2017). On held-out incomplete sequences, our method is effective at inferring the ground-truth unobserved events, with particle smoothing consistently improving upon particle filtering.

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently get stuck in local optima. This work addresses these weaknesses by combining recent improvements in the reuse of off-policy data and exploration in parameter space with deterministic behavioral policies. The resulting objective is amenable to standard neural network optimization strategies like stochastic gradient descent or stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Incorporation of previous rollouts via importance sampling greatly improves data-efficiency, whilst stochastic optimization schemes facilitate the escape from local optima. We evaluate the proposed approach on a series of continuous control benchmark tasks. The results show that the proposed algorithm is able to successfully and reliably learn solutions using fewer system interactions than standard policy gradient methods.

In this paper, we study the sum rate maximization for successive zero-forcing dirty-paper coding (SZFDPC) with per-antenna power constraint (PAPC). Although SZFDPC is a low-complexity alternative to the optimal dirty paper coding (DPC), efficient algorithms to compute its sum rate are still open problems especially under practical PAPC. The existing solution to the considered problem is computationally inefficient due to employing high-complexity interior-point method. In this study, we propose two new low-complexity approaches to this important problem. More specifically, the first algorithm achieves the optimal solution by transforming the original problem in the broadcast channel into an equivalent problem in the multiple access channel, then the resulting problem is solved by alternating optimization together with successive convex approximation. We also derive a suboptimal solution based on machine learning to which simple linear regressions are applicable. The approaches are analyzed and validated extensively to demonstrate their superiors over the existing approach.

In this work, we propose a novel meta-learning approach for few-shot classification, which learns transferable prior knowledge across tasks and directly produces network parameters for similar unseen tasks with training samples. Our approach, called LGM-Net, includes two key modules, namely, TargetNet and MetaNet. The TargetNet module is a neural network for solving a specific task and the MetaNet module aims at learning to generate functional weights for TargetNet by observing training samples. We also present an intertask normalization strategy for the training process to leverage common information shared across different tasks. The experimental results on Omniglot and miniImageNet datasets demonstrate that LGM-Net can effectively adapt to similar unseen tasks and achieve competitive performance, and the results on synthetic datasets show that transferable prior knowledge is learned by the MetaNet module via mapping training data to functional weights. LGM-Net enables fast learning and adaptation since no further tuning steps are required compared to other meta-learning approaches.