The explosive growth in fake news and its erosion to democracy, justice, and public trust has increased the demand for fake news analysis, detection and intervention. This survey comprehensively and systematically reviews fake news research. The survey identifies and specifies fundamental theories across various disciplines, e.g., psychology and social science, to facilitate and enhance the interdisciplinary research of fake news. Current fake news research is reviewed, summarized and evaluated. These studies focus on fake news from four perspective: (1) the false knowledge it carries, (2) its writing style, (3) its propagation patterns, and (4) the credibility of its creators and spreaders. We characterize each perspective with various analyzable and utilizable information provided by news and its spreaders, various strategies and frameworks that are adaptable, and techniques that are applicable. By reviewing the characteristics of fake news and open issues in fake news studies, we highlight some potential research tasks at the end of this survey.

Production forecasting is a key step to design the future development of a reservoir. A classical way to generate such forecasts consists in simulating future production for numerical models representative of the reservoir. However, identifying such models can be very challenging as they need to be constrained to all available data. In particular, they should reproduce past production data, which requires to solve a complex non-linear inverse problem. In this paper, we thus propose to investigate the potential of machine learning algorithms to predict the future production of a reservoir based on past production data without model calibration. We focus more specifically on robust online aggregation, a deterministic approach that provides a robust framework to make forecasts on a regular basis. This method does not rely on any specific assumption or need for stochastic modeling. Forecasts are first simulated for a set of base reservoir models representing the prior uncertainty, and then combined to predict production at the next time step. The weight associated to each forecast is related to its past performance. Three different algorithms are considered for weight computations: the exponentially weighted average algorithm, ridge regression and the Lasso regression. They are applied on a synthetic reservoir case study, the Brugge case, for sequential predictions. To estimate the potential of development scenarios, production forecasts are needed on long periods of time without intermediary data acquisition. An extension of the deterministic aggregation approach is thus proposed in this paper to provide such multi-step-ahead forecasts.

We leverage a streaming architecture based on ELK, Spark and Hadoop in order to collect, store, and analyse database connection logs in near real-time. The proposed system investigates outliers using unsupervised learning; widely adopted clustering and classification algorithms for log data, highlighting the subtle variances in each model by visualisation of outliers. Arriving at a novel solution to evaluate untagged, unfiltered connection logs, we propose an approach that can be extrapolated to a generalised system of analysing connection logs across a large infrastructure comprising thousands of individual nodes and generating hundreds of lines in logs per second. I. INTRODUCTION Anomaly detection has provided a classic problem statement across multifarious use-cases ranging from scientific observations to financial transactions. We define an anomaly as a single observation or a set thereof, that fails to conform to a group of properties exhibited by larger collections of such observations.

Likelihood-free inference is concerned with the estimation of the parameters of a non-differentiable stochastic simulator that best reproduce real observations. In the absence of a likelihood function, most of the existing inference methods optimize the simulator parameters through a handcrafted iterative procedure that tries to make the simulated data more similar to the observations. In this work, we explore whether meta-learning can be used in the likelihood-free context, for learning automatically from data an iterative optimization procedure that would solve likelihood-free inference problems. We design a recurrent inference machine that learns a sequence of parameter updates leading to good parameter estimates, without ever specifying some explicit notion of divergence between the simulated data and the real data distributions. We demonstrate our approach on toy simulators, showing promising results both in terms of performance and robustness.

In the era of deep learning, understanding over-fitting phenomenon becomes increasingly important. It is observed that carefully designed deep neural networks achieve small testing error even when the training error is close to zero. One possible explanation is that for many modern machine learning algorithms, over-fitting can greatly reduce the estimation bias, while not increasing the estimation variance too much. To illustrate the above idea, we prove that the proposed interpolated nearest neighbor algorithm achieves the minimax optimal rate in both regression and classification regimes, and observe that they are empirically better than the traditional $k$ nearest neighbor method in some cases.

Increasing the mini-batch size for stochastic gradient descent offers significant opportunities to reduce wall-clock training time, but there are a variety of theoretical and systems challenges that impede the widespread success of this technique. We investigate these issues, with an emphasis on time to convergence and total computational cost, through an extensive empirical analysis of network training across several architectures and problem domains, including image classification, image segmentation, and language modeling. Although it is common practice to increase the batch size in order to fully exploit available computational resources, we find a substantially more nuanced picture. Our main finding is that across a wide range of network architectures and problem domains, increasing the batch size beyond a certain point yields no decrease in wall-clock time to convergence for \emph{either} train or test loss. This batch size is usually substantially below the capacity of current systems. We show that popular training strategies for large batch size optimization begin to fail before we can populate all available compute resources, and we show that the point at which these methods break down depends more on attributes like model architecture and data complexity than it does directly on the size of the dataset.

Dementia and especially Alzheimer's disease (AD) are the most common causes of cognitive decline in elderly people. A spread of the above mentioned mental health problems in aging societies is causing a significant medical and economic burden in many countries around the world. According to a recent World Health Organization (WHO) report, it is approximated that currently, worldwide, about 47 million people live with a dementia spectrum of neurocognitive disorders. This number is expected to triple by 2050, which calls for possible application of AI-based technologies to support an early screening for preventive interventions and a subsequent mental wellbeing monitoring as well as maintenance with so-called digital-pharma or beyond a pill therapeutical approaches. This paper discusses our attempt and preliminary results of brainwave (EEG) techniques to develop digital biomarkers for dementia progress detection and monitoring. We present an information geometry-based classification approach for automatic EEG-derived event related responses (ERPs) discrimination of low versus high task-load auditory or tactile stimuli recognition, of which amplitude and latency variabilities are similar to those in dementia. The discussed approach is a step forward to develop AI, and especially machine learning (ML) approaches, for the subsequent application to mild-cognitive impairment (MCI) and AD diagnostics.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can learn effective features, though have been shown to suffer from a performance drop when the distribution of the data changes from training to test data. In this paper we analyze the internal representations of CNNs and observe that the representations of unseen data in each class, spread more (with higher variance) in the embedding space of the CNN compared to representations of the training data. More importantly, this difference is more extreme if the unseen data comes from a shifted distribution. Based on this observation, we objectively evaluate the degree of representation's variance in each class via eigenvalue decomposition on the within-class covariance of the internal representations of CNNs and observe the same behaviour. This can be problematic as larger variances might lead to mis-classification if the sample crosses the decision boundary of its class. We apply nearest neighbor classification on the representations and empirically show that the embeddings with the high variance actually have significantly worse KNN classification performances, although this could not be foreseen from their end-to-end classification results. To tackle this problem, we propose Deep Within-Class Covariance Analysis (DWCCA), a deep neural network layer that significantly reduces the within-class covariance of a DNN's representation, improving performance on unseen test data from a shifted distribution. We empirically evaluate DWCCA on two datasets for Acoustic Scene Classification (DCASE2016 and DCASE2017). We demonstrate that not only does DWCCA significantly improve the network's internal representation, it also increases the end-to-end classification accuracy, especially when the test set exhibits a distribution shift. By adding DWCCA to a VGG network, we achieve around 6 percentage points improvement in the case of a distribution mismatch.

A key task in Bayesian machine learning is sampling from distributions that are only specified up to a partition function (i.e., constant of proportionality). One prevalent example of this is sampling posteriors in parametric distributions, such as latent-variable generative models. However sampling (even very approximately) can be #P-hard. Classical results going back to Bakry and \'Emery (1985) on sampling focus on log-concave distributions, and show a natural Markov chain called Langevin diffusion mixes in polynomial time. However, all log-concave distributions are uni-modal, while in practice it is very common for the distribution of interest to have multiple modes. In this case, Langevin diffusion suffers from torpid mixing. We address this problem by combining Langevin diffusion with simulated tempering. The result is a Markov chain that mixes more rapidly by transitioning between different temperatures of the distribution. We analyze this Markov chain for a mixture of (strongly) log-concave distributions of the same shape. In particular, our technique applies to the canonical multi-modal distribution: a mixture of gaussians (of equal variance). Our algorithm efficiently samples from these distributions given only access to the gradient of the log-pdf. For the analysis, we introduce novel techniques for proving spectral gaps based on decomposing the action of the generator of the diffusion. Previous approaches rely on decomposing the state space as a partition of sets, while our approach can be thought of as decomposing the stationary measure as a mixture of distributions (a "soft partition"). Additional materials for the paper can be found at http://tiny.cc/glr17. The proof and results have been improved and generalized from the precursor at www.arxiv.org/abs/1710.02736.

Variational Bayesian neural networks combine the flexibility of deep learning with Bayesian uncertainty estimation. However, inference procedures for flexible variational posteriors are computationally expensive. A recently proposed method, noisy natural gradient, is a surprisingly simple method to fit expressive posteriors by adding weight noise to regular natural gradient updates. Noisy K-FAC is an instance of noisy natural gradient that fits a matrix-variate Gaussian posterior with minor changes to ordinary K-FAC. Nevertheless, a matrix-variate Gaussian posterior does not capture an accurate diagonal variance. In this work, we extend on noisy K-FAC to obtain a more flexible posterior distribution called eigenvalue corrected matrix-variate Gaussian. The proposed method computes the full diagonal re-scaling factor in Kronecker-factored eigenbasis. Empirically, our approach consistently outperforms existing algorithms (e.g., noisy K-FAC) on regression and classification tasks.