Level assessment for foreign language students is necessary for putting them in the right level group, furthermore, interviewing students is a very time-consuming task, so we propose to automate the evaluation of speaker fluency level by implementing machine learning techniques. This work presents an audio processing system capable of classifying the level of fluency of non-native English speakers using five different machine learning models. As a first step, we have built our own dataset, which consists of labeled audio conversations in English between people ranging in different fluency domains/classes (low, intermediate, high). We segment the audio conversations into 5s non-overlapped audio clips to perform feature extraction on them. We start by extracting Mel cepstral coefficients from the audios, selecting 20 coefficients is an appropriate quantity for our data. We thereafter extracted zero-crossing rate, root mean square energy and spectral flux features, proving that this improves model performance. Out of a total of 1424 audio segments, with 70% training data and 30% test data, one of our trained models (support vector machine) achieved a classification accuracy of 94.39%, whereas the other four models passed an 89% classification accuracy threshold.

With recent progress in algorithms and the availability of massive amounts of computation power, application of machine learning techniques is becoming a hot topic in the oil and gas industry. One of the most promising aspects to apply machine learning to the upstream field is the rock facies classification in reservoir characterization, which is crucial in determining the net pay thickness of reservoirs, thus a definitive factor in drilling decision making process. For complex machine learning tasks like facies classification, feature engineering is often critical. This paper shows the inclusion of physics-motivated feature interaction in feature augmentation can further improve the capability of machine learning in rock facies classification. We demonstrate this approach with the SEG 2016 machine learning contest dataset and the top winning algorithms. The improvement is roboust and can be $\sim5\%$ better than current existing best F-1 score, where F-1 is an evaluation metric used to quantify average prediction accuracy.

Gradient boosting is a prediction method that iteratively combines weak learners to produce a complex and accurate model. From an optimization point of view, the learning procedure of gradient boosting mimics a gradient descent on a functional variable. This paper proposes to build upon the proximal point algorithm when the empirical risk to minimize is not differentiable. In addition, the novel boosting approach, called accelerated proximal boosting, benefits from Nesterov's acceleration in the same way as gradient boosting [Biau et al., 2018]. Advantages of leveraging proximal methods for boosting are illustrated by numerical experiments on simulated and real-world data. In particular, we exhibit a favorable comparison over gradient boosting regarding convergence rate and prediction accuracy.

Solving statistical learning problems often involves nonconvex optimization. Despite the empirical success of nonconvex statistical optimization methods, their global dynamics, especially convergence to the desirable local minima, remain less well understood in theory. In this paper, we propose a new analytic paradigm based on diffusion processes to characterize the global dynamics of nonconvex statistical optimization. As a concrete example, we study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for the tensor decomposition formulation of independent component analysis. In particular, we cast different phases of SGD into diffusion processes, i.e., solutions to stochastic differential equations. Initialized from an unstable equilibrium, the global dynamics of SGD transit over three consecutive phases: (i) an unstable Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process slowly departing from the initialization, (ii) the solution to an ordinary differential equation, which quickly evolves towards the desirable local minimum, and (iii) a stable Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process oscillating around the desirable local minimum. Our proof techniques are based upon Stroock and Varadhan's weak convergence of Markov chains to diffusion processes, which are of independent interest.

We propose a unified framework for building unsupervised representations of individual objects or entities (and their compositions), by associating with each object both a distributional as well as a point estimate (vector embedding). This is made possible by the use of optimal transport, which allows us to build these associated estimates while harnessing the underlying geometry of the ground space. Our method gives a novel perspective for building rich and powerful feature representations that simultaneously capture uncertainty (via a distributional estimate) and interpretability (with the optimal transport map). As a guiding example, we formulate unsupervised representations for text, in particular for sentence representation and entailment detection. Empirical results show strong advantages gained through the proposed framework. This approach can be used for any unsupervised or supervised problem (on text or other modalities) with a co-occurrence structure, such as any sequence data. The key tools underlying the framework are Wasserstein distances and Wasserstein barycenters (and, hence the title!).

In this paper, we propose to adopt the diffusion approximation tools to study the dynamics of Oja's iteration which is an online stochastic gradient descent method for the principal component analysis. Oja's iteration maintains a running estimate of the true principal component from streaming data and enjoys less temporal and spatial complexities. We show that the Oja's iteration for the top eigenvector generates a continuous-state discrete-time Markov chain over the unit sphere. We characterize the Oja's iteration in three phases using diffusion approximation and weak convergence tools. Our three-phase analysis further provides a finite-sample error bound for the running estimate, which matches the minimax information lower bound for principal component analysis under the additional assumption of bounded samples.

In this paper, we study a generic learning framework for building robust text classification model that achieves accuracy comparable to standard full models under test-time budget constraints. Our approach learns a selector to identify words that are relevant to the prediction tasks and only passes these words to the classifier for processing. The selector is trained jointly with the classifier and directly learns to incorporate with the classifier. We further propose a data aggregation scheme to improve the robustness of the classifier. Our learning framework is general and can be incorporated with any type of text classification model. On real-world data, we show that the proposed approach improves the performance of a given classifier and speeds up the model with a mere loss in accuracy performance.

Quantized deep neural networks (QDNNs) are attractive due to their much lower memory storage and faster inference speed than their regular full precision counterparts. To maintain the same performance level especially at low bit-widths, QDNNs must be retrained. Their training involves piecewise constant activation functions and discrete weights, hence mathematical challenges arise. We introduce the notion of coarse derivative and propose the blended coarse gradient descent (BCGD) algorithm, for training fully quantized neural networks. Coarse gradient is generally not a gradient of any function but an artificial ascent direction. The weight update of BCGD goes by coarse gradient correction of a weighted average of the full precision weights and their quantization (the so-called blending), which yields sufficient descent in the objective value and thus accelerates the training. Our experiments demonstrate that this simple blending technique is very effective for quantization at extremely low bit-width such as binarization. In full quantization of ResNet-18 for ImageNet classification task, BCGD gives 64.36% top-1 accuracy with binary weights across all layers and 4-bit adaptive activation. If the weights in the first and last layers are kept in full precision, this number increases to 65.46%. As theoretical justification, we provide the convergence analysis of coarse gradient descent for a two-layer neural network model with Gaussian input data, and prove that the expected coarse gradient correlates positively with the underlying true gradient.

In this work, we present novel methods to adapt visual QA models for community QA tasks of practical significance - automated question category classification and finding experts for question answering - on questions containing both text and image. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the multimodality challenge in CQA, and is an enabling step towards basic question-answering on image-based CQA. First, we analyze the differences between visual QA and community QA datasets, discussing the limitations of applying VQA models directly to CQA tasks, and then we propose novel augmentations to VQA-based models to best address those limitations. Our model, with the augmentations of an image-text combination method tailored for CQA and use of auxiliary tasks for learning better grounding features, significantly outperforms the text-only and VQA model baselines for both tasks on real-world CQA data from Yahoo! Chiebukuro, a Japanese counterpart of Yahoo! Answers.

Network embeddings, which learn low-dimensional representations for each vertex in a large-scale network, have received considerable attention in recent years. For a wide range of applications, vertices in a network are typically accompanied by rich textual information such as user profiles, paper abstracts, etc. We propose to incorporate semantic features into network embeddings by matching important words between text sequences for all pairs of vertices. We introduce a word-by-word alignment framework that measures the compatibility of embeddings between word pairs, and then adaptively accumulates these alignment features with a simple yet effective aggregation function. In experiments, we evaluate the proposed framework on three real-world benchmarks for downstream tasks, including link prediction and multi-label vertex classification. Results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art network embedding methods by a large margin.