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### Feature extraction and similar image search with OpenCV for newbies

Image features For this task, first of all, we need to understand what is an Image Feature and how we can use it. Image feature is a simple image pattern, based on which we can describe what we see on the image. For example cat eye will be a feature on a image of a cat. The main role of features in computer vision(and not only) is to transform visual information into the vector space. Ok, but how to get this features from the image?

### Towards Exploiting Implicit Human Feedback for Improving RDF2vec Embeddings

RDF2vec is a technique for creating vector space embeddings from an RDF knowledge graph, i.e., representing each entity in the graph as a vector. It first creates sequences of nodes by performing random walks on the graph. In a second step, those sequences are processed by the word2vec algorithm for creating the actual embeddings. In this paper, we explore the use of external edge weights for guiding the random walks. As edge weights, transition probabilities between pages in Wikipedia are used as a proxy for the human feedback for the importance of an edge. We show that in some scenarios, RDF2vec utilizing those transition probabilities can outperform both RDF2vec based on random walks as well as the usage of graph internal edge weights.

### Locality Preserving Loss to Align Vector Spaces

We present a locality preserving loss (LPL)that improves the alignment between vector space representations (i.e., word or sentence embeddings) while separating (increasing distance between) uncorrelated representations as compared to the standard method that minimizes the mean squared error (MSE) only. The locality preserving loss optimizes the projection by maintaining the local neighborhood of embeddings that are found in the source, in the target domain as well. This reduces the overall size of the dataset required to the train model. We argue that vector space alignment (with MSE and LPL losses) acts as a regularizer in certain language-based classification tasks, leading to better accuracy than the base-line, especially when the size of the training set is small. We validate the effectiveness ofLPL on a cross-lingual word alignment task, a natural language inference task, and a multi-lingual inference task.

### Nonparametric Contextual Bandits in Metric Spaces with Unknown Metric

Suppose that there is a large set of arms, yet there is a simple but unknown structure amongst the arm reward functions, e.g. We present a novel algorithm which learns data-driven similarities amongst the arms, in order to implement adaptive partitioning of the context-arm space for more efficient learning. We provide regret bounds along with simulations that highlight the algorithm's dependence on the local geometry of the reward functions. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

### Bipartite Link Prediction based on Topological Features via 2-hop Path

A variety of real-world systems can be modeled as bipartite networks. One of the most powerful and simple link prediction methods is Linear-Graph Autoencoder(LGAE) which has promising performance on challenging tasks such as link prediction and node clustering. LGAE relies on simple linear model w.r.t. the adjacency matrix of the graph to learn vector space representations of nodes. In this paper, we consider the case of bipartite link predictions where node attributes are unavailable. When using LGAE, we propose to multiply the reconstructed adjacency matrix with a symmetrically normalized training adjacency matrix. As a result, 2-hop paths are formed which we use as the predicted adjacency matrix to evaluate the performance of our model. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world dataset show our approach consistently outperforms Graph Autoencoder and Linear Graph Autoencoder model in 10 out of 12 bipartite dataset and reaches competitive performances in 2 other bipartite dataset.

### Beyond Vector Spaces: Compact Data Representation as Differentiable Weighted Graphs

Learning useful representations is a key ingredient to the success of modern machine learning. Currently, representation learning mostly relies on embedding data into Euclidean space. However, recent work has shown that data in some domains is better modeled by non-euclidean metric spaces, and inappropriate geometry can result in inferior performance. In this paper, we aim to eliminate the inductive bias imposed by the embedding space geometry. Namely, we propose to map data into more general non-vector metric spaces: a weighted graph with a shortest path distance.

### Zooming for Efficient Model-Free Reinforcement Learning in Metric Spaces

Despite the wealth of research into provably efficient reinforcement learning algorithms, most works focus on tabular representation and thus struggle to handle exponentially or infinitely large state-action spaces. In this paper, we consider episodic reinforcement learning with a continuous state-action space which is assumed to be equipped with a natural metric that characterizes the proximity between different states and actions. We propose ZoomRL, an online algorithm that leverages ideas from continuous bandits to learn an adaptive discretization of the joint space by zooming in more promising and frequently visited regions while carefully balancing the exploitation-exploration trade-off. We show that ZoomRL achieves a worst-case regret $\tilde{O}(H^{\frac{5}{2}} K^{\frac{d+1}{d+2}})$ where $H$ is the planning horizon, $K$ is the number of episodes and $d$ is the covering dimension of the space with respect to the metric. Moreover, our algorithm enjoys improved metric-dependent guarantees that reflect the geometry of the underlying space. Finally, we show that our algorithm is robust to small misspecification errors.

### Distributional semantic modeling: a revised technique to train term/word vector space models applying the ontology-related approach

We design a new technique for the distributional semantic modeling with a neural network-based approach to learn distributed term representations (or term embeddings) - term vector space models as a result, inspired by the recent ontology-related approach (using different types of contextual knowledge such as syntactic knowledge, terminological knowledge, semantic knowledge, etc.) to the identification of terms (term extraction) and relations between them (relation extraction) called semantic pre-processing technology - SPT. Our method relies on automatic term extraction from the natural language texts and subsequent formation of the problem-oriented or application-oriented (also deeply annotated) text corpora where the fundamental entity is the term (includes non-compositional and compositional terms). This gives us an opportunity to changeover from distributed word representations (or word embeddings) to distributed term representations (or term embeddings). This transition will allow to generate more accurate semantic maps of different subject domains (also, of relations between input terms - it is useful to explore clusters and oppositions, or to test your hypotheses about them). The semantic map can be represented as a graph using Vec2graph - a Python library for visualizing word embeddings (term embeddings in our case) as dynamic and interactive graphs. The Vec2graph library coupled with term embeddings will not only improve accuracy in solving standard NLP tasks, but also update the conventional concept of automated ontology development. The main practical result of our work is the development kit (set of toolkits represented as web service APIs and web application), which provides all necessary routines for the basic linguistic pre-processing and the semantic pre-processing of the natural language texts in Ukrainian for future training of term vector space models.

### Optimizing Revenue while showing Relevant Assortments at Scale

Scalable real-time assortment optimization has become essential in e-commerce operations due to the need for personalization and the availability of a large variety of items. While this can be done when there are simplistic assortment choices to be made, imposing constraints on the collection of feasible assortments gives more flexibility to incorporate insights of store-managers and historically well-performing assortments. We design fast and flexible algorithms based on variations of binary search that find the revenue of the (approximately) optimal assortment. In particular, we revisit the problem of large-scale assortment optimization under the multinomial logit choice model without any assumptions on the structure of the feasible assortments. We speed up the comparisons steps using novel vector space embeddings, based on advances in the fields of information retrieval and machine learning. For an arbitrary collection of assortments, our algorithms can find a solution in time that is sub-linear in the number of assortments and for the simpler case of cardinality constraints - linear in the number of items (existing methods are quadratic or worse). Empirical validations using the Billion Prices dataset and several retail transaction datasets show that our algorithms are competitive even when the number of items is $\sim 10^5$ ($100$x larger instances than previously studied).

### Semiparametric Nonlinear Bipartite Graph Representation Learning with Provable Guarantees

Graph representation learning is a ubiquitous task in machine learning where the goal is to embed each vertex into a low-dimensional vector space. We consider the bipartite graph and formalize its representation learning problem as a statistical estimation problem of parameters in a semiparametric exponential family distribution. The bipartite graph is assumed to be generated by a semiparametric exponential family distribution, whose parametric component is given by the proximity of outputs of two one-layer neural networks, while nonparametric (nuisance) component is the base measure. Neural networks take high-dimensional features as inputs and output embedding vectors. In this setting, the representation learning problem is equivalent to recovering the weight matrices. The main challenges of estimation arise from the nonlinearity of activation functions and the nonparametric nuisance component of the distribution. To overcome these challenges, we propose a pseudo-likelihood objective based on the rank-order decomposition technique and focus on its local geometry. We show that the proposed objective is strongly convex in a neighborhood around the ground truth, so that a gradient descent-based method achieves linear convergence rate. Moreover, we prove that the sample complexity of the problem is linear in dimensions (up to logarithmic factors), which is consistent with parametric Gaussian models. However, our estimator is robust to any model misspecification within the exponential family, which is validated in extensive experiments.