Non-rigid shape comparison based on manifold embeddingusing Generalized Multidimensional Scaling(GMDS) has attracted much attention for its highaccuracy. However, this method requires that shape surfaceis not elastic. In other words, it is sensitive totopological transformations such as stretching and compressing.To tackle this problem, we propose a new approachthat constructs a high-dimensional space to embedthe manifolds of shapes based on sparse representation,which is able to completely withstand rigid transformationsand considerably tolerate topological transformations.Experiments on TOSCA shapes validate theproposed approach.

Inferring the causal direction between two variables is a nontrivial problem in the subject of causal discovery from observed data. A method for errors-in-variables models where both the cause variable and the effect variable are observed with measurement errors is presented in this paper.

In causal inference, all methods of model learning rely on testable implications, namely, properties of the joint distribution that are dictated by the model structure. These constraints, if not satisfied in the data, allow us to reject or modify the model. Most common methods of testing a linear structural equation model (SEM) rely on the likelihood ratio or chi-square test which simultaneously tests all of the restrictions implied by the model. Local constraints, on the other hand, offer increased power (Bollen and Pearl, 2013; McDonald, 2002) and, in the case of failure, provide the modeler with insight for revising the model specification. One strategy of uncovering local constraints in linear SEMs is to search for overidentified path coefficients. While these overidentifying constraints are well known, no method has been given for systematically discovering them. In this paper, we extend the half-trek criterion of (Foygel et al., 2012) to identify a larger set of structural coefficients and use it to systematically discover overidentifying constraints. Still open is the question of whether our algorithm is complete.

The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a complex problem in sports scheduling whose solution is a schedule of home and away games meeting specific feasibility requirements, while minimizing the total distance traveled by all the teams. A recently-developed "hybrid" algorithm, combining local search and integer programming, has resulted in best-known solutions for many TTP instances. In this paper, we tackle the TTP from a graph-theoretic perspective, by generating a new "canonical" schedule in which each team's three-game road trips match up with the underlying graph's minimum-weight P_3-packing. By using this new schedule as the initial input for the hybrid algorithm, we develop tournament schedules for five benchmark TTP instances that beat all previously-known solutions.

As potential-based reward shaping functions (heuristic signals conflicts may exist between objectives, there is in general guiding exploration) (Brys et al. 2014a). We prove that this a need to identify (a set of) tradeoff solutions. The set modification preserves the total order, and thus also optimality, of optimal, i.e. non-dominated, incomparable solutions is of policies, mainly relying on the results by Ng, Harada, called the Pareto-front. We identify multi-objective problems and Russell (1999). This insight - that any MDP can be with correlated objectives (CMOP) as a specific subclass framed as a CMOMDP - significantly increases the importance of multi-objective problems, defined to contain those of this problem class, as well as techniques developed MOPs whose Pareto-front is so limited that one can barely for it, as these could be used to solve regular single-objective speak of tradeoffs (Brys et al. 2014b). By consequence, MDPs faster and better, provided several meaningful shapings the system designer does not care about which of the very can be devised.

The conventional statistical machine translation (SMT) models, such as phrase-based models (Koehn et al. 2007), formal syntax-based models (Chiang 2007; Xiong, Liu, and Aiming at retaining the semantic meaning during the Lin 2006) and linguistically syntax-based models (Liu, Liu, translation process, we propose a Recursive Neural Network and Lin 2006; Huang, Knight, and Joshi 2006; Galley et al. (RNN) based translation model. Like the previous SMT 2006; Zhang et al. 2008), perform the decoding process and models, the RNN-based model induces the translation rules generate the translation result by compositing a set of translation from the bitexts. Unlike them, the RNN-based model learns rules which are associated with high probabilities. The how to represent each lexical translation rule with two compact probabilities of the translation rules (e.g. the phrasal translation semantic vectors, and learns how to perform decoding probabilities and the lexical weights in phrase-based using the merging type (swap or monotone) dependent recursive and formal syntax-based models) are all computed based on neural networks that attempt to find the best translation the cooccurrence statistics of the rule's source-and targetsides candidate having the minimal semantic gap with the source in the bilingual corpus.

Given a CNF formula and a weight for each assignment of values tovariables, two natural problems are weighted model counting anddistribution-aware sampling of satisfying assignments. Both problems have a wide variety of important applications. Due to the inherentcomplexity of the exact versions of the problems, interest has focusedon solving them approximately. Prior work in this area scaled only tosmall problems in practice, or failed to provide strong theoreticalguarantees, or employed a computationally-expensive most-probable-explanation ({\MPE}) queries that assumes prior knowledge of afactored representation of the weight distribution. We identify a novel parameter,\emph{tilt}, which is the ratio of the maximum weight of satisfying assignment to minimum weightof satisfying assignment and present anovel approach that works with a black-box oracle for weights ofassignments and requires only an {\NP}-oracle (in practice, a {\SAT}-solver) to solve both thecounting and sampling problems when the tilt is small. Our approach provides strong theoretical guarantees, and scales toproblems involving several thousand variables. We also show that theassumption of small tilt can be significantly relaxed while improving computational efficiency if a factored representation of the weights is known.

As a promising alternative to using standard (often intractable) planning techniques with Bellman equations, we propose an interesting method of optimizing POMDP controllers by probabilistic inference in a novel equivalent single-DBN generative model. Our inference approach to POMDP planning allows for (1) for application of various techniques for probabilistic inference in single graphical models, and (2) for exploiting the factored structure in a controller architecture to take advantage of natural structural constrains of planning problems and represent them compactly. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) we designed a novel single-DBN generative model that ensures that the task of probabilistic inference is equivalent to the original problem of optimizing POMDP controllers, and (2) we developed several inference approaches to approximate the value of the policy when exact inference methods are not tractable to solve large-size problems with complex graphical models. The proposed approaches to policy optimization by probabilistic inference are evaluated on several POMDP benchmark problems and the performance of the implemented approximation algorithms is compared.

Qualitative Possibilistic Mixed-Observable MDPs (pi-MOMDPs), generalizing pi-MDPs and pi-POMDPs, are well-suited models to planning under uncertainty with mixed-observability when transition, observation and reward functions are not precisely known and can be qualitatively described. Functions defining the model as well as intermediate calculations are valued in a finite possibilistic scale L, which induces a finite belief state space under partial observability contrary to its probabilistic counterpart. In this paper, we propose the first study of factored pi-MOMDP models in order to solve large structured planning problems under qualitative uncertainty, or considered as qualitative approximations of probabilistic problems. Building upon the SPUDD algorithm for solving factored (probabilistic) MDPs, we conceived a symbolic algorithm named PPUDD for solving factored pi-MOMDPs. Whereas SPUDD's decision diagrams' leaves may be as large as the state space since their values are real numbers aggregated through additions and multiplications, PPUDD's ones always remain in the finite scale L via min and max operations only. Our experiments show that PPUDD's computation time is much lower than SPUDD, Symbolic-HSVI and APPL for possibilistic and probabilistic versions of the same benchmarks under either total or mixed observability, while still providing high-quality policies.

Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are a powerful generative modeling technique, based on a complex graphical model of hidden (latent) variables. Conditional RBMs (CRBMs) are an extension of RBMs tailored to modeling temporal data. A drawback of CRBMs is their consideration of linear temporal dependencies, which limits their capability to capture complex temporal structure. They also require many variables to model long temporal dependencies, a fact that might provoke overfitting proneness. To resolve these issues, in this paper we propose the echo-state CRBM (ES-CRBM): our model uses an echo-state network reservoir in the context of CRBMs to efficiently capture long and complex temporal dynamics, with much fewer trainable parameters compared to conventional CRBMs. In addition, we introduce an (implicit) mixture of ES-CRBM experts (im-ES-CRBM) to enhance even further the capabilities of our ES-CRBM model. The introduced im-ES-CRBM allows for better modeling temporal observations which might comprise a number of latent or observable subpatterns that alternate in a dynamic fashion. It also allows for performing sequence segmentation using our framework. We apply our methods to sequential data modeling and classification experiments using public datasets. As we show, our approach outperforms both existing RBM-based approaches as well as related state-of-the-art methods, such as conditional random fields.