Calcium imaging is an important technique for monitoring the activity of thousands of neurons simultaneously. As calcium imaging datasets grow in size, automated detection of individual neurons is becoming important. Here we apply a supervised learning approach to this problem and show that convolutional networks can achieve near-human accuracy and superhuman speed. Accuracy is superior to the popular PCA/ICA method based on precision and recall relative to ground truth annotation by a human expert. These results suggest that convolutional networks are an efficient and flexible tool for the analysis of large-scale calcium imaging data.

Understanding how humans perceive the likability of high-dimensional objects'' such as faces is an important problem in both cognitive science and AI/ML. Existing models generally assume these preferences to be fixed. However, psychologists have found human assessment of facial attractiveness to be context-dependent. Specifically, the classical Beauty-in-Averageness (BiA) effect, whereby a blended face is judged to be more attractive than the originals, is significantly diminished or reversed when the original faces are recognizable, or when the blend is mixed-race/mixed-gender and the attractiveness judgment is preceded by a race/gender categorization, respectively. This "Ugliness-in-Averageness" (UiA) effect has previously been explained via a qualitative disfluency account, which posits that the negative affect associated with the difficult race or gender categorization is inadvertently interpreted by the brain as a dislike for the face itself.

Continuous-time Bayesian Networks (CTBNs) represent a compact yet powerful framework for understanding multivariate time-series data. Given complete data, parameters and structure can be estimated efficiently in closed-form. However, if data is incomplete, the latent states of the CTBN have to be estimated by laboriously simulating the intractable dynamics of the assumed CTBN. This is a problem, especially for structure learning tasks, where this has to be done for each element of a super-exponentially growing set of possible structures. In order to circumvent this notorious bottleneck, we develop a novel gradient-based approach to structure learning.

We propose Confusions over Time (CoT), a novel generative framework which facilitates a multi-granular analysis of the decision making process. The CoT not only models the confusions or error properties of individual decision makers and their evolution over time, but also allows us to obtain diagnostic insights into the collective decision making process in an interpretable manner. Interpretable insights are obtained by grouping similar decision makers (and items being judged) into clusters and representing each such cluster with an appropriate prototype and identifying the most important features characterizing the cluster via a subspace feature indicator vector. Experimentation with real world data on bail decisions, asthma treatments, and insurance policy approval decisions demonstrates that CoT can accurately model and explain the confusions of decision makers and their evolution over time. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

Markov jump processes are continuous-time stochastic processes widely used in statistical applications in the natural sciences, and more recently in machine learning. Inference for these models typically proceeds via Markov chain Monte Carlo, and can suffer from various computational challenges. In this work, we propose a novel collapsed variational inference algorithm to address this issue. Our work leverages ideas from discrete-time Markov chains, and exploits a connection between these two through an idea called uniformization. We apply our ideas to synthetic data as well as a dataset of check-in recordings, where we demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art MCMC methods.

Recent works have shown that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) achieves the fast convergence rates of full-batch gradient descent for over-parameterized models satisfying certain interpolation conditions. However, the step-size used in these works depends on unknown quantities and SGD's practical performance heavily relies on the choice of this step-size. We propose to use line-search techniques to automatically set the step-size when training models that can interpolate the data. In the interpolation setting, we prove that SGD with a stochastic variant of the classic Armijo line-search attains the deterministic convergence rates for both convex and strongly-convex functions. Under additional assumptions, SGD with Armijo line-search is shown to achieve fast convergence for non-convex functions.

We introduce a technique based on the singular vector canonical correlation analysis (SVCCA) for measuring the generality of neural network layers across a continuously-parametrized set of tasks. We illustrate this method by studying generality in neural networks trained to solve parametrized boundary value problems based on the Poisson partial differential equation. We find that the first hidden layers are general, and that they learn generalized coordinates over the input domain. Deeper layers are successively more specific. We find excellent agreement between the two methods, and note that our method is much faster, particularly for continuously-parametrized problems.

In recent years, structured matrix recovery problems have gained considerable attention for its real world applications, such as recommender systems and computer vision. Much of the existing work has focused on matrices with low-rank structure, and limited progress has been made on matrices with other types of structure. In this paper we present non-asymptotic analysis for estimation of generally structured matrices via the generalized Dantzig selector based on sub-Gaussian measurements. We show that the estimation error can always be succinctly expressed in terms of a few geometric measures such as Gaussian widths of suitable sets associated with the structure of the underlying true matrix. Further, we derive general bounds on these geometric measures for structures characterized by unitarily invariant norms, a large family covering most matrix norms of practical interest.

To infer a multilayer representation of high-dimensional count vectors, we propose the Poisson gamma belief network (PGBN) that factorizes each of its layers into the product of a connection weight matrix and the nonnegative real hidden units of the next layer. The PGBN's hidden layers are jointly trained with an upward-downward Gibbs sampler, each iteration of which upward samples Dirichlet distributed connection weight vectors starting from the first layer (bottom data layer), and then downward samples gamma distributed hidden units starting from the top hidden layer. The gamma-negative binomial process combined with a layer-wise training strategy allows the PGBN to infer the width of each layer given a fixed budget on the width of the first layer. The PGBN with a single hidden layer reduces to Poisson factor analysis. Example results on text analysis illustrate interesting relationships between the width of the first layer and the inferred network structure, and demonstrate that the PGBN, whose hidden units are imposed with correlated gamma priors, can add more layers to increase its performance gains over Poisson factor analysis, given the same limit on the width of the first layer.

In this paper, a bat-inspired high-resolution ultrasound 3D imaging system is presented. Live bats demonstrate that the properly used ultrasound can be used to perceive 3D space. With this in mind, a neural network referred to as a Bat-G network is implemented to reconstruct the 3D representation of target objects from the hyperbolic FM (HFM) chirped ultrasonic echoes. The Bat-G network consists of an encoder emulating a bat's central auditory pathway, and a 3D graphical visualization decoder. For the acquisition of the ultrasound data, a custom-made Bat-I sensor module is used.