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Diffusion Maps for Textual Network Embedding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Textual network embedding leverages rich text information associated with the network to learn low-dimensional vectorial representations of vertices. Rather than using typical natural language processing (NLP) approaches, recent research exploits the relationship of texts on the same edge to graphically embed text. However, these models neglect to measure the complete level of connectivity between any two texts in the graph. We present diffusion maps for textual network embedding (DMTE), integrating global structural information of the graph to capture the semantic relatedness between texts, with a diffusion-convolution operation applied on the text inputs. In addition, a new objective function is designed to efficiently preserve the high-order proximity using the graph diffusion. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the vertex-classification and link-prediction tasks.


Variational Inference with Tail-adaptive f-Divergence

Neural Information Processing Systems

Variational inference with α-divergences has been widely used in modern probabilistic machine learning. Compared to Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, a major advantage of using α-divergences (with positive α values) is their mass-covering property. However, estimating and optimizing α-divergences require to use importance sampling, which could have extremely large or infinite variances due to heavy tails of importance weights. In this paper, we propose a new class of tail-adaptive f-divergences that adaptively change the convex function f with the tail of the importance weights, in a way that theoretically guarantee finite moments, while simultaneously achieving mass-covering properties. We test our methods on Bayesian neural networks, as well as deep reinforcement learning in which our method is applied to improve a recent soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm (Haarnoja et al., 2018). Our results show that our approach yields significant advantages compared with existing methods based on classical KL and α-divergences.


Learning filter widths of spectral decompositions with wavelets

Neural Information Processing Systems

Time series classification using deep neural networks, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), operate on the spectral decomposition of the time series computed using a preprocessing step. This step can include a large number of hyperparameters, such as window length, filter widths, and filter shapes, each with a range of possible values that must be chosen using time and data intensive cross-validation procedures. We propose the wavelet deconvolution (WD) layer as an efficient alternative to this preprocessing step that eliminates a significant number of hyperparameters. The WD layer uses wavelet functions with adjustable scale parameters to learn the spectral decomposition directly from the signal. Using backpropagation, we show the scale parameters can be optimized with gradient descent. Furthermore, the WD layer adds interpretability to the learned time series classifier by exploiting the properties of the wavelet transform.


Global Gated Mixture of Second-order Pooling for Improving Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

In most of existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for classification, global average (first-order) pooling (GAP) has become a standard module to summarize activations of the last convolution layer as final representation for prediction. Recent researches show integration of higher-order pooling (HOP) methods clearly improves performance of deep CNNs. However, both GAP and existing HOP methods assume unimodal distributions, which cannot fully capture statistics of convolutional activations, limiting representation ability of deep CNNs, especially for samples with complex contents. To overcome the above limitation, this paper proposes a global Gated Mixture of Second-order Pooling (GM-SOP) method to further improve representation ability of deep CNNs. To this end, we introduce a sparsity-constrained gating mechanism and propose a novel parametric SOP as component of mixture model.


Recurrently Controlled Recurrent Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) such as long short-term memory and gated recurrent units are pivotal building blocks across a broad spectrum of sequence modeling problems. This paper proposes a recurrently controlled recurrent network (RCRN) for expressive and powerful sequence encoding. More concretely, the key idea behind our approach is to learn the recurrent gating functions using recurrent networks. Our architecture is split into two components - a controller cell and a listener cell whereby the recurrent controller actively influences the compositionality of the listener cell. We conduct extensive experiments on a myriad of tasks in the NLP domain such as sentiment analysis (SST, IMDb, Amazon reviews, etc.), question classification (TREC), entailment classification (SNLI, SciTail), answer selection (WikiQA, TrecQA) and reading comprehension (NarrativeQA). Across all 26 datasets, our results demonstrate that RCRN not only consistently outperforms BiLSTMs but also stacked BiLSTMs, suggesting that our controller architecture might be a suitable replacement for the widely adopted stacked architecture. Additionally, RCRN achieves state-of-the-art results on several well-established datasets.


Which Neural Net Architectures Give Rise to Exploding and Vanishing Gradients?

Neural Information Processing Systems

We give a rigorous analysis of the statistical behavior of gradients in a randomly initialized fully connected network N with ReLU activations. Our results show that the empirical variance of the squares of the entries in the input-output Jacobian of N is exponential in a simple architecture-dependent constant beta, given by the sum of the reciprocals of the hidden layer widths. When beta is large, the gradients computed by N at initialization vary wildly. Our approach complements the mean field theory analysis of random networks. From this point of view, we rigorously compute finite width corrections to the statistics of gradients at the edge of chaos.


Graphene-based sensor to improve robot touch

Robohub

Multiscale-structured miniaturized 3D force sensors CC BY 4.0 Robots are becoming increasingly capable in vision and movement, yet touch remains one of their major weaknesses. Now, researchers have developed a miniature tactile sensor that could give robots something much closer to a human sense of touch. The technology, developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, is based on liquid metal composites and graphene - a two-dimensional form of carbon. The'skin' allows robots to detect not just how hard they are pressing on an object, but also the direction of applied forces, whether an object is slipping, and even how rough a surface is, at a scale small enough to rival the spatial resolution of human fingertips. Their results are reported in the journal .

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  Industry: Health & Medicine (0.31)

Is Antarctica's Doomsday Glacier about to COLLAPSE? Shocking study predicts Thwaites could shed 200 gigatonnes of ice per year by 2067 - with devastating consequences

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Timothee Chalamet, Oscars laughing stock: All the brutal digs aimed at star after he missed out on Best Actor and'looked like he wanted to cry' A-list stars ditch formal Oscars red carpet dresses for sexy party looks - with Jeff Goldblum's wife Emilie Livingston, Heidi Klum, Amelia Gray Hamlin and Kate Hudson turning up the heat at Vanity Fair bash Teyana Taylor erupts backstage at Oscars after being'shoved' Chilling new details of dismembered Emily Pike's final hours after she was snatched in Arizona desert and man detectives now believe murdered her Dark truth about secret new filler treatment that uses tissue from DEAD PEOPLE... as doctors issue urgent warning Awful Timothee Chalamet's ego is bigger than Kylie's inflated butt... but it's so clear what's really going on here. Israel blows up Ayatollah Khamenei's personal jet amid claims his injured heir Mojtaba'has been flown to Moscow for treatment' Kate lets Diana take the spotlight: Princess skips Mother's Day post after emotional cancer message and Photoshop furore Baseball fans fume after'terrible' umpire error ends USA's controversial showdown with Dominican Republic in WBC semifinal How Oscars 2026 proved Hollywood has overdosed on Ozempic: Leading doctors name stars now at'extreme' risk... and reveal terrifying new side effects Trump warns of'very bad future' for Nato if his call for warships to police Strait of Hormuz is refused - hinting he could punish Ukraine Kim Kardashian struggles to WALK in skintight golden gown and towering'stripper heels' as she attends the Vanity Fair Oscars party Oscars presenter Kumail Nanjiani blasted for horrific Holocaust joke: 'Do not invite him back' Real reason Sean Penn skipped Oscars 2026... as disappointed fans blast his boycott'It's like he was possessed': Terrifying moment Alexander brother turned into a'monster' and raped me... and the four chilling words he said after horror attack - alleged victim claims Dubai'arrests foreign survivors of Iranian drone strike after they sent images of explosion aftermath to loved ones to prove they were safe' Is Antarctica's Doomsday Glacier about to COLLAPSE? Antarctica's Doomsday Glacier could'snowball' towards collapse, as a study shows the ice is melting faster than expected. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh predict that the glacier - whose official name is Thwaites - could shed 200 gigatonnes of ice every single year by 2067. That is more than the current ice loss of the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet, which has been losing 150 gigatonnes of ice per year for the last two decades.


Support Recovery for Orthogonal Matching Pursuit: Upper and Lower bounds

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper studies the problem of sparse regression where the goal is to learn a sparse vector that best optimizes a given objective function. Under the assumption that the objective function satisfies restricted strong convexity (RSC), we analyze orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), a greedy algorithm that is used heavily in applications, and obtain support recovery result as well as a tight generalization error bound for OMP. Furthermore, we obtain lower bounds for OMP, showing that both our results on support recovery and generalization error are tight up to logarithmic factors. To the best of our knowledge, these support recovery and generalization bounds are the first such matching upper and lower bounds (up to logarithmic factors) for {\em any} sparse regression algorithm under the RSC assumption.


A New Study Details How Cats Almost Always Land on Their Feet

WIRED

The secret to this acrobatic skill lies in an extremely flexible part of the spine that allows cats to twist in the air and land safely. It's well established that when cats fall, they're able to land perfectly most of the time, nimbly maneuvering to right themselves before they hit the ground. Now, researchers at Japan's Yamaguchi University have advanced our understanding of this extraordinary ability, focusing on the mechanical properties of feline spines. What they found, as detailed in a recent study in the journal The Anatomical Record, is that those sure-footed landings are due in part to the fact that a cat's thoracic region is much more flexible than its lumbar region. While a cat's ability to rotate in the air without something to push again seems to defy the laws of physics, it's instead a complex righting maneuver.