Fault detection in rotating machinery is a complex task, particularly in small and heterogeneous dataset scenarios. Variability in sensor placement, machinery configurations, and structural differences further increase the complexity of the problem. Conventional deep learning approaches often demand large, homogeneous datasets, limiting their applicability in data-scarce industrial environments. While transfer learning and few-shot learning have shown potential, however, they are often constrained by the need for extensive fault datasets. This research introduces a unified framework leveraging a novel progressive neural network (PNN) architecture designed to address these challenges. The PNN sequentially estimates the fixed-size refined features of the higher order with the help of all previously estimated features and appends them to the feature set. This fixed-size feature output at each layer controls the complexity of the PNN and makes it suitable for effective learning from small datasets. The framework's effectiveness is validated on eight datasets, including six open-source datasets, one in-house fault simulator, and one real-world industrial dataset. The PNN achieves state-of-the-art performance in fault detection across varying dataset sizes and machinery types, highlighting superior generalization and classification capabilities.

Human brain and behavior provide a rich venue that can inspire novel control and learning methods for robotics. In an attempt to exemplify such a development by inspiring how humans acquire knowledge and transfer skills among tasks, we introduce a novel multi-task reinforcement learning framework named Episodic Return Progress with Bidirectional Progressive Neural Networks (ERP-BPNN). The proposed ERP-BPNN model (1) learns in a human-like interleaved manner by (2) autonomous task switching based on a novel intrinsic motivation signal and, in contrast to existing methods, (3) allows bidirectional skill transfer among tasks. ERP-BPNN is a general architecture applicable to several multi-task learning settings; in this paper, we present the details of its neural architecture and show its ability to enable effective learning and skill transfer among morphologically different robots in a reaching task. The developed Bidirectional Progressive Neural Network (BPNN) architecture enables bidirectional skill transfer without requiring incremental training and seamlessly integrates with online task arbitration. The task arbitration mechanism developed is based on soft Episodic Return progress (ERP), a novel intrinsic motivation (IM) signal. To evaluate our method, we use quantifiable robotics metrics such as 'expected distance to goal' and 'path straightness' in addition to the usual reward-based measure of episodic return common in reinforcement learning. With simulation experiments, we show that ERP-BPNN achieves faster cumulative convergence and improves performance in all metrics considered among morphologically different robots compared to the baselines.

A successful deep learning model is dependent on extensive training data and processing power and time (known as training costs). There exist many tasks without enough number of labeled data to train a deep learning model. Further, the demand is rising for running deep learning models on edge devices with limited processing capacity and training time. Deep transfer learning (DTL) methods are the answer to tackle such limitations, e.g., fine-tuning a pre-trained model on a massive semi-related dataset proved to be a simple and effective method for many problems. DTLs handle limited target data concerns as well as drastically reduce the training costs. In this paper, the definition and taxonomy of deep transfer learning is reviewed. Then we focus on the sub-category of network-based DTLs since it is the most common types of DTLs that have been applied to various applications in the last decade.

TEACH ME AND I REMEMBER. I recently started a new newsletter focus on AI education. TheSequence is a no-BS( meaning no hype, no news etc) AI-focused newsletter that takes 5 minutes to read. The goal is to keep you up to date with machine learning projects, research papers and concepts. Life is a journey through learning experiences.

The intersection between artificial intelligence(AI) and human cognition is one of the most fascinating areas of research in the modern technology space. Deep learning is constantly trying to emulate mechanisms of the human brain in order to improve the capabilities of AI agents. Many of those mechanisms are centered around how humans learn and build knowledge. A recent research paper from DeepMind is proposing a method that emulates the progressive nature of human learning in deep learning model. DeepMind calls this technique progressive neural networks.

TEACH ME AND I REMEMBER. Life is a journey through learning experiences. As, we are continuously learning new tasks and acquiring new knowledge and we have a magical, and purely understood ability to leverage previous experiences to optimize how we build new knowledge. Learning never stops and it shapes as intellectual and social beings. Could we recreate the continuity of learning in artificial intelligence(AI) models.

This paper addresses the problem of incremental domain adaptation (IDA). We assume each domain comes one after another, and that we could only access data in the current domain. The goal of IDA is to build a unified model performing well on all the domains that we have encountered. We propose to augment a recurrent neural network (RNN) with a directly parameterized memory bank, which is retrieved by an attention mechanism at each step of RNN transition. The memory bank provides a natural way of IDA: when adapting our model to a new domain, we progressively add new slots to the memory bank, which increases the number of parameters, and thus the model capacity. We learn the new memory slots and fine-tune existing parameters by back-propagation. Experimental results show that our approach achieves significantly better performance than fine-tuning alone, which suffers from the catastrophic forgetting problem. Compared with expanding hidden states, our approach is more robust for old domains, shown by both empirical and theoretical results. Our model also outperforms previous work of IDA including elastic weight consolidation (EWC) and the progressive neural network.

These systems don't just require more information than humans to understand concepts or recognize features, they require hundreds of thousands times more, says Neil Lawrence, a professor of machine learning at the University of Sheffield and part of Amazon's AI team. Once they've been trained, they can be incredibly efficient at tasks like recognizing cats or playing Atari games, says Google DeepMind research scientist Raia Hadsell. A solution to this might be something called progressive neural networks -- this means connecting separate deep learning systems together so that they can pass on certain bits of information. One way of doing this is revisiting an old, unfashionable strand of artificial intelligence known as symbolic AI or Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI), says Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London (and also the scientific advisor on Ex Machina).

If you've seen one Atari game you've seen them all, or at least once you've seen enough of them anyway. When we (humans) learn, we don't start from scratch with every new task or experience, instead we're able to build on what we already know. And not just for one new task, but the accumulated knowledge across a whole series of experiences is applied to each new task. Nor do we suddenly forget everything we knew before – just because you learn to drive (for example), that doesn't mean you suddenly become worse at playing chess. But neural networks don't work like we do.

"Is data the new oil?" asked proponents of big data back in 2012 in Forbes magazine. By 2016, and the rise of big data's turbo-powered cousin deep learning, we had become more certain: "Data is the new oil," stated Fortune. Amazon's Neil Lawrence has a slightly different analogy: Data, he says, is coal. Not coal today, though, but coal in the early days of the 18th century, when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine. A Devonian ironmonger, Newcomen built his device to pump water out of the south west's prolific tin mines. The problem, as Lawrence told the Re-Work conference on Deep Learning in London, was that the pump was rather more useful to those who had a lot of coal than those who didn't: it was good, but not good enough to buy coal in to run it.