Temporal Pattern Detection in Time-Varying Graphical Models

Federico Tomasi, Veronica Tozzo, Annalisa Barla

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Auto-TLDR; A dynamical network inference model that leverages on kernels to consider general temporal patterns

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Graphical models allow to describe the interplay among variables of a system through a compact representation, suitable when relations evolve over time. For example, in a biological setting, genes interact differently depending on external environmental or metabolic factors. To incorporate this dynamics a viable strategy is to estimate a sequence of temporally related graphs assuming similarity among samples in different time points. While adjacent time points may direct the analysis towards a robust estimate of the underlying graph, the resulting model will not incorporate long-term or recurrent temporal relationships. In this work we propose a dynamical network inference model that leverages on kernels to consider general temporal patterns (such as circadian rhythms or seasonality). We show how our approach may also be exploited when the recurrent patterns are unknown, by coupling the network inference with a clustering procedure that detects possibly non-consecutive similar networks. Such clusters are then used to build similarity kernels. The convexity of the functional is determined by whether we impose or infer the kernel. In the first case, the optimisation algorithm exploits efficiently proximity operators with closed-form solutions. In the other case, we resort to an alternating minimisation procedure which jointly learns the temporal kernel and the underlying network. Extensive analysis on synthetic data shows the efficacy of our models compared to state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we applied our approach on two real-world applications to show how considering long-term patterns is fundamental to have insights on the behaviour of a complex system.

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Auto-TLDR; Sketch-based Clustering of Community Detection Using a Small Sketch

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Auto-TLDR; Continuous Bilevel Optimization for Multi-Task Learning

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Auto-TLDR; An invariance-guided method for clustering model selection in time series data

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Auto-TLDR; Constrained Stochastic Block Models for Assortative Communities in Neural Networks

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Auto-TLDR; Variational RNN for Switching Dynamics

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Auto-TLDR; A Constrained Primal-dual Method for Structured Feature Selection on High Dimensional Data

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Auto-TLDR; Learning Random Forests for Clustering

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Auto-TLDR; Sparse Bayes for Interpretable Non-linear Prediction

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Auto-TLDR; Learning Graph Convolutional Networks Using Topological Properties of Graphs

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Auto-TLDR; Motion Segmentation using Multi-Modelfitting andpermutation synchronization

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Auto-TLDR; A-Contrario Clustering for the Detection of Altered Violins using UVIFL Images

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Auto-TLDR; A Deep Convolutional Embedding Model for Clustering Artworks

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Auto-TLDR; Time-Series Prediction with Denoising and Imputation of Missing Data

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Auto-TLDR; Data-Efficient Bayesian Active Learning for Factor Screening in Combat Simulations

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Auto-TLDR; GLT-GCRNN: Geographic and Long-term Temporal Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network for Traffic Forecasting

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Auto-TLDR; Feature Learning in Mixed Type of Variable by an undirected graph

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Auto-TLDR; Compression of Large Convolutional Neural Networks by Weight Pruning and Quantization

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Auto-TLDR; A Comparative Study of Multi-Task Learning for Non-linear Time Series Problems

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Auto-TLDR; Constrained Online Expectation-Maximization for Probabilistic Principal Components Analysis

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Multiple Future Prediction Leveraging Synthetic Trajectories

Lorenzo Berlincioni, Federico Becattini, Lorenzo Seidenari, Alberto Del Bimbo

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Auto-TLDR; Synthetic Trajectory Prediction using Markov Chains

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Auto-TLDR; Geodesic Clustering of Connectivity Matrices for Multiple Sclerosis Classification

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An important task in brain connectivity research is the classification of patients from healthy subjects. In this work, we present a two-step mathematical framework allowing to discriminate between two groups of people with an application to multiple sclerosis. The proposed approach exploits the properties of the connectivity matrices determined using the covariances between signals of a fixed set of brain areas. These positive semi-definite matrices lay on a Riemannian manifold, allowing to use a geodesic distance defined on this space. In order to generate a vector representation useful for classification purpose, but still preserving the network structures, we encoded the data exploiting the network attractors determined by a geodesic clustering of connectivity matrices. Then clustering centroids were used as a dictionary allowing to encode subject’s connectivity matrices as a vector of geodesic distances. A Linear Support Vector Machine was then used to perform classification between subjects. To demonstrate the advantage of using geodesic metrics in this framework, we conducted the same analysis using Euclidean metric. Experimental results validate the fact that employing geodesic metric in this framework leads to a higher classification performance, whereas with Euclidean metric performance was suboptimal.

Subspace Clustering for Action Recognition with Covariance Representations and Temporal Pruning

Giancarlo Paoletti, Jacopo Cavazza, Cigdem Beyan, Alessio Del Bue

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Learning for Human Action Recognition from Skeletal Data

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This paper tackles the problem of human action recognition, defined as classifying which action is displayed in a trimmed sequence, from skeletal data. Albeit state-of-the-art approaches designed for this application are all supervised, in this paper we pursue a more challenging direction: Solving the problem with unsupervised learning. To this end, we propose a novel subspace clustering method, which exploits covariance matrix to enhance the action’s discriminability and a timestamp pruning approach that allow us to better handle the temporal dimension of the data. Through a broad experimental validation, we show that our computational pipeline surpasses existing unsupervised approaches but also can result in favorable performances as compared to supervised methods.

Probabilistic Latent Factor Model for Collaborative Filtering with Bayesian Inference

Jiansheng Fang, Xiaoqing Zhang, Yan Hu, Yanwu Xu, Ming Yang, Jiang Liu

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Auto-TLDR; Bayesian Latent Factor Model for Collaborative Filtering

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Active Sampling for Pairwise Comparisons via Approximate Message Passing and Information Gain Maximization

Aliaksei Mikhailiuk, Clifford Wilmot, Maria Perez-Ortiz, Dingcheng Yue, Rafal Mantiuk

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Auto-TLDR; ASAP: An Active Sampling Algorithm for Pairwise Comparison Data

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Pairwise comparison data arise in many domains with subjective assessment experiments, for example in image and video quality assessment. In these experiments observers are asked to express a preference between two conditions. However, many pairwise comparison protocols require a large number of comparisons to infer accurate scores, which may be unfeasible when each comparison is time-consuming (e.g. videos) or expensive (e.g. medical imaging). This motivates the use of an active sampling algorithm that chooses only the most informative pairs for comparison. In this paper we propose ASAP, an active sampling algorithm based on approximate message passing and expected information gain maximization. Unlike most existing methods, which rely on partial updates of the posterior distribution, we are able to perform full updates and therefore much improve the accuracy of the inferred scores. The algorithm relies on three techniques for reducing computational cost: inference based on approximate message passing, selective evaluations of the information gain, and selecting pairs in a batch that forms a minimum spanning tree of the inverse of information gain. We demonstrate, with real and synthetic data, that ASAP offers the highest accuracy of inferred scores compared to the existing methods. We also provide an open-source GPU implementation of ASAP for large-scale experiments.

Temporal Collaborative Filtering with Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Esther Rodrigo-Bonet, Minh Duc Nguyen, Nikos Deligiannis

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Auto-TLDR; Temporal Collaborative Filtering with Graph-Neural-Network-based Neural Networks

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Temporal collaborative filtering (TCF) methods aim at modelling non-static aspects behind recommender systems, such as the dynamics in users' preferences and social trends around items. State-of-the-art TCF methods employ recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model such aspects. These methods deploy matrix-factorization-based (MF-based) approaches to learn the user and item representations. Recently, graph-neural-network-based (GNN-based) approaches have shown improved performance in providing accurate recommendations over traditional MF-based approaches in non-temporal CF settings. Motivated by this, we propose a novel TCF method that leverages GNNs to learn user and item representations, and RNNs to model their temporal dynamics. A challenge with this method lies in the increased data sparsity, which negatively impacts obtaining meaningful quality representations with GNNs. To overcome this challenge, we train a GNN model at each time step using a set of observed interactions accumulated time-wise. Comprehensive experiments on real-world data show the improved performance obtained by our method over several state-of-the-art temporal and non-temporal CF models.

Bayesian Active Learning for Maximal Information Gain on Model Parameters

Kasra Arnavaz, Aasa Feragen, Oswin Krause, Marco Loog

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Auto-TLDR; Bayesian assumptions for Bayesian classification

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The fact that machine learning models, despite their advancements, are still trained on randomly gathered data is proof that a lasting solution to the problem of optimal data gathering has not yet been found. In this paper, we investigate whether a Bayesian approach to the classification problem can provide assumptions under which one is guaranteed to perform at least as good as random sampling. For a logistic regression model, we show that maximal expected information gain on model parameters is a promising criterion for selecting samples, assuming that our classification model is well-matched to the data. Our derived criterion is closely related to the maximum model change. We experiment with data sets which satisfy this assumption to varying degrees to see how sensitive our performance is to the violation of our assumption in practice.

GPSRL: Learning Semi-Parametric Bayesian Survival Rule Lists from Heterogeneous Patient Data

Ameer Hamza Shakur, Xiaoning Qian, Zhangyang Wang, Bobak Mortazavi, Shuai Huang

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-parametric Bayesian Survival Rule List Model for Heterogeneous Survival Data

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Survival data is often collected in medical applications from a heterogeneous population of patients. While in the past, popular survival models focused on modeling the average effect of the co-variates on survival outcomes, rapidly advancing sensing and information technologies have provided opportunities to further model the heterogeneity of the population as well as the non-linearity of the survival risk. With this motivation, we propose a new semi-parametric Bayesian Survival Rule List model in this paper. Our model derives a rule-based decision-making approach, while within the regime defined by each rule, survival risk is modelled via a Gaussian process latent variable model. Markov Chain Monte Carlo with a nested Laplace approximation for the latent variable model is used to search over the posterior of the rule lists efficiently. The use of ordered rule lists enables us to model heterogeneity while keeping the model complexity in check. Performance evaluations on a synthetic heterogeneous survival dataset and a real world sepsis survival dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Learning Parameter Distributions to Detect Concept Drift in Data Streams

Johannes Haug, Gjergji Kasneci

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Auto-TLDR; A novel framework for the detection of concept drift in streaming environments

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Data distributions in streaming environments are usually not stationary. In order to maintain a high predictive quality at all times, online learning models need to adapt to distributional changes, which are known as concept drift. The timely and robust identification of concept drift can be difficult, as we never have access to the true distribution of streaming data. In this work, we propose a novel framework for the detection of real concept drift, called ERICS. By treating the parameters of a predictive model as random variables, we show that concept drift corresponds to a change in the distribution of optimal parameters. To this end, we adopt common measures from information theory. The proposed framework is completely model-agnostic. By choosing an appropriate base model, ERICS is also capable to detect concept drift at the input level, which is a significant advantage over existing approaches. An evaluation on several synthetic and real-world data sets suggests that the proposed framework identifies concept drift more effectively and precisely than various existing works.

Penalized K-Means Algorithms for Finding the Number of Clusters

Behzad Kamgar-Parsi, Behrooz Kamgar-Parsi

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Auto-TLDR; Exploring the coefficient of additive penalty in k-means for ideal clusters

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In many applications we want to find the number of clusters in a dataset. A common approach is to use a penalized k-means algorithm with an additive penalty term linear in the number of clusters. Obviously, the number of discovered clusters depends critically on the value of the coefficient of the penalty term, and an open problem is estimating the value of the coefficient in a principled manner. In this paper (a) We derive rigorous bounds for the coefficient of additive penalty in k-means for ideal clusters. Although in practice clusters typically deviate from the ideal assumption, the ideal case serves as a useful guideline. (b) We propose an alternative approach to additive penalty, namely multiplicative penalty, which appears to produce a more reliable signature for the correct number of clusters in most cases. We also empirically investigate certain types of deviations from ideal cluster assumption and show, in particular, that the best way to resolve ambiguous solutions is to combine additive and multiplicative penalties.

DAG-Net: Double Attentive Graph Neural Network for Trajectory Forecasting

Alessio Monti, Alessia Bertugli, Simone Calderara, Rita Cucchiara

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Auto-TLDR; Recurrent Generative Model for Multi-modal Human Motion Behaviour in Urban Environments

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Understanding human motion behaviour is a critical task for several possible applications like self-driving cars or social robots, and in general for all those settings where an autonomous agent has to navigate inside a human-centric environment. This is non-trivial because human motion is inherently multi-modal: given a history of human motion paths, there are many plausible ways by which people could move in the future. Additionally, people activities are often driven by goals, e.g. reaching particular locations or interacting with the environment. We address both the aforementioned aspects by proposing a new recurrent generative model that considers both single agents’ future goals and interactions between different agents. The model exploits a double attention-based graph neural network to collect information about the mutual influences among different agents and integrates it with data about agents’ possible future objectives. Our proposal is general enough to be applied in different scenarios: the model achieves state-of-the-art results in both urban environments and also in sports applications.

Transfer Learning with Graph Neural Networks for Short-Term Highway Traffic Forecasting

Tanwi Mallick, Prasanna Balaprakash, Eric Rask, Jane Macfarlane

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Auto-TLDR; Transfer Learning for Highway Traffic Forecasting on Unseen Traffic Networks

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Large-scale highway traffic forecasting approaches are critical for intelligent transportation systems. Recently, deep-learning-based traffic forecasting methods have emerged as promising approaches for a wide range of traffic forecasting tasks. However, these methods are specific to a given traffic network and consequently, they cannot be used for forecasting traffic on an unseen traffic network. Previous work has identified diffusion convolutional recurrent neural network (DCRNN), as a state-of-the-art method for highway traffic forecasting. It models the complex spatial and temporal dynamics of a highway network using a graph-based diffusion convolution operation within a recurrent neural network. Currently, DCRNN cannot perform transfer learning because it learns location-specific traffic patterns, which cannot be used for unseen regions of a network or new geographic locations. To that end, we develop TL-DCRNN, a new transfer learning approach for DCRNN, where a single model trained on a highway network can be used to forecast traffic on unseen highway networks. Given a traffic network with a large amount of traffic data, our approach consists of partitioning the traffic network into a number of subgraphs and using a new training scheme that utilizes subgraphs for the DCRNN to marginalize the location-specific information, thus learning the traffic as a function of network connectivity and temporal patterns alone. The resulting trained model can be used to forecast traffic on unseen networks. We demonstrate that TL-DCRNN can learn from San Francisco regional traffic data and forecast traffic on the Los Angeles region and vice versa.

Epitomic Variational Graph Autoencoder

Rayyan Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Umer Anwaar, Martin Kleinsteuber

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Auto-TLDR; EVGAE: A Generative Variational Autoencoder for Graph Data

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Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a widely used generative model for learning latent representations. Burda et al. in their seminal paper showed that learning capacity of VAE is limited by over-pruning. It is a phenomenon where a significant number of latent variables fail to capture any information about the input data and the corresponding hidden units become inactive. This adversely affects learning diverse and interpretable latent representations. As variational graph autoencoder (VGAE) extends VAE for graph-structured data, it inherits the over-pruning problem. In this paper, we adopt a model based approach and propose epitomic VGAE (EVGAE),a generative variational framework for graph datasets which successfully mitigates the over-pruning problem and also boosts the generative ability of VGAE. We consider EVGAE to consist of multiple sparse VGAE models, called epitomes, that are groups of latent variables sharing the latent space. This approach aids in increasing active units as epitomes compete to learn better representation of the graph data. We verify our claims via experiments on three benchmark datasets. Our experiments show that EVGAE has a better generative ability than VGAE. Moreover, EVGAE outperforms VGAE on link prediction task in citation networks

An Intransitivity Model for Matchup and Pairwise Comparison

Yan Gu, Jiuding Duan, Hisashi Kashima

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Auto-TLDR; Blade-Chest: A Low-Rank Matrix Approach for Probabilistic Ranking of Players

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Ranking is a ubiquitous problem appearing in many real-world applications. The superior players or objects are oftentimes determined by a matchup or pairwise comparison. Various models have been developed to integrate the matchup results into a single ranking list of players and to further predict the results of future matchups. Amongst them, the Bradley-Terry model is a mainstream model that achieves the goals by constructing explicit probabilistic interpretation. However, the model suffers from its strong assumption of transitive relationships and becomes vulnerable in practices where intransitive relationships exist. Blade-Chest model is an alternative solution to this intransitivity challenge by allowing the multi-dimensional representation of players. In this paper, we propose a low-rank matrix approach to characterize all players and generalize the related works by introducing a unified framework. Our experimental results on synthetic datasets and real-world datasets show that the proposed model is stably competitive with the standard models in terms of the consistency of probabilistic model interpretation and the predictive performance in out-of-sample tests.

The eXPose Approach to Crosslier Detection

Antonio Barata, Frank Takes, Hendrik Van Den Herik, Cor Veenman

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Auto-TLDR; EXPose: Crosslier Detection Based on Supervised Category Modeling

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Transit of wasteful materials within the European Union is highly regulated through a system of permits. Waste processing costs vary greatly depending on the waste category of a permit. Therefore, companies may have a financial incentive to allege transporting waste with erroneous categorisation. Our goal is to assist inspectors in selecting potentially manipulated permits for further investigation, making their task more effective and efficient. Due to data limitations, a supervised learning approach based on historical cases is not possible. Standard unsupervised approaches, such as outlier detection and data quality-assurance techniques, are not suited since we are interested in targeting non-random modifications in both category and category-correlated features. For this purpose we (1) introduce the concept of crosslier: an anomalous instance of a category which lies across other categories; (2) propose eXPose: a novel approach to crosslier detection based on supervised category modelling; and (3) present the crosslier diagram: a visualisation tool specifically designed for domain experts to easily assess crossliers. We compare eXPose against traditional outlier detection methods in various benchmark datasets with synthetic crossliers and show the superior performance of our method in targeting these instances.

SDMA: Saliency Driven Mutual Cross Attention for Multi-Variate Time Series

Yash Garg, K. Selcuk Candan

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Auto-TLDR; Salient-Driven Mutual Cross Attention for Intelligent Time Series Analytics

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Integration of rich sensory technologies into critical applications, such as gesture recognition and building energy optimization, has highlighted the importance of intelligent time series analytics. To accommodate this demand, uni-variate approaches have been extended for multi-variate scenarios, but naive extensions have lead to deterioration in model performances due to their limited ability to capture the information recorded in different variates and complex multi-variate time series patterns’ evolution over time. Furthermore, real-world time series are often contaminated with noisy information. In this paper, we note that a time series often carry robust localized temporal events that could help improve model performance by highlighting the relevant information; however, the lack of sufficient data to train for these events make it impossible for neural architectures to identify and make use of these temporal events. We, therefore, argue that a companion process helping identify salient events in the input time series and driving model’s attention to the associated salient sub-sequences can help with learning a high-performing network. Relying on this observation, we propose a novel Saliency-Driven Mutual Cross Attention (SDMA) framework that extracts localized temporal events and generate a saliency series to complement the input time series. We further propose an architecture which accounts for the mutual cross-talk between the input and saliency series branches where input and saliency series attend each other. Experiments show that the proposed mutually-cross attention framework can offer significant boosts in model performance when compared against non-attentioned, conventionally attentioned, and conventionally cross-attentioned models.

Mutual Information Based Method for Unsupervised Disentanglement of Video Representation

Aditya Sreekar P, Ujjwal Tiwari, Anoop Namboodiri

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Auto-TLDR; MIPAE: Mutual Information Predictive Auto-Encoder for Video Prediction

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Video Prediction is an interesting and challenging task of predicting future frames from a given set context frames that belong to a video sequence. Video prediction models have found prospective applications in Maneuver Planning, Health care, Autonomous Navigation and Simulation. One of the major challenges in future frame generation is due to the high dimensional nature of visual data. In this work, we propose Mutual Information Predictive Auto-Encoder (MIPAE) framework, that reduces the task of predicting high dimensional video frames by factorising video representations into content and low dimensional pose latent variables that are easy to predict. A standard LSTM network is used to predict these low dimensional pose representations. Content and the predicted pose representations are decoded to generate future frames. Our approach leverages the temporal structure of the latent generative factors of a video and a novel mutual information loss to learn disentangled video representations. We also propose a metric based on mutual information gap (MIG) to quantitatively access the effectiveness of disentanglement on DSprites and MPI3D-real datasets. MIG scores corroborate with the visual superiority of frames predicted by MIPAE. We also compare our method quantitatively on evaluation metrics LPIPS, SSIM and PSNR.

Reducing the Variance of Variational Estimates of Mutual Information by Limiting the Critic's Hypothesis Space to RKHS

Aditya Sreekar P, Ujjwal Tiwari, Anoop Namboodiri

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Auto-TLDR; Mutual Information Estimation from Variational Lower Bounds Using a Critic's Hypothesis Space

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Mutual information (MI) is an information-theoretic measure of dependency between two random variables. Several methods to estimate MI, from samples of two random variables with unknown underlying probability distributions have been proposed in the literature. Recent methods realize parametric probability distributions or critic as a neural network to approximate unknown density ratios. The approximated density ratios are used to estimate different variational lower bounds of MI. While these methods provide reliable estimation when the true MI is low, they produce high variance estimates in cases of high MI. We argue that the high variance characteristic is due to the uncontrolled complexity of the critic's hypothesis space. In support of this argument, we use the data-driven Rademacher complexity of the hypothesis space associated with the critic's architecture to analyse generalization error bound of variational lower bound estimates of MI. In the proposed work, we show that it is possible to negate the high variance characteristics of these estimators by constraining the critic's hypothesis space to Reproducing Hilbert Kernel Space (RKHS), which corresponds to a kernel learned using Automated Spectral Kernel Learning (ASKL). By analysing the aforementioned generalization error bounds, we augment the overall optimisation objective with effective regularisation term. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of this regularization in enforcing proper bias variance tradeoff on four variational lower bounds, namely NWJ, MINE, JS and SMILE.

Scalable Direction-Search-Based Approach to Subspace Clustering

Yicong He, George Atia

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Auto-TLDR; Fast Direction-Search-Based Subspace Clustering

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Subspace clustering finds a multi-subspace representation that best fits a high-dimensional dataset. The computational and storage complexities of existing algorithms limit their usefulness for large scale data. In this paper, we develop a novel scalable approach to subspace clustering termed Fast Direction-Search-Based Subspace Clustering (Fast DiSC). In sharp contrast to existing scalable solutions which are mostly based on the self-expressiveness property of the data, Fast DiSC rests upon a new representation obtained from projections on computed data-dependent directions. These directions are derived from a convex formulation for optimal direction search to gauge hidden similarity relations. The computational complexity is significantly reduced by performing direction search in partitions of sampled data, followed by a retrieval step to cluster out-of-sample data using projections on the computed directions. A theoretical analysis underscores the ability of the proposed formulation to construct local similarity relations for the different data points. Experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can often outperform the state-of-the-art clustering methods.

Expectation-Maximization for Scheduling Problems in Satellite Communication

Werner Bailer, Martin Winter, Johannes Ebert, Joel Flavio, Karin Plimon

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Machine Learning for Satellite Communication Using Expectation-Maximization

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In this paper we address unsupervised machine learning for two use cases in satellite communication, which are scheduling problems: (i) Ka-band frequency plan optimization and (ii) dynamic configuration of an active antenna array satellite. We apply approaches based on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework to both of them. We compare against baselines of currently deployed solutions, and show that they can be significantly outperformed by the EM-based approach. In addition, the approaches can be applied incrementally, thus supporting fast adaptation to small changes in the input configuration.

Learning Sign-Constrained Support Vector Machines

Kenya Tajima, Kouhei Tsuchida, Esmeraldo Ronnie Rey Zara, Naoya Ohta, Tsuyoshi Kato

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Auto-TLDR; Constrained Sign Constraints for Learning Linear Support Vector Machine

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Domain knowledge is useful to improve the generalization performance of learning machines. Sign constraints are a handy representation to combine domain knowledge with learning machine. In this paper, we consider constraining the signs of the weight coefficients in learning the linear support vector machine, and develop two optimization algorithms for minimizing the empirical risk under the sign constraints. One of the two algorithms is based on the projected gradient method, in which each iteration of the projected gradient method takes O(nd) computational cost and the sublinear convergence of the objective error is guaranteed. The second algorithm is based on the Frank-Wolfe method that also converges sublinearly and possesses a clear termination criterion. We show that each iteration of the Frank-Wolfe also requires O(nd) cost. Furthermore, we derive the explicit expression for the minimal iteration number to ensure an epsilon-accurate solution by analyzing the curvature of the objective function. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that the sign constraints are a promising technique when similarities to the training examples compose the feature vector.

A Multi-Task Multi-View Based Multi-Objective Clustering Algorithm

Sayantan Mitra, Sriparna Saha

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Auto-TLDR; MTMV-MO: Multi-task multi-view multi-objective optimization for multi-task clustering

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In recent years, multi-view multi-task clustering has received much attention. There are several real-life problems that involve both multi-view clustering and multi-task clustering, i.e., the tasks are closely related, and each task can be analyzed using multiple views. Traditional multi-task multi-view clustering algorithms use single-objective optimization-based approaches and cannot apply too-many regularization terms. However, these problems are inherently some multi-objective optimization problems because conflict may be between different views within a given task and also between different tasks, necessitating a trade-off. Based on these observations, in this paper, we have proposed a novel multi-task multi-view multi-objective optimization (MTMV-MO) algorithm which simultaneously optimizes three objectives, i.e., within-view task relation, within-task view relation and the quality of the clusters obtained. The proposed methodology (MTMV-MO) is evaluated on four different datasets and the results are compared with five state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) and Classification Accuracy (%CoA). MTMV-MO illustrates an improvement of 1.5-2% in terms of ARI and 4-5% in terms of %CoA compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Thermal Characterisation of Unweighted and Weighted Networks

Jianjia Wang, Hui Wu, Edwin Hancock

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Auto-TLDR; Thermodynamic Characterisation of Networks as Particles of the Thermal System

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Thermodynamic characterisations or analogies have proved to provide powerful tools for the statistical analysis of network populations or time series, together with the identification of structural anomalies that occur within them. For instance, classical Boltzmann statistics together with the corresponding partition function have been used to apply the tools of statistical physics to the analysis of variations in network structure. However, the physical analogy adopted in this analysis, together with the interpretation of the resulting system of particles is sometimes vague and remains an open question. This, in turn, has implications concerning the definition of quantities such as temperature and energy. In this paper, we take a novel view of the thermal characterisation where we regard the edges in a network as the particles of the thermal system. By considering networks with a fixed number of nodes we obtain a conservation law which applies to the particle occupation configuration. Using this interpretation, we provide a physical meaning for the temperature which is related to the number of network nodes and edges. This provides a fundamental description of a network as a thermal system. If we further interpret the elements of the adjacency matrix as the binary microstates associated with edges, this allows us to further extend the analysis to systems with edge-weights. We thus introduce the concept of the canonical ensemble into the thermal network description and the corresponding partition function and then use this to compute the thermodynamic quantities. Finally, we provide numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world data-sets to evaluate the thermal characterisations for both unweighted and weighted networks.

Region and Relations Based Multi Attention Network for Graph Classification

Manasvi Aggarwal, M. Narasimha Murty

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Auto-TLDR; R2POOL: A Graph Pooling Layer for Non-euclidean Structures

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Graphs are non-euclidean structures that can represent many relational data efficiently. Many studies have proposed the convolution and the pooling operators on the non-euclidean domain. The graph convolution operators have shown astounding performance on various tasks such as node representation and classification. For graph classification, different pooling techniques are introduced, but none of them has considered both neighborhood of the node and the long-range dependencies of the node. In this paper, we propose a novel graph pooling layer R2POOL, which balances the structure information around the node as well as the dependencies with far away nodes. Further, we propose a new training strategy to learn coarse to fine representations. We add supervision at only intermediate levels to generate predictions using only intermediate-level features. For this, we propose the concept of an alignment score. Moreover, each layer's prediction is controlled by our proposed branch training strategy. This complete training helps in learning dominant class features at each layer for representing graphs. We call the combined model by R2MAN. Experiments show that R2MAN the potential to improve the performance of graph classification on various datasets.