Many types of ventricular and atrial cardiac arrhythmias have been discovered in clinical practice in the past 100 years, and these arrhythmias are a major contributor to sudden cardiac death. Ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, and paroxysmal atrial fibrillation are the most commonly-occurring and dangerous arrhythmias, therefore early detection is crucial to prevent any further complications and reduce fatalities. Implantable devices such as pacemakers are commonly used in patients at high risk of sudden cardiac death. While great advances have been made in medical technology, there remain significant challenges in effective management of common arrhythmias. This thesis proposes novel arrhythmia detection and prediction methods to differentiate cardiac arrhythmias from non-life-threatening cardiac events, to increase the likelihood of detecting events that may lead to mortality, as well as reduce the incidence of unnecessary therapeutic intervention. The methods are based on detailed analysis of Heart Rate Variability (HRV) information. The results of the work show good performance of the proposed methods and support the potential for their deployment in resource-constrained devices for ventricular and atrial arrhythmia prediction, such as implantable pacemakers and defibrillators.
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves higher sample efficiency in practice than model-free RL by learning a dynamics model to generate samples for policy learning. Previous works learn a "global" dynamics model to fit the state-action visitation distribution for all historical policies. However, in this paper, we find that learning a global dynamics model does not necessarily benefit model prediction for the current policy since the policy in use is constantly evolving. The evolving policy during training will cause state-action visitation distribution shifts. We theoretically analyze how the distribution of historical policies affects the model learning and model rollouts. We then propose a novel model-based RL method, named \textit{Policy-adaptation Model-based Actor-Critic (PMAC)}, which learns a policy-adapted dynamics model based on a policy-adaptation mechanism. This mechanism dynamically adjusts the historical policy mixture distribution to ensure the learned model can continually adapt to the state-action visitation distribution of the evolving policy. Experiments on a range of continuous control environments in MuJoCo show that PMAC achieves state-of-the-art asymptotic performance and almost two times higher sample efficiency than prior model-based methods.
The field of touch-based authentication has been rapidly developing over the last decade, creating a fragmented and difficult-to-navigate area for researchers and application developers alike due to the variety of methods investigated. In this study, we perform a systematic literature analysis of 30 studies on the techniques used for feature extraction, classification, and aggregation in touch-based authentication systems as well as the performance metrics reported by each study. Based on our findings, we design a set of experiments to compare the performance of the most frequently used techniques in the field under clearly defined conditions. In addition, we introduce three new techniques for touch-based authentication: an expanded feature set (consisting of 149 unique features), a multi-algorithm ensemble-based classifier, and a Recurrent Neural Network based stacking aggregation method. The comparison includes 14 feature sets, 11 classifiers, and 5 aggregation methods. In total, 219 model configurations are examined and we show that our novel techniques outperform the current state-of-the-art in each category. The results are also validated across three different publicly available datasets. Finally, we discuss the findings of our investigation with the aim of making the field more understandable and accessible for researchers and practitioners.
Manufacturing companies face challenges when it comes to quickly adapting their production control to fluctuating demands or changing requirements. Control approaches that encapsulate production functions as services have shown to be promising in order to increase the flexibility of Cyber-Physical Production Systems. But an existing challenge of such approaches is finding a production plan based on provided functionalities for a demanded product, especially when there is no direct (i.e., syntactic) match between demanded and provided functions. While there is a variety of approaches to production planning, flexible production poses specific requirements that are not covered by existing research. In this contribution, we first capture these requirements for flexible production environments. Afterwards, an overview of current Artificial Intelligence approaches that can be utilized in order to overcome the aforementioned challenges is given. For this purpose, we focus on planning algorithms, but also consider models of production systems that can act as inputs to these algorithms. Approaches from both symbolic AI planning as well as approaches based on Machine Learning are discussed and eventually compared against the requirements. Based on this comparison, a research agenda is derived.
Wildfires are a highly prevalent multi-causal environmental phenomenon. The impact of this phenomenon includes human losses, environmental damage and high economic costs. To mitigate these effects, several computer simulation systems have been developed in order to predict fire behavior based on a set of input parameters, also called a scenario (wind speed and direction; temperature; etc.). However, the results of a simulation usually have a high degree of error due to the uncertainty in the values of some variables, because they are not known, or because their measurement may be imprecise, erroneous, or impossible to perform in real time. Previous works have proposed the combination of multiple results in order to reduce this uncertainty. State-of-the-art methods are based on parallel optimization strategies that use a fitness function to guide the search among all possible scenarios. Although these methods have shown improvements in the quality of predictions, they have some limitations related to the algorithms used for the selection of scenarios. To overcome these limitations, in this work we propose to apply the Novelty Search paradigm, which replaces the objective function by a measure of the novelty of the solutions found, which allows the search to continuously generate solutions with behaviors that differ from one another. This approach avoids local optima and may be able to find useful solutions that would be difficult or impossible to find by other algorithms. As with existing methods, this proposal may also be adapted to other propagation models (floods, avalanches or landslides).
Many internet platforms that collect behavioral big data use it to predict user behavior for internal purposes and for their business customers (e.g., advertisers, insurers, security forces, governments, political consulting firms) who utilize the predictions for personalization, targeting, and other decision-making. Improving predictive accuracy is therefore extremely valuable. Data science researchers design algorithms, models, and approaches to improve prediction. Prediction is also improved with larger and richer data. Beyond improving algorithms and data, platforms can stealthily achieve better prediction accuracy by pushing users' behaviors towards their predicted values, using behavior modification techniques, thereby demonstrating more certain predictions. Such apparent "improved" prediction can result from employing reinforcement learning algorithms that combine prediction and behavior modification. This strategy is absent from the machine learning and statistics literature. Investigating its properties requires integrating causal with predictive notation. To this end, we incorporate Pearl's causal do(.) operator into the predictive vocabulary. We then decompose the expected prediction error given behavior modification, and identify the components impacting predictive power. Our derivation elucidates implications of such behavior modification to data scientists, platforms, their customers, and the humans whose behavior is manipulated. Behavior modification can make users' behavior more predictable and even more homogeneous; yet this apparent predictability might not generalize when business customers use predictions in practice. Outcomes pushed towards their predictions can be at odds with customers' intentions, and harmful to manipulated users.
It is now well known that neural networks can be wrong with high confidence in their predictions, leading to poor calibration. The most common post-hoc approach to compensate for this is to perform temperature scaling, which adjusts the confidences of the predictions on any input by scaling the logits by a fixed value. Whilst this approach typically improves the average calibration across the whole test dataset, this improvement typically reduces the individual confidences of the predictions irrespective of whether the classification of a given input is correct or incorrect. With this insight, we base our method on the observation that different samples contribute to the calibration error by varying amounts, with some needing to increase their confidence and others needing to decrease it. Therefore, for each input, we propose to predict a different temperature value, allowing us to adjust the mismatch between confidence and accuracy at a finer granularity. Furthermore, we observe improved results on OOD detection and can also extract a notion of hardness for the data-points. Our method is applied post-hoc, consequently using very little computation time and with a negligible memory footprint and is applied to off-the-shelf pre-trained classifiers. We test our method on the ResNet50 and WideResNet28-10 architectures using the CIFAR10/100 and Tiny-ImageNet datasets, showing that producing per-data-point temperatures is beneficial also for the expected calibration error across the whole test set. Code is available at: //github.com/thwjoy/adats.
We study the performance -- and specifically the rate at which the error probability converges to zero -- of Machine Learning (ML) classification techniques. Leveraging the theory of large deviations, we provide the mathematical conditions for a ML classifier to exhibit error probabilities that vanish exponentially, say $\sim \exp\left(-n\,I + o(n) \right)$, where $n$ is the number of informative observations available for testing (or another relevant parameter, such as the size of the target in an image) and $I$ is the error rate. Such conditions depend on the Fenchel-Legendre transform of the cumulant-generating function of the Data-Driven Decision Function (D3F, i.e., what is thresholded before the final binary decision is made) learned in the training phase. As such, the D3F and, consequently, the related error rate $I$, depend on the given training set, which is assumed of finite size. Interestingly, these conditions can be verified and tested numerically exploiting the available dataset, or a synthetic dataset, generated according to the available information on the underlying statistical model. In other words, the classification error probability convergence to zero and its rate can be computed on a portion of the dataset available for training. Coherently with the large deviations theory, we can also establish the convergence, for $n$ large enough, of the normalized D3F statistic to a Gaussian distribution. This property is exploited to set a desired asymptotic false alarm probability, which empirically turns out to be accurate even for quite realistic values of $n$. Furthermore, approximate error probability curves $\sim \zeta_n \exp\left(-n\,I \right)$ are provided, thanks to the refined asymptotic derivation (often referred to as exact asymptotics), where $\zeta_n$ represents the most representative sub-exponential terms of the error probabilities.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to greatly improve society, but as with any powerful technology, it comes with heightened risks and responsibilities. Current AI research lacks a systematic discussion of how to manage long-tail risks from AI systems, including speculative long-term risks. Keeping in mind the potential benefits of AI, there is some concern that building ever more intelligent and powerful AI systems could eventually result in systems that are more powerful than us; some say this is like playing with fire and speculate that this could create existential risks (x-risks). To add precision and ground these discussions, we provide a guide for how to analyze AI x-risk, which consists of three parts: First, we review how systems can be made safer today, drawing on time-tested concepts from hazard analysis and systems safety that have been designed to steer large processes in safer directions. Next, we discuss strategies for having long-term impacts on the safety of future systems. Finally, we discuss a crucial concept in making AI systems safer by improving the balance between safety and general capabilities. We hope this document and the presented concepts and tools serve as a useful guide for understanding how to analyze AI x-risk.
Neural architecture search (NAS) aims to automate architecture design processes and improve the performance of deep neural networks. Platform-aware NAS methods consider both performance and complexity and can find well-performing architectures with low computational resources. Although ordinary NAS methods result in tremendous computational costs owing to the repetition of model training, one-shot NAS, which trains the weights of a supernetwork containing all candidate architectures only once during the search process, has been reported to result in a lower search cost. This study focuses on the architecture complexity-aware one-shot NAS that optimizes the objective function composed of the weighted sum of two metrics, such as the predictive performance and number of parameters. In existing methods, the architecture search process must be run multiple times with different coefficients of the weighted sum to obtain multiple architectures with different complexities. This study aims at reducing the search cost associated with finding multiple architectures. The proposed method uses multiple distributions to generate architectures with different complexities and updates each distribution using the samples obtained from multiple distributions based on importance sampling. The proposed method allows us to obtain multiple architectures with different complexities in a single architecture search, resulting in reducing the search cost. The proposed method is applied to the architecture search of convolutional neural networks on the CIAFR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Consequently, compared with baseline methods, the proposed method finds multiple architectures with varying complexities while requiring less computational effort.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved unprecedented success in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), including computer vision, natural language processing and speech recognition. However, their superior performance comes at the considerable cost of computational complexity, which greatly hinders their applications in many resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Therefore, methods and techniques that are able to lift the efficiency bottleneck while preserving the high accuracy of DNNs are in great demand in order to enable numerous edge AI applications. This paper provides an overview of efficient deep learning methods, systems and applications. We start from introducing popular model compression methods, including pruning, factorization, quantization as well as compact model design. To reduce the large design cost of these manual solutions, we discuss the AutoML framework for each of them, such as neural architecture search (NAS) and automated pruning and quantization. We then cover efficient on-device training to enable user customization based on the local data on mobile devices. Apart from general acceleration techniques, we also showcase several task-specific accelerations for point cloud, video and natural language processing by exploiting their spatial sparsity and temporal/token redundancy. Finally, to support all these algorithmic advancements, we introduce the efficient deep learning system design from both software and hardware perspectives.