We report an improvement to the conventional Echo State Network (ESN), which already achieves competitive performance in one-dimensional time series prediction of dynamical systems. Our model -- a 20$\%$-dense ESN with reservoir weights derived from a fruit fly connectome (and from its bootstrapped distribution) -- yields superior performance on a chaotic time series prediction task, and furthermore alleviates the ESN's high-variance problem. We also find that an arbitrary positioning of weights can degrade ESN performance and variance; and that this can be remedied in particular by employing connectome-derived weight positions. Herein we consider four connectome features -- namely, the sparsity, positioning, distribution, and clustering of weights -- and construct corresponding model classes (A, B, B${}_2$, C) from an appropriate null model ESN; one with its reservoir layer replaced by a fruit fly connectivity matrix. After tuning relevant hyperparameters and selecting the best instance of each model class, we train and validate all models for multi-step prediction on size-variants (50, 250, 500, and 750 training input steps) of the Mackey-Glass chaotic time series; and compute their performance (Mean-Squared Error) and variance across train-validate trials.
Human brains lie at the core of complex neurobiological systems, where the neurons, circuits, and subsystems interact in enigmatic ways. Understanding the structural and functional mechanisms of the brain has long been an intriguing pursuit for neuroscience research and clinical disorder therapy. Mapping the connections of the human brain as a network is one of the most pervasive paradigms in neuroscience. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently emerged as a potential method for modeling complex network data. Deep models, on the other hand, have low interpretability, which prevents their usage in decision-critical contexts like healthcare. To bridge this gap, we propose an interpretable framework to analyze disorder-specific Regions of Interest (ROIs) and prominent connections. The proposed framework consists of two modules: a brain-network-oriented backbone model for disease prediction and a globally shared explanation generator that highlights disorder-specific biomarkers including salient ROIs and important connections. We conduct experiments on three real-world datasets of brain disorders. The results verify that our framework can obtain outstanding performance and also identify meaningful biomarkers. All code for this work is available at //github.com/HennyJie/IBGNN.git.
In this paper, we consider the problems in the practical application of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). With the popularization and application of the technology in wide scope, the practicability of SLAM system has become a new hot topic after the accuracy and robustness, e.g., how to keep the stability of the system and achieve accurate pose estimation in the low-texture and dynamic environment, and how to improve the universality and real-time performance of the system in the real scenes, etc. This paper proposes a real-time stereo indirect visual SLAM system, PLD-SLAM, which combines point and line features, and avoid the impact of dynamic objects in highly dynamic environments. We also present a novel global gray similarity (GGS) algorithm to achieve reasonable keyframe selection and efficient loop closure detection (LCD). Benefiting from the GGS, PLD-SLAM can realize real-time accurate pose estimation in most real scenes without pre-training and loading a huge feature dictionary model. To verify the performance of the proposed system, we compare it with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on the public datasets KITTI, EuRoC MAV, and the indoor stereo datasets provided by us, etc. The experiments show that the PLD-SLAM has better real-time performance while ensuring stability and accuracy in most scenarios. In addition, through the analysis of the experimental results of the GGS, we can find it has excellent performance in the keyframe selection and LCD.
Deep learning methods have been successfully applied to remote sensing problems for several years. Among these methods, CNN based models have high accuracy in solving the land classification problem using satellite or aerial images. Although these models have high accuracy, this generally comes with large memory size requirements. On the other hand, it is desirable to have small-sized models for applications, such as the ones implemented on unmanned aerial vehicles, with low memory space. Unfortunately, small-sized CNN models do not provide high accuracy as with their large-sized versions. In this study, we propose a novel method to improve the accuracy of CNN models, especially the ones with small size, by injecting traditional features to them. To test the effectiveness of the proposed method, we applied it to the CNN models SqueezeNet, MobileNetV2, ShuffleNetV2, VGG16, and ResNet50V2 having size 0.5 MB to 528 MB. We used the sample mean, gray level co-occurrence matrix features, Hu moments, local binary patterns, histogram of oriented gradients, and color invariants as traditional features for injection. We tested the proposed method on the EuroSAT dataset to perform land classification. Our experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the land classification accuracy especially when applied to small-sized CNN models.
Future power systems will rely heavily on micro grids with a high share of decentralised renewable energy sources and energy storage systems. The high complexity and uncertainty in this context might make conventional power dispatch strategies infeasible. Reinforcement-learning based (RL) controllers can address this challenge, however, cannot themselves provide safety guarantees, preventing their deployment in practice. To overcome this limitation, we propose a formally validated RL controller for economic dispatch. We extend conventional constraints by a time-dependent constraint encoding the islanding contingency. The contingency constraint is computed using set-based backwards reachability analysis and actions of the RL agent are verified through a safety layer. Unsafe actions are projected into the safe action space while leveraging constrained zonotope set representations for computational efficiency. The developed approach is demonstrated on a residential use case using real-world measurements.
Importance sampling (IS) is valuable in reducing the variance of Monte Carlo sampling for many areas, including finance, rare event simulation, and Bayesian inference. It is natural and obvious to combine quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods with IS to achieve a faster rate of convergence. However, a naive replacement of Monte Carlo with QMC may not work well. This paper investigates the convergence rates of randomized QMC-based IS for estimating integrals with respect to a Gaussian measure, in which the IS measure is a Gaussian or $t$ distribution. We prove that if the target function satisfies the so-called boundary growth condition and the covariance matrix of the IS density has eigenvalues no smaller than 1, then randomized QMC with the Gaussian proposal has a root mean squared error of $O(N^{-1+\epsilon})$ for arbitrarily small $\epsilon>0$. Similar results of $t$ distribution as the proposal are also established. These sufficient conditions help to assess the effectiveness of IS in QMC. For some particular applications, we find that the Laplace IS, a very general approach to approximate the target function by a quadratic Taylor approximation around its mode, has eigenvalues smaller than 1, making the resulting integrand less favorable for QMC. From this point of view, when using Gaussian distributions as the IS proposal, a change of measure via Laplace IS may transform a favorable integrand into unfavorable one for QMC although the variance of Monte Carlo sampling is reduced. We also give some examples to verify our propositions and warn against naive replacement of MC with QMC under IS proposals. Numerical results suggest that using Laplace IS with $t$ distributions is more robust than that with Gaussian distributions.
In model extraction attacks, adversaries can steal a machine learning model exposed via a public API by repeatedly querying it and adjusting their own model based on obtained predictions. To prevent model stealing, existing defenses focus on detecting malicious queries, truncating, or distorting outputs, thus necessarily introducing a tradeoff between robustness and model utility for legitimate users. Instead, we propose to impede model extraction by requiring users to complete a proof-of-work before they can read the model's predictions. This deters attackers by greatly increasing (even up to 100x) the computational effort needed to leverage query access for model extraction. Since we calibrate the effort required to complete the proof-of-work to each query, this only introduces a slight overhead for regular users (up to 2x). To achieve this, our calibration applies tools from differential privacy to measure the information revealed by a query. Our method requires no modification of the victim model and can be applied by machine learning practitioners to guard their publicly exposed models against being easily stolen.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.
The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be alleviated if we could partially predict a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the overlap of activations between datapoints in untrained networks and motivate how this can give a measure which is usefully indicative of a network's trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench, and Network Design Spaces. Our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods; we examine a simple adaptation of regularised evolutionary search. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at //github.com/BayesWatch/nas-without-training.
How can we estimate the importance of nodes in a knowledge graph (KG)? A KG is a multi-relational graph that has proven valuable for many tasks including question answering and semantic search. In this paper, we present GENI, a method for tackling the problem of estimating node importance in KGs, which enables several downstream applications such as item recommendation and resource allocation. While a number of approaches have been developed to address this problem for general graphs, they do not fully utilize information available in KGs, or lack flexibility needed to model complex relationship between entities and their importance. To address these limitations, we explore supervised machine learning algorithms. In particular, building upon recent advancement of graph neural networks (GNNs), we develop GENI, a GNN-based method designed to deal with distinctive challenges involved with predicting node importance in KGs. Our method performs an aggregation of importance scores instead of aggregating node embeddings via predicate-aware attention mechanism and flexible centrality adjustment. In our evaluation of GENI and existing methods on predicting node importance in real-world KGs with different characteristics, GENI achieves 5-17% higher NDCG@100 than the state of the art.
Spectral clustering is a leading and popular technique in unsupervised data analysis. Two of its major limitations are scalability and generalization of the spectral embedding (i.e., out-of-sample-extension). In this paper we introduce a deep learning approach to spectral clustering that overcomes the above shortcomings. Our network, which we call SpectralNet, learns a map that embeds input data points into the eigenspace of their associated graph Laplacian matrix and subsequently clusters them. We train SpectralNet using a procedure that involves constrained stochastic optimization. Stochastic optimization allows it to scale to large datasets, while the constraints, which are implemented using a special-purpose output layer, allow us to keep the network output orthogonal. Moreover, the map learned by SpectralNet naturally generalizes the spectral embedding to unseen data points. To further improve the quality of the clustering, we replace the standard pairwise Gaussian affinities with affinities leaned from unlabeled data using a Siamese network. Additional improvement can be achieved by applying the network to code representations produced, e.g., by standard autoencoders. Our end-to-end learning procedure is fully unsupervised. In addition, we apply VC dimension theory to derive a lower bound on the size of SpectralNet. State-of-the-art clustering results are reported on the Reuters dataset. Our implementation is publicly available at //github.com/kstant0725/SpectralNet .