Predictive models of student success in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a critical component of effective content personalization and adaptive interventions. In this article we review the state of the art in predictive models of student success in MOOCs and present a categorization of MOOC research according to the predictors (features), prediction (outcomes), and underlying theoretical model. We critically survey work across each category, providing data on the raw data source, feature engineering, statistical model, evaluation method, prediction architecture, and other aspects of these experiments. Such a review is particularly useful given the rapid expansion of predictive modeling research in MOOCs since the emergence of major MOOC platforms in 2012. This survey reveals several key methodological gaps, which include extensive filtering of experimental subpopulations, ineffective student model evaluation, and the use of experimental data which would be unavailable for real-world student success prediction and intervention, which is the ultimate goal of such models. Finally, we highlight opportunities for future research, which include temporal modeling, research bridging predictive and explanatory student models, work which contributes to learning theory, and evaluating long-term learner success in MOOCs.
This work focuses on mitigating two limitations in the joint learning of local feature detectors and descriptors. First, the ability to estimate the local shape (scale, orientation, etc.) of feature points is often neglected during dense feature extraction, while the shape-awareness is crucial to acquire stronger geometric invariance. Second, the localization accuracy of detected keypoints is not sufficient to reliably recover camera geometry, which has become the bottleneck in tasks such as 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we present ASLFeat, with three light-weight yet effective modifications to mitigate above issues. First, we resort to deformable convolutional networks to densely estimate and apply local transformation. Second, we take advantage of the inherent feature hierarchy to restore spatial resolution and low-level details for accurate keypoint localization. Finally, we use a peakiness measurement to relate feature responses and derive more indicative detection scores. The effect of each modification is thoroughly studied, and the evaluation is extensively conducted across a variety of practical scenarios. State-of-the-art results are reported that demonstrate the superiority of our methods.
Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, the edge computing systems integrate computing, storage and network resources at the edge of the network to provide computing infrastructure, enabling developers to quickly develop and deploy edge applications. Nowadays the edge computing systems have received widespread attention in both industry and academia. To explore new research opportunities and assist users in selecting suitable edge computing systems for specific applications, this survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the existing edge computing systems and introduces representative projects. A comparison of open source tools is presented according to their applicability. Finally, we highlight energy efficiency and deep learning optimization of edge computing systems. Open issues for analyzing and designing an edge computing system are also studied in this survey.
Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. As the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Different from previous surveys, this survey paper reviews over forty representative transfer learning approaches from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.
The field of natural language processing has seen impressive progress in recent years, with neural network models replacing many of the traditional systems. A plethora of new models have been proposed, many of which are thought to be opaque compared to their feature-rich counterparts. This has led researchers to analyze, interpret, and evaluate neural networks in novel and more fine-grained ways. In this survey paper, we review analysis methods in neural language processing, categorize them according to prominent research trends, highlight existing limitations, and point to potential directions for future work.
The process of translation is ambiguous, in that there are typically many valid trans- lations for a given sentence. This gives rise to significant variation in parallel cor- pora, however, most current models of machine translation do not account for this variation, instead treating the prob- lem as a deterministic process. To this end, we present a deep generative model of machine translation which incorporates a chain of latent variables, in order to ac- count for local lexical and syntactic varia- tion in parallel corpora. We provide an in- depth analysis of the pitfalls encountered in variational inference for training deep generative models. Experiments on sev- eral different language pairs demonstrate that the model consistently improves over strong baselines.
Learning sophisticated feature interactions behind user behaviors is critical in maximizing CTR for recommender systems. Despite great progress, existing methods have a strong bias towards low- or high-order interactions, or rely on expertise feature engineering. In this paper, we show that it is possible to derive an end-to-end learning model that emphasizes both low- and high-order feature interactions. The proposed framework, DeepFM, combines the power of factorization machines for recommendation and deep learning for feature learning in a new neural network architecture. Compared to the latest Wide & Deep model from Google, DeepFM has a shared raw feature input to both its "wide" and "deep" components, with no need of feature engineering besides raw features. DeepFM, as a general learning framework, can incorporate various network architectures in its deep component. In this paper, we study two instances of DeepFM where its "deep" component is DNN and PNN respectively, for which we denote as DeepFM-D and DeepFM-P. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepFM-D and DeepFM-P over the existing models for CTR prediction, on both benchmark data and commercial data. We conduct online A/B test in Huawei App Market, which reveals that DeepFM-D leads to more than 10% improvement of click-through rate in the production environment, compared to a well-engineered LR model. We also covered related practice in deploying our framework in Huawei App Market.
Tracking humans that are interacting with the other subjects or environment remains unsolved in visual tracking, because the visibility of the human of interests in videos is unknown and might vary over time. In particular, it is still difficult for state-of-the-art human trackers to recover complete human trajectories in crowded scenes with frequent human interactions. In this work, we consider the visibility status of a subject as a fluent variable, whose change is mostly attributed to the subject's interaction with the surrounding, e.g., crossing behind another object, entering a building, or getting into a vehicle, etc. We introduce a Causal And-Or Graph (C-AOG) to represent the causal-effect relations between an object's visibility fluent and its activities, and develop a probabilistic graph model to jointly reason the visibility fluent change (e.g., from visible to invisible) and track humans in videos. We formulate this joint task as an iterative search of a feasible causal graph structure that enables fast search algorithm, e.g., dynamic programming method. We apply the proposed method on challenging video sequences to evaluate its capabilities of estimating visibility fluent changes of subjects and tracking subjects of interests over time. Results with comparisons demonstrate that our method outperforms the alternative trackers and can recover complete trajectories of humans in complicated scenarios with frequent human interactions.
The recent popularity of deep neural networks (DNNs) has generated a lot of research interest in performing DNN-related computation efficiently. However, the primary focus is usually very narrow and limited to (i) inference -- i.e. how to efficiently execute already trained models and (ii) image classification networks as the primary benchmark for evaluation. Our primary goal in this work is to break this myopic view by (i) proposing a new benchmark for DNN training, called TBD (TBD is short for Training Benchmark for DNNs), that uses a representative set of DNN models that cover a wide range of machine learning applications: image classification, machine translation, speech recognition, object detection, adversarial networks, reinforcement learning, and (ii) by performing an extensive performance analysis of training these different applications on three major deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow, MXNet, CNTK) across different hardware configurations (single-GPU, multi-GPU, and multi-machine). TBD currently covers six major application domains and eight different state-of-the-art models. We present a new toolchain for performance analysis for these models that combines the targeted usage of existing performance analysis tools, careful selection of new and existing metrics and methodologies to analyze the results, and utilization of domain specific characteristics of DNN training. We also build a new set of tools for memory profiling in all three major frameworks; much needed tools that can finally shed some light on precisely how much memory is consumed by different data structures (weights, activations, gradients, workspace) in DNN training. By using our tools and methodologies, we make several important observations and recommendations on where the future research and optimization of DNN training should be focused.
The aim of knowledge graphs is to gather knowledge about the world and provide a structured representation of this knowledge. Current knowledge graphs are far from complete. To address the incompleteness of the knowledge graphs, link prediction approaches have been developed which make probabilistic predictions about new links in a knowledge graph given the existing links. Tensor factorization approaches have proven promising for such link prediction problems. In this paper, we develop a simple tensor factorization model called SimplE, through a slight modification of the Polyadic Decomposition model from 1927. The complexity of SimplE grows linearly with the size of embeddings. The embeddings learned through SimplE are interpretable, and certain types of expert knowledge in terms of logical rules can be incorporated into these embeddings through weight tying. We prove SimplE is fully-expressive and derive a bound on the size of its embeddings for full expressivity. We show empirically that, despite its simplicity, SimplE outperforms several state-of-the-art tensor factorization techniques.
Click through rate (CTR) prediction of image ads is the core task of online display advertising systems, and logistic regression (LR) has been frequently applied as the prediction model. However, LR model lacks the ability of extracting complex and intrinsic nonlinear features from handcrafted high-dimensional image features, which limits its effectiveness. To solve this issue, in this paper, we introduce a novel deep neural network (DNN) based model that directly predicts the CTR of an image ad based on raw image pixels and other basic features in one step. The DNN model employs convolution layers to automatically extract representative visual features from images, and nonlinear CTR features are then learned from visual features and other contextual features by using fully-connected layers. Empirical evaluations on a real world dataset with over 50 million records demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this method.