In 2020, the White House released the, "Call to Action to the Tech Community on New Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset," wherein artificial intelligence experts are asked to collect data and develop text mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19. The Allen Institute for AI and collaborators announced the availability of a rapidly growing open dataset of publications, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). As the pace of research accelerates, biomedical scientists struggle to stay current. To expedite their investigations, scientists leverage hypothesis generation systems, which can automatically inspect published papers to discover novel implicit connections. We present an automated general purpose hypothesis generation systems AGATHA-C and AGATHA-GP for COVID-19 research. The systems are based on graph-mining and the transformer model. The systems are massively validated using retrospective information rediscovery and proactive analysis involving human-in-the-loop expert analysis. Both systems achieve high-quality predictions across domains (in some domains up to 0.97% ROC AUC) in fast computational time and are released to the broad scientific community to accelerate biomedical research. In addition, by performing the domain expert curated study, we show that the systems are able to discover on-going research findings such as the relationship between COVID-19 and oxytocin hormone.
Combination and aggregation techniques can significantly improve forecast accuracy. This also holds for probabilistic forecasting methods where predictive distributions are combined. There are several time-varying and adaptive weighting schemes such as Bayesian model averaging (BMA). However, the quality of different forecasts may vary not only over time but also within the distribution. For example, some distribution forecasts may be more accurate in the center of the distributions, while others are better at predicting the tails. Therefore, we introduce a new weighting method that considers the differences in performance over time and within the distribution. We discuss pointwise combination algorithms based on aggregation across quantiles that optimize with respect to the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS). After analyzing the theoretical properties of pointwise CRPS learning, we discuss B- and P-Spline-based estimation techniques for batch and online learning, based on quantile regression and prediction with expert advice. We prove that the proposed fully adaptive Bernstein online aggregation (BOA) method for pointwise CRPS online learning has optimal convergence properties. They are confirmed in simulations and a probabilistic forecasting study for European emission allowance (EUA) prices.
Owing to effective and flexible data acquisition, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has recently become a hotspot across the fields of computer vision (CV) and remote sensing (RS). Inspired by recent success of deep learning (DL), many advanced object detection and tracking approaches have been widely applied to various UAV-related tasks, such as environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, traffic management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the research progress and prospects of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods. More specifically, we first outline the challenges, statistics of existing methods, and provide solutions from the perspectives of DL-based models in three research topics: object detection from the image, object detection from the video, and object tracking from the video. Open datasets related to UAV-dominated object detection and tracking are exhausted, and four benchmark datasets are employed for performance evaluation using some state-of-the-art methods. Finally, prospects and considerations for the future work are discussed and summarized. It is expected that this survey can facilitate those researchers who come from remote sensing field with an overview of DL-based UAV object detection and tracking methods, along with some thoughts on their further developments.
Graphs are widely used as a popular representation of the network structure of connected data. Graph data can be found in a broad spectrum of application domains such as social systems, ecosystems, biological networks, knowledge graphs, and information systems. With the continuous penetration of artificial intelligence technologies, graph learning (i.e., machine learning on graphs) is gaining attention from both researchers and practitioners. Graph learning proves effective for many tasks, such as classification, link prediction, and matching. Generally, graph learning methods extract relevant features of graphs by taking advantage of machine learning algorithms. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview on the state-of-the-art of graph learning. Special attention is paid to four categories of existing graph learning methods, including graph signal processing, matrix factorization, random walk, and deep learning. Major models and algorithms under these categories are reviewed respectively. We examine graph learning applications in areas such as text, images, science, knowledge graphs, and combinatorial optimization. In addition, we discuss several promising research directions in this field.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a devastating effect on the health and well-being of the global population. A critical step in the fight against COVID-19 is effective screening of infected patients, with one of the key screening approaches being radiological imaging using chest radiography. Motivated by this, a number of artificial intelligence (AI) systems based on deep learning have been proposed and results have been shown to be quite promising in terms of accuracy in detecting patients infected with COVID-19 using chest radiography images. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, these developed AI systems have been closed source and unavailable to the research community for deeper understanding and extension, and unavailable for public access and use. Therefore, in this study we introduce COVID-Net, a deep convolutional neural network design tailored for the detection of COVID-19 cases from chest radiography images that is open source and available to the general public. We also describe the chest radiography dataset leveraged to train COVID-Net, which we will refer to as COVIDx and is comprised of 5941 posteroanterior chest radiography images across 2839 patient cases from two open access data repositories. Furthermore, we investigate how COVID-Net makes predictions using an explainability method in an attempt to gain deeper insights into critical factors associated with COVID cases, which can aid clinicians in improved screening. By no means a production-ready solution, the hope is that the open access COVID-Net, along with the description on constructing the open source COVIDx dataset, will be leveraged and build upon by both researchers and citizen data scientists alike to accelerate the development of highly accurate yet practical deep learning solutions for detecting COVID-19 cases and accelerate treatment of those who need it the most.
Recent years have witnessed the emerging success of graph neural networks (GNNs) for modeling structured data. However, most GNNs are designed for homogeneous graphs, in which all nodes and edges belong to the same types, making them infeasible to represent heterogeneous structures. In this paper, we present the Heterogeneous Graph Transformer (HGT) architecture for modeling Web-scale heterogeneous graphs. To model heterogeneity, we design node- and edge-type dependent parameters to characterize the heterogeneous attention over each edge, empowering HGT to maintain dedicated representations for different types of nodes and edges. To handle dynamic heterogeneous graphs, we introduce the relative temporal encoding technique into HGT, which is able to capture the dynamic structural dependency with arbitrary durations. To handle Web-scale graph data, we design the heterogeneous mini-batch graph sampling algorithm---HGSampling---for efficient and scalable training. Extensive experiments on the Open Academic Graph of 179 million nodes and 2 billion edges show that the proposed HGT model consistently outperforms all the state-of-the-art GNN baselines by 9%--21% on various downstream tasks.
The dominant graph-to-sequence transduction models employ graph neural networks for graph representation learning, where the structural information is reflected by the receptive field of neurons. Unlike graph neural networks that restrict the information exchange between immediate neighborhood, we propose a new model, known as Graph Transformer, that uses explicit relation encoding and allows direct communication between two distant nodes. It provides a more efficient way for global graph structure modeling. Experiments on the applications of text generation from Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) and syntax-based neural machine translation show the superiority of our proposed model. Specifically, our model achieves 27.4 BLEU on LDC2015E86 and 29.7 BLEU on LDC2017T10 for AMR-to-text generation, outperforming the state-of-the-art results by up to 2.2 points. On the syntax-based translation tasks, our model establishes new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU scores, 21.3 for English-to-German and 14.1 for English-to-Czech, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles, by over 1 BLEU.
Humans and animals have the ability to continually acquire, fine-tune, and transfer knowledge and skills throughout their lifespan. This ability, referred to as lifelong learning, is mediated by a rich set of neurocognitive mechanisms that together contribute to the development and specialization of our sensorimotor skills as well as to long-term memory consolidation and retrieval. Consequently, lifelong learning capabilities are crucial for autonomous agents interacting in the real world and processing continuous streams of information. However, lifelong learning remains a long-standing challenge for machine learning and neural network models since the continual acquisition of incrementally available information from non-stationary data distributions generally leads to catastrophic forgetting or interference. This limitation represents a major drawback for state-of-the-art deep neural network models that typically learn representations from stationary batches of training data, thus without accounting for situations in which information becomes incrementally available over time. In this review, we critically summarize the main challenges linked to lifelong learning for artificial learning systems and compare existing neural network approaches that alleviate, to different extents, catastrophic forgetting. We discuss well-established and emerging research motivated by lifelong learning factors in biological systems such as structural plasticity, memory replay, curriculum and transfer learning, intrinsic motivation, and multisensory integration.
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved many recent successes, yet experiment turn-around time remains a key bottleneck in research and in practice. We investigate how to optimize existing deep RL algorithms for modern computers, specifically for a combination of CPUs and GPUs. We confirm that both policy gradient and Q-value learning algorithms can be adapted to learn using many parallel simulator instances. We further find it possible to train using batch sizes considerably larger than are standard, without negatively affecting sample complexity or final performance. We leverage these facts to build a unified framework for parallelization that dramatically hastens experiments in both classes of algorithm. All neural network computations use GPUs, accelerating both data collection and training. Our results include using an entire DGX-1 to learn successful strategies in Atari games in mere minutes, using both synchronous and asynchronous algorithms.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a renaissance recently, making major progress in key domains such as vision, language, control, and decision-making. This has been due, in part, to cheap data and cheap compute resources, which have fit the natural strengths of deep learning. However, many defining characteristics of human intelligence, which developed under much different pressures, remain out of reach for current approaches. In particular, generalizing beyond one's experiences--a hallmark of human intelligence from infancy--remains a formidable challenge for modern AI. The following is part position paper, part review, and part unification. We argue that combinatorial generalization must be a top priority for AI to achieve human-like abilities, and that structured representations and computations are key to realizing this objective. Just as biology uses nature and nurture cooperatively, we reject the false choice between "hand-engineering" and "end-to-end" learning, and instead advocate for an approach which benefits from their complementary strengths. We explore how using relational inductive biases within deep learning architectures can facilitate learning about entities, relations, and rules for composing them. We present a new building block for the AI toolkit with a strong relational inductive bias--the graph network--which generalizes and extends various approaches for neural networks that operate on graphs, and provides a straightforward interface for manipulating structured knowledge and producing structured behaviors. We discuss how graph networks can support relational reasoning and combinatorial generalization, laying the foundation for more sophisticated, interpretable, and flexible patterns of reasoning.