Sequential VAEs have been successfully considered for many high-dimensional time series modelling problems, with many variant models relying on discrete-time mechanisms such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs). On the other hand, continuous-time methods have recently gained attraction, especially in the context of irregularly-sampled time series, where they can better handle the data than discrete-time methods. One such class are Gaussian process variational autoencoders (GPVAEs), where the VAE prior is set as a Gaussian process (GP). However, a major limitation of GPVAEs is that it inherits the cubic computational cost as GPs, making it unattractive to practioners. In this work, we leverage the equivalent discrete state space representation of Markovian GPs to enable linear time GPVAE training via Kalman filtering and smoothing. For our model, Markovian GPVAE (MGPVAE), we show on a variety of high-dimensional temporal and spatiotemporal tasks that our method performs favourably compared to existing approaches whilst being computationally highly scalable.
Artificial neural networks show promising performance in detecting correlations within data that are associated with specific outcomes. However, the black-box nature of such models can hinder the knowledge advancement in research fields by obscuring the decision process and preventing scientist to fully conceptualize predicted outcomes. Furthermore, domain experts like healthcare providers need explainable predictions to assess whether a predicted outcome can be trusted in high stakes scenarios and to help them integrating a model into their own routine. Therefore, interpretable models play a crucial role for the incorporation of machine learning into high stakes scenarios like healthcare. In this paper we introduce Convolutional Motif Kernel Networks, a neural network architecture that involves learning a feature representation within a subspace of the reproducing kernel Hilbert space of the position-aware motif kernel function. The resulting model enables to directly interpret and evaluate prediction outcomes by providing a biologically and medically meaningful explanation without the need for additional post-hoc analysis. We show that our model is able to robustly learn on small datasets and reaches state-of-the-art performance on relevant healthcare prediction tasks. Our proposed method can be utilized on DNA and protein sequences. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method learns biologically meaningful concepts directly from data using an end-to-end learning scheme.
Higher order artificial neurons whose outputs are computed by applying an activation function to a higher order multinomial function of the inputs have been considered in the past, but did not gain acceptance due to the extra parameters and computational cost. However, higher order neurons have significantly greater learning capabilities since the decision boundaries of higher order neurons can be complex surfaces instead of just hyperplanes. The boundary of a single quadratic neuron can be a general hyper-quadric surface allowing it to learn many nonlinearly separable datasets. Since quadratic forms can be represented by symmetric matrices, only $\frac{n(n+1)}{2}$ additional parameters are needed instead of $n^2$. A quadratic Logistic regression model is first presented. Solutions to the XOR problem with a single quadratic neuron are considered. The complete vectorized equations for both forward and backward propagation in feedforward networks composed of quadratic neurons are derived. A reduced parameter quadratic neural network model with just $ n $ additional parameters per neuron that provides a compromise between learning ability and computational cost is presented. Comparison on benchmark classification datasets are used to demonstrate that a final layer of quadratic neurons enables networks to achieve higher accuracy with significantly fewer hidden layer neurons. In particular this paper shows that any dataset composed of $C$ bounded clusters can be separated with only a single layer of $C$ quadratic neurons.
Elongated anisotropic Gaussian filters are used for the orientation estimation of fibers. In cases where computed tomography images are noisy, roughly resolved, and of low contrast, they are the method of choice even if being efficient only in virtual 2D slices. However, minor inaccuracies in the anisotropic Gaussian filters can carry over to the orientation estimation. Therefore, this paper proposes a modified algorithm for 2D anisotropic Gaussian filters and shows that this improves their precision. Applied to synthetic images of fiber bundles, it is more accurate and robust to noise. Finally, the effectiveness of the approach is shown by applying it to real-world images of sheet molding compounds.
Recently, neural networks have shown impressive progress across diverse fields, with speech processing being no exception. However, recent breakthroughs in this area require extensive offline training using large datasets and tremendous computing resources. Unfortunately, these models struggle to retain their previously acquired knowledge when learning new tasks continually, and retraining from scratch is almost always impractical. In this paper, we investigate the problem of learning sequence-to-sequence models for spoken language understanding in a class-incremental learning (CIL) setting and we propose COCONUT, a CIL method that relies on the combination of experience replay and contrastive learning. Through a modified version of the standard supervised contrastive loss applied only to the rehearsal samples, COCONUT preserves the learned representations by pulling closer samples from the same class and pushing away the others. Moreover, we leverage a multimodal contrastive loss that helps the model learn more discriminative representations of the new data by aligning audio and text features. We also investigate different contrastive designs to combine the strengths of the contrastive loss with teacher-student architectures used for distillation. Experiments on two established SLU datasets reveal the effectiveness of our proposed approach and significant improvements over the baselines. We also show that COCONUT can be combined with methods that operate on the decoder side of the model, resulting in further metrics improvements.
Emotions lie on a continuum, but current models treat emotions as a finite valued discrete variable. This representation does not capture the diversity in the expression of emotion. To better represent emotions we propose the use of natural language descriptions (or prompts). In this work, we address the challenge of automatically generating these prompts and training a model to better learn emotion representations from audio and prompt pairs. We use acoustic properties that are correlated to emotion like pitch, intensity, speech rate, and articulation rate to automatically generate prompts i.e. 'acoustic prompts'. We use a contrastive learning objective to map speech to their respective acoustic prompts. We evaluate our model on Emotion Audio Retrieval and Speech Emotion Recognition. Our results show that the acoustic prompts significantly improve the model's performance in EAR, in various Precision@K metrics. In SER, we observe a 3.8% relative accuracy improvement on the Ravdess dataset.
Interactive Natural Language Processing (iNLP) has emerged as a novel paradigm within the field of NLP, aimed at addressing limitations in existing frameworks while aligning with the ultimate goals of artificial intelligence. This paradigm considers language models as agents capable of observing, acting, and receiving feedback iteratively from external entities. Specifically, language models in this context can: (1) interact with humans for better understanding and addressing user needs, personalizing responses, aligning with human values, and improving the overall user experience; (2) interact with knowledge bases for enriching language representations with factual knowledge, enhancing the contextual relevance of responses, and dynamically leveraging external information to generate more accurate and informed responses; (3) interact with models and tools for effectively decomposing and addressing complex tasks, leveraging specialized expertise for specific subtasks, and fostering the simulation of social behaviors; and (4) interact with environments for learning grounded representations of language, and effectively tackling embodied tasks such as reasoning, planning, and decision-making in response to environmental observations. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of iNLP, starting by proposing a unified definition and framework of the concept. We then provide a systematic classification of iNLP, dissecting its various components, including interactive objects, interaction interfaces, and interaction methods. We proceed to delve into the evaluation methodologies used in the field, explore its diverse applications, scrutinize its ethical and safety issues, and discuss prospective research directions. This survey serves as an entry point for researchers who are interested in this rapidly evolving area and offers a broad view of the current landscape and future trajectory of iNLP.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully used in many problems involving graph-structured data, achieving state-of-the-art performance. GNNs typically employ a message-passing scheme, in which every node aggregates information from its neighbors using a permutation-invariant aggregation function. Standard well-examined choices such as the mean or sum aggregation functions have limited capabilities, as they are not able to capture interactions among neighbors. In this work, we formalize these interactions using an information-theoretic framework that notably includes synergistic information. Driven by this definition, we introduce the Graph Ordering Attention (GOAT) layer, a novel GNN component that captures interactions between nodes in a neighborhood. This is achieved by learning local node orderings via an attention mechanism and processing the ordered representations using a recurrent neural network aggregator. This design allows us to make use of a permutation-sensitive aggregator while maintaining the permutation-equivariance of the proposed GOAT layer. The GOAT model demonstrates its increased performance in modeling graph metrics that capture complex information, such as the betweenness centrality and the effective size of a node. In practical use-cases, its superior modeling capability is confirmed through its success in several real-world node classification benchmarks.
Embedding models for deterministic Knowledge Graphs (KG) have been extensively studied, with the purpose of capturing latent semantic relations between entities and incorporating the structured knowledge into machine learning. However, there are many KGs that model uncertain knowledge, which typically model the inherent uncertainty of relations facts with a confidence score, and embedding such uncertain knowledge represents an unresolved challenge. The capturing of uncertain knowledge will benefit many knowledge-driven applications such as question answering and semantic search by providing more natural characterization of the knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertain KG embedding model UKGE, which aims to preserve both structural and uncertainty information of relation facts in the embedding space. Unlike previous models that characterize relation facts with binary classification techniques, UKGE learns embeddings according to the confidence scores of uncertain relation facts. To further enhance the precision of UKGE, we also introduce probabilistic soft logic to infer confidence scores for unseen relation facts during training. We propose and evaluate two variants of UKGE based on different learning objectives. Experiments are conducted on three real-world uncertain KGs via three tasks, i.e. confidence prediction, relation fact ranking, and relation fact classification. UKGE shows effectiveness in capturing uncertain knowledge by achieving promising results on these tasks, and consistently outperforms baselines on these tasks.
Graphs, which describe pairwise relations between objects, are essential representations of many real-world data such as social networks. In recent years, graph neural networks, which extend the neural network models to graph data, have attracted increasing attention. Graph neural networks have been applied to advance many different graph related tasks such as reasoning dynamics of the physical system, graph classification, and node classification. Most of the existing graph neural network models have been designed for static graphs, while many real-world graphs are inherently dynamic. For example, social networks are naturally evolving as new users joining and new relations being created. Current graph neural network models cannot utilize the dynamic information in dynamic graphs. However, the dynamic information has been proven to enhance the performance of many graph analytical tasks such as community detection and link prediction. Hence, it is necessary to design dedicated graph neural networks for dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose DGNN, a new {\bf D}ynamic {\bf G}raph {\bf N}eural {\bf N}etwork model, which can model the dynamic information as the graph evolving. In particular, the proposed framework can keep updating node information by capturing the sequential information of edges, the time intervals between edges and information propagation coherently. Experimental results on various dynamic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
We investigate a lattice-structured LSTM model for Chinese NER, which encodes a sequence of input characters as well as all potential words that match a lexicon. Compared with character-based methods, our model explicitly leverages word and word sequence information. Compared with word-based methods, lattice LSTM does not suffer from segmentation errors. Gated recurrent cells allow our model to choose the most relevant characters and words from a sentence for better NER results. Experiments on various datasets show that lattice LSTM outperforms both word-based and character-based LSTM baselines, achieving the best results.