How scientists navigate between the need to capitalize on their prior knowledge by specializing, and the urge to adapt to evolving research opportunities? Drawing from diverse perspectives on adaptation, in particular from institutional change and cultural evolution, this paper proposes an unsupervised Bayesian model of the evolution of scientists' research portfolios in response to transformations in their field. The model relies on scientific abstracts and authorship data to evaluate the influence of intellectual, social, and institutional resources on scientists' trajectories within a cohort of $2\,195$ high-energy physicists between 2000 and 2019. The reallocation of research efforts is shown to be shaped by learning costs, thus enhancing the utility of the scientific capital disseminated among scientists. Two dimensions of social capital, namely ``diversity'' and ``power'', have opposite effects on the magnitude of change in scientists' research interests: while ``diversity'' disrupts and expands research interests, ``power'' stabilizes physicists' research agendas -- as does institutional stability. Social capital plays a more crucial role in shifts between cognitively distant research areas. This contribution paves the way for further investigation of science and scientific communities as adaptative systems.
We use Markov categories to develop generalizations of the theory of Markov chains and hidden Markov models in an abstract setting. This comprises characterizations of hidden Markov models in terms of local and global conditional independences as well as existing algorithms for Bayesian filtering and smoothing applicable in all Markov categories with conditionals. We show that these algorithms specialize to existing ones such as the Kalman filter, forward-backward algorithm, and the Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoother when instantiated in appropriate Markov categories. Under slightly stronger assumptions, we also prove that the sequence of outputs of the Bayes filter is itself a Markov chain with a concrete formula for its transition maps. There are two main features of this categorical framework. The first is its generality, as it can be used in any Markov category with conditionals. In particular, it provides a systematic unified account of hidden Markov models and algorithms for filtering and smoothing in discrete probability, Gaussian probability, measure-theoretic probability, possibilistic nondeterminism and others at the same time. The second feature is the intuitive visual representation of information flow in these algorithms in terms of string diagrams.
The brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have garnered considerable research interest due to their superior performance and energy efficiency in processing temporal signals. Recently, a novel multi-compartment spiking neuron model, namely the Two-Compartment LIF (TC-LIF) model, has been proposed and exhibited a remarkable capacity for sequential modelling. However, training the TC-LIF model presents challenges stemming from the large memory consumption and the issue of gradient vanishing associated with the Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) algorithm. To address these challenges, online learning methodologies emerge as a promising solution. Yet, to date, the application of online learning methods in SNNs has been predominantly confined to simplified Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron models. In this paper, we present a novel online learning method specifically tailored for networks of TC-LIF neurons. Additionally, we propose a refined TC-LIF neuron model called Adaptive TC-LIF, which is carefully designed to enhance temporal information integration in online learning scenarios. Extensive experiments, conducted on various sequential benchmarks, demonstrate that our approach successfully preserves the superior sequential modeling capabilities of the TC-LIF neuron while incorporating the training efficiency and hardware friendliness of online learning. As a result, it offers a multitude of opportunities to leverage neuromorphic solutions for processing temporal signals.
Many measures of human-robot trust have proliferated across the HRI research literature because each attempts to capture the factors that impact trust despite its many dimensions. None of the previous trust measures, however, address the systems of inequity and structures of power present in HRI research or attempt to counteract the systematic biases and potential harms caused by HRI systems. This position paper proposes a participatory and social justice-oriented approach for the design and evaluation of a trust measure. This proposed process would iteratively co-design the trust measure with the community for whom the HRI system is being created. The process would prioritize that community's needs and unique circumstances to produce a trust measure that accurately reflects the factors that impact their trust in a robot.
The recent surge in generative AI technologies, such as large language models and diffusion models, have boosted the development of AI applications in various domains, including science, finance, and education. Concurrently, adaptive learning, a concept that has gained substantial interest in the educational sphere, has proven its efficacy in enhancing students' learning efficiency. In this position paper, we aim to shed light on the intersectional studies of these two methods, which combine generative AI with adaptive learning concepts. By presenting discussions about the benefits, challenges, and potentials in this field, we argue that this union will contribute significantly to the development of the next stage learning format in education.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.
Automatic KB completion for commonsense knowledge graphs (e.g., ATOMIC and ConceptNet) poses unique challenges compared to the much studied conventional knowledge bases (e.g., Freebase). Commonsense knowledge graphs use free-form text to represent nodes, resulting in orders of magnitude more nodes compared to conventional KBs (18x more nodes in ATOMIC compared to Freebase (FB15K-237)). Importantly, this implies significantly sparser graph structures - a major challenge for existing KB completion methods that assume densely connected graphs over a relatively smaller set of nodes. In this paper, we present novel KB completion models that can address these challenges by exploiting the structural and semantic context of nodes. Specifically, we investigate two key ideas: (1) learning from local graph structure, using graph convolutional networks and automatic graph densification and (2) transfer learning from pre-trained language models to knowledge graphs for enhanced contextual representation of knowledge. We describe our method to incorporate information from both these sources in a joint model and provide the first empirical results for KB completion on ATOMIC and evaluation with ranking metrics on ConceptNet. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of language model representations in boosting link prediction performance and the advantages of learning from local graph structure (+1.5 points in MRR for ConceptNet) when training on subgraphs for computational efficiency. Further analysis on model predictions shines light on the types of commonsense knowledge that language models capture well.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.
Embedding entities and relations into a continuous multi-dimensional vector space have become the dominant method for knowledge graph embedding in representation learning. However, most existing models ignore to represent hierarchical knowledge, such as the similarities and dissimilarities of entities in one domain. We proposed to learn a Domain Representations over existing knowledge graph embedding models, such that entities that have similar attributes are organized into the same domain. Such hierarchical knowledge of domains can give further evidence in link prediction. Experimental results show that domain embeddings give a significant improvement over the most recent state-of-art baseline knowledge graph embedding models.
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on the ImageNet classification task has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) dataset of perceptual human judgments, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by huge margins. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.