Spatial transcriptomics (ST) captures gene expression within distinct regions (i.e., windows) of a tissue slide. Traditional supervised learning frameworks applied to model ST are constrained to predicting expression from slide image windows for gene types seen during training, failing to generalize to unseen gene types. To overcome this limitation, we propose a semantic guided network (SGN), a pioneering zero-shot framework for predicting gene expression from slide image windows. Considering a gene type can be described by functionality and phenotype, we dynamically embed a gene type to a vector per its functionality and phenotype, and employ this vector to project slide image windows to gene expression in feature space, unleashing zero-shot expression prediction for unseen gene types. The gene type functionality and phenotype are queried with a carefully designed prompt from a pre-trained large language model (LLM). On standard benchmark datasets, we demonstrate competitive zero-shot performance compared to past state-of-the-art supervised learning approaches.
Quantum Relative Entropy (QRE) programming is a recently popular and challenging class of convex optimization problems with significant applications in quantum computing and quantum information theory. We are interested in modern interior point (IP) methods based on optimal self-concordant barriers for the QRE cone. A range of theoretical and numerical challenges associated with such barrier functions and the QRE cones have hindered the scalability of IP methods. To address these challenges, we propose a series of numerical and linear algebraic techniques and heuristics aimed at enhancing the efficiency of gradient and Hessian computations for the self-concordant barrier function, solving linear systems, and performing matrix-vector products. We also introduce and deliberate about some interesting concepts related to QRE such as symmetric quantum relative entropy (SQRE). We also introduce a two-phase method for performing facial reduction that can significantly improve the performance of QRE programming. Our new techniques have been implemented in the latest version (DDS 2.2) of the software package DDS. In addition to handling QRE constraints, DDS accepts any combination of several other conic and non-conic convex constraints. Our comprehensive numerical experiments encompass several parts including 1) a comparison of DDS 2.2 with Hypatia for the nearest correlation matrix problem, 2) using DDS for combining QRE constraints with various other constraint types, and 3) calculating the key rate for quantum key distribution (QKD) channels and presenting results for several QKD protocols.
We prove a priori and a posteriori error estimates for physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for linear PDEs. We analyze elliptic equations in primal and mixed form, elasticity, parabolic, hyperbolic and Stokes equations; and a PDE constrained optimization problem. For the analysis, we propose an abstract framework in the common language of bilinear forms, and we show that coercivity and continuity lead to error estimates. The obtained estimates are sharp and reveal that the $L^2$ penalty approach for initial and boundary conditions in the PINN formulation weakens the norm of the error decay. Finally, utilizing recent advances in PINN optimization, we present numerical examples that illustrate the ability of the method to achieve accurate solutions.
Contextualized embeddings are the preferred tool for modeling Lexical Semantic Change (LSC). Current evaluations typically focus on a specific task known as Graded Change Detection (GCD). However, performance comparison across work are often misleading due to their reliance on diverse settings. In this paper, we evaluate state-of-the-art models and approaches for GCD under equal conditions. We further break the LSC problem into Word-in-Context (WiC) and Word Sense Induction (WSI) tasks, and compare models across these different levels. Our evaluation is performed across different languages on eight available benchmarks for LSC, and shows that (i) APD outperforms other approaches for GCD; (ii) XL-LEXEME outperforms other contextualized models for WiC, WSI, and GCD, while being comparable to GPT-4; (iii) there is a clear need for improving the modeling of word meanings, as well as focus on how, when, and why these meanings change, rather than solely focusing on the extent of semantic change.
Symmetry is a fundamental aspect of many real-world robotic tasks. However, current deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches can seldom harness and exploit symmetry effectively. Often, the learned behaviors fail to achieve the desired transformation invariances and suffer from motion artifacts. For instance, a quadruped may exhibit different gaits when commanded to move forward or backward, even though it is symmetrical about its torso. This issue becomes further pronounced in high-dimensional or complex environments, where DRL methods are prone to local optima and fail to explore regions of the state space equally. Past methods on encouraging symmetry for robotic tasks have studied this topic mainly in a single-task setting, where symmetry usually refers to symmetry in the motion, such as the gait patterns. In this paper, we revisit this topic for goal-conditioned tasks in robotics, where symmetry lies mainly in task execution and not necessarily in the learned motions themselves. In particular, we investigate two approaches to incorporate symmetry invariance into DRL -- data augmentation and mirror loss function. We provide a theoretical foundation for using augmented samples in an on-policy setting. Based on this, we show that the corresponding approach achieves faster convergence and improves the learned behaviors in various challenging robotic tasks, from climbing boxes with a quadruped to dexterous manipulation.
Euler diagrams are a tool for the graphical representation of set relations. Due to their simple way of visualizing elements in the sets by geometric containment, they are easily readable by an inexperienced reader. Euler diagrams where the sets are visualized as aligned rectangles are of special interest. In this work, we link the existence of such rectangular Euler diagrams to the order dimension of an associated order relation. For this, we consider Euler diagrams in one and two dimensions. In the one-dimensional case, this correspondence provides us with a polynomial-time algorithm to compute the Euler diagrams, while the two-dimensional case results in an exponential-time algorithm.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
As a crucial component in task-oriented dialog systems, the Natural Language Generation (NLG) module converts a dialog act represented in a semantic form into a response in natural language. The success of traditional template-based or statistical models typically relies on heavily annotated data, which is infeasible for new domains. Therefore, it is pivotal for an NLG system to generalize well with limited labelled data in real applications. To this end, we present FewShotWoz, the first NLG benchmark to simulate the few-shot learning setting in task-oriented dialog systems. Further, we develop the SC-GPT model. It is pre-trained on a large set of annotated NLG corpus to acquire the controllable generation ability, and fine-tuned with only a few domain-specific labels to adapt to new domains. Experiments on FewShotWoz and the large Multi-Domain-WOZ datasets show that the proposed SC-GPT significantly outperforms existing methods, measured by various automatic metrics and human evaluations.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
The potential of graph convolutional neural networks for the task of zero-shot learning has been demonstrated recently. These models are highly sample efficient as related concepts in the graph structure share statistical strength allowing generalization to new classes when faced with a lack of data. However, knowledge from distant nodes can get diluted when propagating through intermediate nodes, because current approaches to zero-shot learning use graph propagation schemes that perform Laplacian smoothing at each layer. We show that extensive smoothing does not help the task of regressing classifier weights in zero-shot learning. In order to still incorporate information from distant nodes and utilize the graph structure, we propose an Attentive Dense Graph Propagation Module (ADGPM). ADGPM allows us to exploit the hierarchical graph structure of the knowledge graph through additional connections. These connections are added based on a node's relationship to its ancestors and descendants and an attention scheme is further used to weigh their contribution depending on the distance to the node. Finally, we illustrate that finetuning of the feature representation after training the ADGPM leads to considerable improvements. Our method achieves competitive results, outperforming previous zero-shot learning approaches.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.