Tree Echo State Networks

In this paper we present the Tree Echo State Network (TreeESN) model, generalizing the paradigm of Reservoir Computing to tree structured data. TreeESNs exploit an untrained generalized recursive reservoir, exhibiting extreme efficiency for learning in structured domains. In addition, we highlight through the paper other characteristics of the approach: First, we discuss the Markovian characterization of reservoir dynamics, extended to the case of tree domains, that is implied by the contractive setting of the TreeESN state transition function. Second, we study two types of state mapping functions to map the tree structured state of TreeESN into a fixed-size feature representation for classification or regression tasks. The critical role of the relation between the choice of the state mapping function and the Markovian characterization of the task is analyzed and experimentally investigated on both artificial and real-world tasks. Finally, experimental results on benchmark and real-world tasks show that the TreeESN approach, in spite of its efficiency, can achieve comparable results with state-of-the-art, although more complex, neural and kernel based models for tree structured data

Attention-Aware Face Hallucination via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Face hallucination is a domain-specific super-resolution problem with the goal to generate high-resolution (HR) faces from low-resolution (LR) input images. In contrast to existing methods that often learn a single patch-to-patch mapping from LR to HR images and are regardless of the contextual interdependency between patches, we propose a novel Attention-aware Face Hallucination (Attention-FH) framework which resorts to deep reinforcement learning for sequentially discovering attended patches and then performing the facial part enhancement by fully exploiting the global interdependency of the image. Specifically, in each time step, the recurrent policy network is proposed to dynamically specify a new attended region by incorporating what happened in the past. The state (i.e., face hallucination result for the whole image) can thus be exploited and updated by the local enhancement network on the selected region. The Attention-FH approach jointly learns the recurrent policy network and local enhancement network through maximizing the long-term reward that reflects the hallucination performance over the whole image. Therefore, our proposed Attention-FH is capable of adaptively personalizing an optimal searching path for each face image according to its own characteristic. Extensive experiments show our approach significantly surpasses the state-of-the-arts on in-the-wild faces with large pose and illumination variations

Probabilistic learning on graphs via contextual architectures

We propose a novel methodology for representation learning on graph-structured data, in which a stack of Bayesian Networks learns different distributions of a vertex's neighbour- hood. Through an incremental construction policy and layer-wise training, we can build deeper architectures with respect to typical graph convolutional neural networks, with benefits in terms of context spreading between vertices. First, the model learns from graphs via maximum likelihood estimation without using target labels. Then, a supervised readout is applied to the learned graph embeddings to deal with graph classification and vertex classification tasks, showing competitive results against neural models for graphs. The computational complexity is linear in the number of edges, facilitating learning on large scale data sets. By studying how depth affects the performances of our model, we discover that a broader context generally improves performances. In turn, this leads to a critical analysis of some benchmarks used in literature

An adaptive model for learning molecular endpoints

I will describe a recursive neural network that deals with undirected graphs, and its application to predicting property labels or activity values of small molecules. The model is entirely general, in that it can process any undirected graph with a finite number of nodes by factorising it into a number of directed graphs with the same skeleton. The model\u27s only input in the applications I will present is the graph representing the chemical structure of the molecule. In spite of its simplicity, the model outperforms or matches the state of the art in three of the four tasks, and in the fourth is outperformed only by a method resorting to a very problem-specific feature