8,189 research outputs found
Machine learning in solar physics
The application of machine learning in solar physics has the potential to
greatly enhance our understanding of the complex processes that take place in
the atmosphere of the Sun. By using techniques such as deep learning, we are
now in the position to analyze large amounts of data from solar observations
and identify patterns and trends that may not have been apparent using
traditional methods. This can help us improve our understanding of explosive
events like solar flares, which can have a strong effect on the Earth
environment. Predicting hazardous events on Earth becomes crucial for our
technological society. Machine learning can also improve our understanding of
the inner workings of the sun itself by allowing us to go deeper into the data
and to propose more complex models to explain them. Additionally, the use of
machine learning can help to automate the analysis of solar data, reducing the
need for manual labor and increasing the efficiency of research in this field.Comment: 100 pages, 13 figures, 286 references, accepted for publication as a
Living Review in Solar Physics (LRSP
AI-Generated Incentive Mechanism and Full-Duplex Semantic Communications for Information Sharing
The next generation of Internet services, such as Metaverse, rely on mixed
reality (MR) technology to provide immersive user experiences. However, the
limited computation power of MR headset-mounted devices (HMDs) hinders the
deployment of such services. Therefore, we propose an efficient information
sharing scheme based on full-duplex device-to-device (D2D) semantic
communications to address this issue. Our approach enables users to avoid heavy
and repetitive computational tasks, such as artificial intelligence-generated
content (AIGC) in the view images of all MR users. Specifically, a user can
transmit the generated content and semantic information extracted from their
view image to nearby users, who can then use this information to obtain the
spatial matching of computation results under their view images. We analyze the
performance of full-duplex D2D communications, including the achievable rate
and bit error probability, by using generalized small-scale fading models. To
facilitate semantic information sharing among users, we design a contract
theoretic AI-generated incentive mechanism. The proposed diffusion model
generates the optimal contract design, outperforming two deep reinforcement
learning algorithms, i.e., proximal policy optimization and soft actor-critic
algorithms. Our numerical analysis experiment proves the effectiveness of our
proposed methods. The code for this paper is available at
https://github.com/HongyangDu/SemSharingComment: Accepted by IEEE JSA
An investigation of entorhinal spatial representations in self-localisation behaviours
Spatial-modulated cells of the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) and neighbouring cortices are thought to provide the neural substrate for self-localisation behaviours. These cells include grid cells of the MEC which are thought to compute path integration operations to update self-location estimates. In order to read this grid code, downstream cells are thought to reconstruct a positional estimate as a simple rate-coded representation of space.
Here, I show the coding scheme of grid cell and putative readout cells recorded from mice performing a virtual reality (VR) linear location task which engaged mice in both beaconing and path integration behaviours. I found grid cells can encode two unique coding schemes on the linear track, namely a position code which reflects periodic grid fields anchored to salient features of the track and a distance code which reflects periodic grid fields without this anchoring. Grid cells were found to switch between these coding schemes within sessions. When grid cells were encoding position, mice performed better at trials that required path integration but not on trials that required beaconing. This result provides the first mechanistic evidence linking grid cell activity to path integration-dependent behaviour.
Putative readout cells were found in the form of ramp cells which fire proportionally as a function of location in defined regions of the linear track. This ramping activity was found to be primarily explained by track position rather than other kinematic variables like speed and acceleration. These representations were found to be maintained across both trial types and outcomes indicating they likely result from recall of the track structure.
Together, these results support the functional importance of grid and ramp cells for self-localisation behaviours. Future investigations will look into the coherence between these two neural populations, which may together form a complete neural system for coding and decoding self-location in the brain
Modular lifelong machine learning
Deep learning has drastically improved the state-of-the-art in many important fields, including computer vision and natural language processing (LeCun et al., 2015). However, it is expensive to train a deep neural network on a machine learning problem. The overall training cost further increases when one wants to solve additional problems. Lifelong machine learning (LML) develops algorithms that aim to efficiently learn to solve a sequence of problems, which become available one at a time. New problems are solved with less resources by transferring previously learned knowledge. At the same time, an LML algorithm needs to retain good performance on all encountered problems, thus avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Current approaches do not possess all the desired properties of an LML algorithm. First, they primarily focus on preventing catastrophic forgetting (Diaz-Rodriguez et al., 2018; Delange et al., 2021). As a result, they neglect some knowledge transfer properties. Furthermore, they assume that all problems in a sequence share the same input space. Finally, scaling these methods to a large sequence of problems remains a challenge.
Modular approaches to deep learning decompose a deep neural network into sub-networks, referred to as modules. Each module can then be trained to perform an atomic transformation, specialised in processing a distinct subset of inputs. This modular approach to storing knowledge makes it easy to only reuse the subset of modules which are useful for the task at hand.
This thesis introduces a line of research which demonstrates the merits of a modular approach to lifelong machine learning, and its ability to address the aforementioned shortcomings of other methods. Compared to previous work, we show that a modular approach can be used to achieve more LML properties than previously demonstrated. Furthermore, we develop tools which allow modular LML algorithms to scale in order to retain said properties on longer sequences of problems.
First, we introduce HOUDINI, a neurosymbolic framework for modular LML. HOUDINI represents modular deep neural networks as functional programs and accumulates a library of pre-trained modules over a sequence of problems. Given a new problem, we use program synthesis to select a suitable neural architecture, as well as a high-performing combination of pre-trained and new modules. We show that our approach has most of the properties desired from an LML algorithm. Notably, it can perform forward transfer, avoid negative transfer and prevent catastrophic forgetting, even across problems with disparate input domains and problems which require different neural architectures.
Second, we produce a modular LML algorithm which retains the properties of HOUDINI but can also scale to longer sequences of problems. To this end, we fix the choice of a neural architecture and introduce a probabilistic search framework, PICLE, for searching through different module combinations. To apply PICLE, we introduce two probabilistic models over neural modules which allows us to efficiently identify promising module combinations.
Third, we phrase the search over module combinations in modular LML as black-box optimisation, which allows one to make use of methods from the setting of hyperparameter optimisation (HPO). We then develop a new HPO method which marries a multi-fidelity approach with model-based optimisation. We demonstrate that this leads to improvement in anytime performance in the HPO setting and discuss how this can in turn be used to augment modular LML methods.
Overall, this thesis identifies a number of important LML properties, which have not all been attained in past methods, and presents an LML algorithm which can achieve all of them, apart from backward transfer
TabR: Unlocking the Power of Retrieval-Augmented Tabular Deep Learning
Deep learning (DL) models for tabular data problems are receiving
increasingly more attention, while the algorithms based on gradient-boosted
decision trees (GBDT) remain a strong go-to solution. Following the recent
trends in other domains, such as natural language processing and computer
vision, several retrieval-augmented tabular DL models have been recently
proposed. For a given target object, a retrieval-based model retrieves other
relevant objects, such as the nearest neighbors, from the available (training)
data and uses their features or even labels to make a better prediction.
However, we show that the existing retrieval-based tabular DL solutions provide
only minor, if any, benefits over the properly tuned simple retrieval-free
baselines. Thus, it remains unclear whether the retrieval-based approach is a
worthy direction for tabular DL.
In this work, we give a strong positive answer to this question. We start by
incrementally augmenting a simple feed-forward architecture with an
attention-like retrieval component similar to those of many (tabular)
retrieval-based models. Then, we highlight several details of the attention
mechanism that turn out to have a massive impact on the performance on tabular
data problems, but that were not explored in prior work. As a result, we design
TabR -- a simple retrieval-based tabular DL model which, on a set of public
benchmarks, demonstrates the best average performance among tabular DL models,
becomes the new state-of-the-art on several datasets, and even outperforms GBDT
models on the recently proposed ``GBDT-friendly'' benchmark (see the first
figure).Comment: Code: https://github.com/yandex-research/tabular-dl-tab
Beam scanning by liquid-crystal biasing in a modified SIW structure
A fixed-frequency beam-scanning 1D antenna based on Liquid Crystals (LCs) is designed for application in 2D scanning with lateral alignment. The 2D array environment imposes full decoupling of adjacent 1D antennas, which often conflicts with the LC requirement of DC biasing: the proposed design accommodates both. The LC medium is placed inside a Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) modified to work as a Groove Gap Waveguide, with radiating slots etched on the upper broad wall, that radiates as a Leaky-Wave Antenna (LWA). This allows effective application of the DC bias voltage needed for tuning the LCs. At the same time, the RF field remains laterally confined, enabling the possibility to lay several antennas in parallel and achieve 2D beam scanning. The design is validated by simulation employing the actual properties of a commercial LC medium
Exploiting Field Dependencies for Learning on Categorical Data
Traditional approaches for learning on categorical data underexploit the
dependencies between columns (\aka fields) in a dataset because they rely on
the embedding of data points driven alone by the classification/regression
loss. In contrast, we propose a novel method for learning on categorical data
with the goal of exploiting dependencies between fields. Instead of modelling
statistics of features globally (i.e., by the covariance matrix of features),
we learn a global field dependency matrix that captures dependencies between
fields and then we refine the global field dependency matrix at the
instance-wise level with different weights (so-called local dependency
modelling) w.r.t. each field to improve the modelling of the field
dependencies. Our algorithm exploits the meta-learning paradigm, i.e., the
dependency matrices are refined in the inner loop of the meta-learning
algorithm without the use of labels, whereas the outer loop intertwines the
updates of the embedding matrix (the matrix performing projection) and global
dependency matrix in a supervised fashion (with the use of labels). Our method
is simple yet it outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on six popular
dataset benchmarks. Detailed ablation studies provide additional insights into
our method.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
(submitted June 2022, accepted July 2023
Object Segmentation and Reconstruction Using Infrastructure Sensor Nodes for Autonomous Mobility
This thesis focuses on the Lidar point cloud processing for the infrastructure sensor node that serves as the perception system for autonomous robots with general mobility in indoor applications. Compared with typical schemes mounting sensors on the robots, the method acquires data from infrastructure sensor nodes, providing a more comprehensive view of the environment, which benefits the robot's navigation. The number of sensors would not need to be increased even for multiple robots, significantly reducing costs. In addition, with a central perception system using the infrastructure sensor nodes navigating every robot, a more comprehensive understanding of the current environment and all the robots' locations can be obtained for the control and operation of the autonomous robots.
For a robot in the detection range of the sensor node, the sensor node can detect and segment obstacles in its driveable area and reconstruct the incomplete, sparse point cloud of objects upon their movement. The complete shape by the reconstruction benefits the localization and path planning which follows the perception part of the robot's system.
Considering the sparse Lidar data and the variety of object categories in the environment, a model-free scheme is selected for object segmentation. Point segmentation starts with background filtering. Considering the complexity of the indoor environment, a depth-matching-based background removal approach is first proposed. However, later tests imply that the method is adequate but not time-efficient. Therefore, based on the depth matching-based method, a process that only focuses on the drive-able area of the robot is proposed, and the computational complexity is significantly reduced. With optimization, the computation time for processing one frame of data can be greatly increased, from 0.2 second by the first approach to 0.01 second by the second approach. After background filtering, the remaining points for occurring objects are segmented as separate clusters using an object clustering algorithm.
With independent clusters of objects, an object tracking algorithm is followed to allocate the point clusters with IDs and arrange the clusters in a time sequence. With a stream of clusters for a specific object in a time sequence, point registration is deployed to aggregate the clusters into a complete shape. And as noticed during the experiment, one of the differences between indoor and outdoor environments is that contact between objects in the indoor environment is much more common. The objects in contact are likely to be segmented as a single cluster by the model-free clustering algorithm, which needs to be avoided in the reconstruction process. Therefore an improvement is made in the tracking algorithm when contact happens. The algorithms in this thesis have been experimentally evaluated and presented
Self-supervised learning techniques for monitoring industrial spaces
Dissertação de mestrado em Matemática e ComputaçãoEste documento é uma Dissertação de Mestrado com o título ”Self-Supervised Learning Techniques for
Monitoring Industrial Spaces”e foi realizada e ambiente empresarial na empresa Neadvance - Machine Vision
S.A. em conjunto com a Universidade do Minho.
Esta dissertação surge de um grande projeto que consiste no desenvolvimento de uma plataforma de
monitorização de operações específicas num espaço industrial, denominada SMARTICS (Plataforma tecnoló gica para monitorização inteligente de espaços industriais abertos). Este projeto continha uma componente
de investigação para explorar um paradigma de aprendizagem diferente e os seus métodos - self-supervised
learning, que foi o foco e principal contributo deste trabalho. O supervised learning atingiu um limite, pois
exige anotações caras e dispendiosas. Em problemas reais, como em espaços industriais nem sempre é
possível adquirir um grande número de imagens. O self-supervised learning ajuda nesses problemas, ex traindo informações dos próprios dados e alcançando bom desempenho em conjuntos de dados de grande
escala. Este trabalho fornece uma revisão geral da literatura sobre a estrutura de self-supervised learning e
alguns métodos. Também aplica um método para resolver uma tarefa de classificação para se assemelhar
a um problema em um espaço industrial.This document is a Master’s Thesis with the title ”Self-Supervised Learning Techniques for Monitoring
Industrial Spaces” and was carried out in a business environment at Neadvance - Machine Vision S.A.
together with the University of Minho.
This dissertation arises from a major project that consists of developing a platform to monitor specific
operations in an industrial space, named SMARTICS (Plataforma tecnológica para monitorização inteligente
de espaços industriais abertos). This project contained a research component to explore a different learning
paradigm and its methods - self-supervised learning, which was the focus and main contribution of this work.
Supervised learning has reached a bottleneck as they require expensive and time-consuming annotations.
In real problems, such as in industrial spaces it is not always possible to require a large number of images.
Self-supervised learning helps these issues by extracting information from the data itself and has achieved
good performance in large-scale datasets. This work provides a comprehensive literature review of the self supervised learning framework and some methods. It also applies a method to solve a classification task to
resemble a problem in an industrial space and evaluate its performance
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