Fast-Slow Recurrent Neural Networks

Processing sequential data of variable length is a major challenge in a wide range of applications, such as speech recognition, language modeling, generative image modeling and machine translation. Here, we address this challenge by proposing a novel recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture, the Fast-Slow RNN (FS-RNN). The FS-RNN incorporates the strengths of both multiscale RNNs and deep transition RNNs as it processes sequential data on different timescales and learns complex transition functions from one time step to the next. We evaluate the FS-RNN on two character level language modeling data sets, Penn Treebank and Hutter Prize Wikipedia, where we improve state of the art results to $1.19$ and $1.25$ bits-per-character (BPC), respectively. In addition, an ensemble of two FS-RNNs achieves $1.20$ BPC on Hutter Prize Wikipedia outperforming the best known compression algorithm with respect to the BPC measure. We also present an empirical investigation of the learning and network dynamics of the FS-RNN, which explains the improved performance compared to other RNN architectures. Our approach is general as any kind of RNN cell is a possible building block for the FS-RNN architecture, and thus can be flexibly applied to different tasks.Comment: Corrected minor typos in Figure 1 and Zoneout citatio

Hierarchical Attention-Based Recurrent Highway Networks for Time Series Prediction

Time series prediction has been studied in a variety of domains. However, it is still challenging to predict future series given historical observations and past exogenous data. Existing methods either fail to consider the interactions among different components of exogenous variables which may affect the prediction accuracy, or cannot model the correlations between exogenous data and target data. Besides, the inherent temporal dynamics of exogenous data are also related to the target series prediction, and thus should be considered as well. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end deep learning model, i.e., Hierarchical attention-based Recurrent Highway Network (HRHN), which incorporates spatio-temporal feature extraction of exogenous variables and temporal dynamics modeling of target variables into a single framework. Moreover, by introducing the hierarchical attention mechanism, HRHN can adaptively select the relevant exogenous features in different semantic levels. We carry out comprehensive empirical evaluations with various methods over several datasets, and show that HRHN outperforms the state of the arts in time series prediction, especially in capturing sudden changes and sudden oscillations of time series

Real time expert system for anomaly detection of aerators based on computer vision technology and existing surveillance cameras

Aerators are essential and crucial auxiliary devices in intensive culture, especially in industrial culture in China. The traditional methods cannot accurately detect abnormal condition of aerators in time. Surveillance cameras are widely used as visual perception modules of the Internet of Things, and then using these widely existing surveillance cameras to realize real-time anomaly detection of aerators is a cost-free and easy-to-promote method. However, it is difficult to develop such an expert system due to some technical and applied challenges, e.g., illumination, occlusion, complex background, etc. To tackle these aforementioned challenges, we propose a real-time expert system based on computer vision technology and existing surveillance cameras for anomaly detection of aerators, which consists of two modules, i.e., object region detection and working state detection. First, it is difficult to detect the working state for some small object regions in whole images, and the time complexity of global feature comparison is also high, so we present an object region detection method based on the region proposal idea. Moreover, we propose a novel algorithm called reference frame Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (RF-KLT) algorithm for motion feature extraction in fixed regions. Then, we present a dimension reduction method of time series for establishing a feature dataset with obvious boundaries between classes. Finally, we use machine learning algorithms to build the feature classifier. The experimental results in both the actual video dataset and the augmented video dataset show that the accuracy for detecting object region and working state of aerators is 100% and 99.9% respectively, and the detection speed is 77-333 frames per second (FPS) according to the different types of surveillance cameras.Comment: 17 figure