A Survey of Adaptive Resonance Theory Neural Network Models for Engineering Applications

This survey samples from the ever-growing family of adaptive resonance theory (ART) neural network models used to perform the three primary machine learning modalities, namely, unsupervised, supervised and reinforcement learning. It comprises a representative list from classic to modern ART models, thereby painting a general picture of the architectures developed by researchers over the past 30 years. The learning dynamics of these ART models are briefly described, and their distinctive characteristics such as code representation, long-term memory and corresponding geometric interpretation are discussed. Useful engineering properties of ART (speed, configurability, explainability, parallelization and hardware implementation) are examined along with current challenges. Finally, a compilation of online software libraries is provided. It is expected that this overview will be helpful to new and seasoned ART researchers

Empirical Gaussian priors for cross-lingual transfer learning

Sequence model learning algorithms typically maximize log-likelihood minus the norm of the model (or minimize Hamming loss + norm). In cross-lingual part-of-speech (POS) tagging, our target language training data consists of sequences of sentences with word-by-word labels projected from translations in $k$ languages for which we have labeled data, via word alignments. Our training data is therefore very noisy, and if Rademacher complexity is high, learning algorithms are prone to overfit. Norm-based regularization assumes a constant width and zero mean prior. We instead propose to use the $k$ source language models to estimate the parameters of a Gaussian prior for learning new POS taggers. This leads to significantly better performance in multi-source transfer set-ups. We also present a drop-out version that injects (empirical) Gaussian noise during online learning. Finally, we note that using empirical Gaussian priors leads to much lower Rademacher complexity, and is superior to optimally weighted model interpolation.Comment: Presented at NIPS 2015 Workshop on Transfer and Multi-Task Learnin

A survey of outlier detection methodologies

Outlier detection has been used for centuries to detect and, where appropriate, remove anomalous observations from data. Outliers arise due to mechanical faults, changes in system behaviour, fraudulent behaviour, human error, instrument error or simply through natural deviations in populations. Their detection can identify system faults and fraud before they escalate with potentially catastrophic consequences. It can identify errors and remove their contaminating effect on the data set and as such to purify the data for processing. The original outlier detection methods were arbitrary but now, principled and systematic techniques are used, drawn from the full gamut of Computer Science and Statistics. In this paper, we introduce a survey of contemporary techniques for outlier detection. We identify their respective motivations and distinguish their advantages and disadvantages in a comparative review

Selecting a Small Set of Optimal Gestures from an Extensive Lexicon

Finding the best set of gestures to use for a given computer recognition problem is an essential part of optimizing the recognition performance while being mindful to those who may articulate the gestures. An objective function, called the ellipsoidal distance ratio metric (EDRM), for determining the best gestures from a larger lexicon library is presented, along with a numerical method for incorporating subjective preferences. In particular, we demonstrate an efficient algorithm that chooses the best $n$ gestures from a lexicon of $m$ gestures where typically $n \ll m$ using a weighting of both subjective and objective measures.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure

End-to-End Kernel Learning with Supervised Convolutional Kernel Networks

In this paper, we introduce a new image representation based on a multilayer kernel machine. Unlike traditional kernel methods where data representation is decoupled from the prediction task, we learn how to shape the kernel with supervision. We proceed by first proposing improvements of the recently-introduced convolutional kernel networks (CKNs) in the context of unsupervised learning; then, we derive backpropagation rules to take advantage of labeled training data. The resulting model is a new type of convolutional neural network, where optimizing the filters at each layer is equivalent to learning a linear subspace in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). We show that our method achieves reasonably competitive performance for image classification on some standard "deep learning" datasets such as CIFAR-10 and SVHN, and also for image super-resolution, demonstrating the applicability of our approach to a large variety of image-related tasks.Comment: to appear in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS