443 research outputs found
Chunking Patterns Reflect Effector-dependent Representation of Motor Sequence
Sequential organization is central to much of human intelligent behavior ranging from everyday skills such as lacing shoes to using a computer. It is well known that such sequential skills involve chaining a number of primitive actions together. A robust representation of skills can be formed by chunking together several elements of a sequence. We demonstrate, using a 2x6 finger movement task, that during the process of acquiring visuomotor skills the chunking patterns remained unaltered when utilizing an effector dependent representation of the sequence. In the 2x6 task, subjects learned a sequence
of 12 visual cues displayed as six sets of two elements each
and performed finger movements on a keypad. Two experiments
Normal-Motor and Normal-Visual were conducted on nine subjects and two observations were collected from each
subject. Each experiment consisted of a Normal and a Rotated
condition. In the Rotated (Motor and Visual) conditions, subjects were required to rotate the visual cues by 180 degrees and press the corresponding keys. The display sequence was also rotated for the Motor condition, requiring an identical set of effector movements to be performed as in the Normal condition. Chunking patterns were identified using the response times (RTs) for individual sets of the sequence. A pause between
set RTs demarcates an ensuing chunk. We demonstrate
that usage of an effector dependent representation is supported by the observation of identical chunking patterns between the Normal and Motor conditions, and the lack of similarity in chunking patterns between the Normal and Visual conditions
Efficient Lock-free Binary Search Trees
In this paper we present a novel algorithm for concurrent lock-free internal
binary search trees (BST) and implement a Set abstract data type (ADT) based on
that. We show that in the presented lock-free BST algorithm the amortized step
complexity of each set operation - {\sc Add}, {\sc Remove} and {\sc Contains} -
is , where, is the height of BST with number of nodes
and is the contention during the execution. Our algorithm adapts to
contention measures according to read-write load. If the situation is
read-heavy, the operations avoid helping pending concurrent {\sc Remove}
operations during traversal, and, adapt to interval contention. However, for
write-heavy situations we let an operation help pending {\sc Remove}, even
though it is not obstructed, and so adapt to tighter point contention. It uses
single-word compare-and-swap (\texttt{CAS}) operations. We show that our
algorithm has improved disjoint-access-parallelism compared to similar existing
algorithms. We prove that the presented algorithm is linearizable. To the best
of our knowledge this is the first algorithm for any concurrent tree data
structure in which the modify operations are performed with an additive term of
contention measure.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, submitted to POD
Asynchronous Optimization Methods for Efficient Training of Deep Neural Networks with Guarantees
Asynchronous distributed algorithms are a popular way to reduce
synchronization costs in large-scale optimization, and in particular for neural
network training. However, for nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives, few
convergence guarantees exist beyond cases where closed-form proximal operator
solutions are available. As most popular contemporary deep neural networks lead
to nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives, there is now a pressing need for such
convergence guarantees. In this paper, we analyze for the first time the
convergence of stochastic asynchronous optimization for this general class of
objectives. In particular, we focus on stochastic subgradient methods allowing
for block variable partitioning, where the shared-memory-based model is
asynchronously updated by concurrent processes. To this end, we first introduce
a probabilistic model which captures key features of real asynchronous
scheduling between concurrent processes; under this model, we establish
convergence with probability one to an invariant set for stochastic subgradient
methods with momentum.
From the practical perspective, one issue with the family of methods we
consider is that it is not efficiently supported by machine learning
frameworks, as they mostly focus on distributed data-parallel strategies. To
address this, we propose a new implementation strategy for shared-memory based
training of deep neural networks, whereby concurrent parameter servers are
utilized to train a partitioned but shared model in single- and multi-GPU
settings. Based on this implementation, we achieve on average 1.2x speed-up in
comparison to state-of-the-art training methods for popular image
classification tasks without compromising accuracy
Detection of Cognitive States from fMRI data using Machine Learning Techniques
Over the past decade functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (fMRI) has emerged as a powerful
technique to locate activity of human brain while
engaged in a particular task or cognitive state. We
consider the inverse problem of detecting the cognitive
state of a human subject based on the fMRI
data. We have explored classification techniques
such as Gaussian Naive Bayes, k-Nearest
Neighbour and Support Vector Machines. In order
to reduce the very high dimensional fMRI data, we
have used three feature selection strategies. Discriminating
features and activity based features
were used to select features for the problem of
identifying the instantaneous cognitive state given
a single fMRI scan and correlation based features
were used when fMRI data from a single time interval
was given. A case study of visuo-motor sequence
learning is presented. The set of cognitive
states we are interested in detecting are whether the
subject has learnt a sequence, and if the subject is
paying attention only towards the position or towards
both the color and position of the visual
stimuli. We have successfully used correlation
based features to detect position-color related cognitive
states with 80% accuracy and the cognitive
states related to learning with 62.5% accuracy
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