Generalization of cyberbullying traces

De nos jours, la cyberintimidation est un problème courant dans les communautés en ligne. Filtrer automatiquement ces messages de cyberintimidation des conversations en ligne c’est avéré être un défi qui a mené à la création de plusieurs ensembles de données, dont plusieurs disponibles comme ressources pour l’entraînement de classificateurs. Toutefois, sans consensus sur la définition de la cyberintimidation, chacun des ensembles de données se retrouve à documenter différentes formes de comportements. Cela rend difficile la comparaison des performances obtenues par de classificateurs entraînés sur de différents ensembles de données, ou même l’application d’un de ces classificateurs à un autre ensemble de données. Dans ce mémoire, on utilise une variété de ces ensembles de données afin d’explorer les différentes définitions, ainsi que l’impact que cela occasionne sur le langage utilisé. Par la suite, on explore la portabilité d’un classificateur entraîné sur un ensemble de données vers un autre ensemble, nous donnant ainsi une meilleure compréhension de la généralisation des classificateurs. Finalement, on étudie plusieurs architectures d’ensemble de modèles, qui par la combinaison de ces différents classificateurs, nous permet de mieux comprendre les interactions des différentes définitions. Nos résultats montrent qu’il est possible d’obtenir une meilleure généralisation en combinant tous les ensembles de données en un seul ensemble de données plutôt que d’utiliser un ensemble de modèles composé de plusieurs classificateurs, chacun entraîné individuellement sur un ensemble de données différent.Cyberbullying is a common problem in today’s ubiquitous online communities. Automatically filtering it out of online conversations has proven a challenge, and the efforts have led to the creation of many different datasets, which are distributed as resources to train classifiers. However, without a consensus for the definition of cyberbullying, each of these datasets ends up documenting a different form of the behavior. This makes it difficult to compare the results of classifiers trained on different datasets, or to apply one such classifier on a different dataset. In this thesis, we will use a variety of these datasets to explore the differences in their definitions of cyberbullying and the impact it has on the language used in the messages. We will then explore the portability of a classifier trained on one dataset to another in order to gain insight on the generalization power of classifiers trained from each of them. Finally, we will study various architectures of ensemble models combining these classifiers in order to understand how they interact with each other. Our results show that by combining all datasets together into a single bigger one, we can achieve a better generalization than by using an ensemble model of individual classifiers trained on each dataset

The Game FAVR: A Framework for the Analysis of Visual Representation in Video Games

This paper lays out a unified framework of the ergodic animage, the rule-based and interactiondriven part of visual representation in video games. It is the end product of a three-year research project conducted by the INTEGRAE team, and is divided into three parts. Part 1 contextualizes the research on graphics and visuality within game studies, notably through the opposition between fiction and rules and the difficulties in finding common vocabulary to discuss key visual concepts such as perspective and point of view. Part 2 discusses a number of visual traditions through which we frame video game graphics (film, animation, art history, graphical projection and technical drawing), highlighting their relevance and shortcomings in addressing the long history of video games and the very different paradigms of 2D and 3D graphics. Part 3 presents the Game FAVR, a model that allows any game’s visual representation to be described and discussed through a common frame and vocabulary. The framework is presented in an accessible manner and is organized as a toolkit, with sample case studies, templates, and a flowchart for using the FAVR provided as an annex, so that researchers and students can immediately start using it

Brain Tumor Segmentation with Deep Neural Networks

In this paper, we present a fully automatic brain tumor segmentation method based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). The proposed networks are tailored to glioblastomas (both low and high grade) pictured in MR images. By their very nature, these tumors can appear anywhere in the brain and have almost any kind of shape, size, and contrast. These reasons motivate our exploration of a machine learning solution that exploits a flexible, high capacity DNN while being extremely efficient. Here, we give a description of different model choices that we've found to be necessary for obtaining competitive performance. We explore in particular different architectures based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), i.e. DNNs specifically adapted to image data. We present a novel CNN architecture which differs from those traditionally used in computer vision. Our CNN exploits both local features as well as more global contextual features simultaneously. Also, different from most traditional uses of CNNs, our networks use a final layer that is a convolutional implementation of a fully connected layer which allows a 40 fold speed up. We also describe a 2-phase training procedure that allows us to tackle difficulties related to the imbalance of tumor labels. Finally, we explore a cascade architecture in which the output of a basic CNN is treated as an additional source of information for a subsequent CNN. Results reported on the 2013 BRATS test dataset reveal that our architecture improves over the currently published state-of-the-art while being over 30 times faster

Algorithmic Improvements for Deep Reinforcement Learning applied to Interactive Fiction

Text-based games are a natural challenge domain for deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Their state and action spaces are combinatorially large, their reward function is sparse, and they are partially observable: the agent is informed of the consequences of its actions through textual feedback. In this paper we emphasize this latter point and consider the design of a deep reinforcement learning agent that can play from feedback alone. Our design recognizes and takes advantage of the structural characteristics of text-based games. We first propose a contextualisation mechanism, based on accumulated reward, which simplifies the learning problem and mitigates partial observability. We then study different methods that rely on the notion that most actions are ineffectual in any given situation, following Zahavy et al.'s idea of an admissible action. We evaluate these techniques in a series of text-based games of increasing difficulty based on the TextWorld framework, as well as the iconic game Zork. Empirically, we find that these techniques improve the performance of a baseline deep reinforcement learning agent applied to text-based games.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20). Accepted for Oral presentatio