Large deviations for renormalized self-intersection local times of stable processes

We study large deviations for the renormalized self-intersection local time of d-dimensional stable processes of index \beta \in (2d/3,d]. We find a difference between the upper and lower tail. In addition, we find that the behavior of the lower tail depends critically on whether \beta <d or \beta =d.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009117904000001099 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A Fully Convolutional Tri-branch Network (FCTN) for Domain Adaptation

A domain adaptation method for urban scene segmentation is proposed in this work. We develop a fully convolutional tri-branch network, where two branches assign pseudo labels to images in the unlabeled target domain while the third branch is trained with supervision based on images in the pseudo-labeled target domain. The re-labeling and re-training processes alternate. With this design, the tri-branch network learns target-specific discriminative representations progressively and, as a result, the cross-domain capability of the segmenter improves. We evaluate the proposed network on large-scale domain adaptation experiments using both synthetic (GTA) and real (Cityscapes) images. It is shown that our solution achieves the state-of-the-art performance and it outperforms previous methods by a significant margin.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 201

Safe Mutations for Deep and Recurrent Neural Networks through Output Gradients

While neuroevolution (evolving neural networks) has a successful track record across a variety of domains from reinforcement learning to artificial life, it is rarely applied to large, deep neural networks. A central reason is that while random mutation generally works in low dimensions, a random perturbation of thousands or millions of weights is likely to break existing functionality, providing no learning signal even if some individual weight changes were beneficial. This paper proposes a solution by introducing a family of safe mutation (SM) operators that aim within the mutation operator itself to find a degree of change that does not alter network behavior too much, but still facilitates exploration. Importantly, these SM operators do not require any additional interactions with the environment. The most effective SM variant capitalizes on the intriguing opportunity to scale the degree of mutation of each individual weight according to the sensitivity of the network's outputs to that weight, which requires computing the gradient of outputs with respect to the weights (instead of the gradient of error, as in conventional deep learning). This safe mutation through gradients (SM-G) operator dramatically increases the ability of a simple genetic algorithm-based neuroevolution method to find solutions in high-dimensional domains that require deep and/or recurrent neural networks (which tend to be particularly brittle to mutation), including domains that require processing raw pixels. By improving our ability to evolve deep neural networks, this new safer approach to mutation expands the scope of domains amenable to neuroevolution