Adversarial Data Programming: Using GANs to Relax the Bottleneck of Curated Labeled Data

Paucity of large curated hand-labeled training data for every domain-of-interest forms a major bottleneck in the deployment of machine learning models in computer vision and other fields. Recent work (Data Programming) has shown how distant supervision signals in the form of labeling functions can be used to obtain labels for given data in near-constant time. In this work, we present Adversarial Data Programming (ADP), which presents an adversarial methodology to generate data as well as a curated aggregated label has given a set of weak labeling functions. We validated our method on the MNIST, Fashion MNIST, CIFAR 10 and SVHN datasets, and it outperformed many state-of-the-art models. We conducted extensive experiments to study its usefulness, as well as showed how the proposed ADP framework can be used for transfer learning as well as multi-task learning, where data from two domains are generated simultaneously using the framework along with the label information. Our future work will involve understanding the theoretical implications of this new framework from a game-theoretic perspective, as well as explore the performance of the method on more complex datasets.Comment: CVPR 2018 main conference pape

How does ownership structure affect capital structure and firm performance? Recent evidence from east Asia

The present paper empirically examines the effects of ownership structure on capital structure and firm valuation in four East Asian countries worst affected by the last Crisis. In doing so, we distinguish ownership from both control and management and also allow for the simultaneity between capital structure and firm valuation in the sample countries. Results obtained from 3SLS estimates with error components confirm and extend the findings of Claessens et al. (2002) and particularly highlight the contrasting behaviour of family firms and non-family firms with/without a Cronyman

A Note on Noncommutative String theory and its low energy limit

The noncommutative string theory is described by embedding open string theory in a constant second rank antisymmetric $B_{\mu\nu}$ field and the noncommutative gauge theory is defined by a deformed $\star$ product. As a check, study of various scattering amplitudes in both noncommutative string and noncommutative gauge theory confirm that in the $\alpha^{'}\to 0$ limit, the noncommutative string theoretic amplitude goes over to the noncommutative gauge theoretic amplitude, and the couplings are related as $g_{YM}=G_0\sqrt{\frac{1}{2\alpha^{'}}}$. Furthermore we show that in this limit there will not be any correction to the gauge theoretic action because of absence of massive modes. We get sin/cos factors in the scattering amplitudes depending on the odd/even number of external photons.Comment: 14 pages including 2 figure

Environmental Standards as Strategic Outcomes : A Simple Model

This paper examines the strategic nature of choice of environmental standards under different degrees of openness of countries. It also compares and contrasts equilibrium environmental standards and levels of pollution, local and global, with the world optimum levels. It shows that, in case of open economies, environmental standards can be strategic substitutes or complements. In equilibrium, countries set higher environmental standards in case of open economies compared to that in case of closed economies. It also shows that equilibrium standards in case of open economies are higher than the world optimum in certain situations. In contrast, countries set lower environmental standards, in equilibrium, than the world optimum in absence of international trade.Environmental standards, strategic choice, openness, world optimum

Bridging the gap? Corruption, knowledge and foreign ownership

We argue that in addition to host corruption per se, as accounted for by the existing literature, an explanation of inter-country variation in FDI needs to account for the distance between the host and home corruption, which we call relative corruption. We use a large matched home-host firm-level panel data-set for 1998-2006 from CEE transition countries. Year-specific selectivity corrected estimates suggest that, ceteris paribus, higher relative ‘grand’ corruption lowers foreign ownership as the returns to investment tends to be lower in more corrupt environment. However, after controlling for the selectivity bias, knowledge-intensive parent firms are found to hold controlling ownership, as the difficulty of successful joint venture looms large in more corrupt environment. Results are robust to alternative specifications.Financial support from the ESRC under RES-062-23-0986 is acknowledge

Leverage and productivity growth in emerging economies: Is there a threshold effect?

While credit is essential for investment, innovation and economic growth, there are risks to unfettered credit booms. The present paper provides an innovative micro-economic approach to identify the threshold leverage beyond which corporate indebtedness becomes “excessive”. In particular, the paper hypothesizes a non-linear relationship in that moderate leverage could boost growth while very high leverage could restrict total factor productivity growth, through increased likelihood of financial distress and bankruptcy. Estimates of a threshold model for a group of emerging CEE countries confirm the non-linear relationship, after controlling for various firm, industry and financial market characteristics.Financial support from ESRC grant RES-062-23-0986 is gratefully acknowledge

Determination of cloud microphysical properties by laser backscattering and extinction measurements

The extinction and backscattering of 514 nm laser radiation in polydisperse water droplet clouds was studied in the laboratory. Three cloud size distributions with modal diameters of 0.02, 5.0, and 12.0 microns were investigated. The relationships between the cloud optical parameters (attentuation coefficient, sigma and volume backscattering coefficient, Beta (sub pi)) and the cloud water content, C, were measured for each size distribution. It was found that a linear relationship exists between sigma and C and between beta (sub pi) and C for cloud water content values up to 3gm/cubic m. The linear relationships obtained, however, have slopes which depend on the droplet size distribution. For a given water content both sigma and beta (sub pi) increase as the modal diameter decreases. The measured data are compared with existing theoretical analyses and discussed in terms of thie application to lidar measurements of atmospheric clouds. It is concluded that the empirical information obtained can serve as a basis for quantitative lidar measurements

C4Synth: Cross-Caption Cycle-Consistent Text-to-Image Synthesis

Generating an image from its description is a challenging task worth solving because of its numerous practical applications ranging from image editing to virtual reality. All existing methods use one single caption to generate a plausible image. A single caption by itself, can be limited, and may not be able to capture the variety of concepts and behavior that may be present in the image. We propose two deep generative models that generate an image by making use of multiple captions describing it. This is achieved by ensuring 'Cross-Caption Cycle Consistency' between the multiple captions and the generated image(s). We report quantitative and qualitative results on the standard Caltech-UCSD Birds (CUB) and Oxford-102 Flowers datasets to validate the efficacy of the proposed approach.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV-201

Scalar sector properties of two-Higgs-doublet models with a global U(1) symmetry

We analyze the scalar sector properties of a general class of two-Higgs-doublet models which has a global U(1) symmetry in the quartic terms. We find constraints on the parameters of the potential from the considerations of unitarity of scattering amplitudes, the global stability of the potential and the $\rho$-parameter. We concentrate on the spectrum of the non-standard scalar masses in the decoupling limit which is preferred by the Higgs data at the LHC. We exhibit charged-Higgs induced contributions to the diphoton decay width of the 125\,GeV Higgs boson and its correlation with the corresponding $Z\gamma$ width.Comment: 12 pages, 15 eps figure files; minor modifications made and a few references adde