Deep Learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that focuses on the development and application of neural networks, which are computational models inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. Deep learning algorithms aim to learn and represent data in increasingly abstract and hierarchical ways, allowing them to automatically discover patterns, features, and representations from raw input data.

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RULENet: End-to-end Learning with the Dual-estimator for Remaining Useful Life Estimation

Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimation is a key element in Predictive maintenance. System agnostic approaches which just utilize sensor and operational time series have gained popularity due to its ease of implementation. Due to the nature of measurement or degradation mechanisms, its accurate estimation is not always feasible. Existing methods suppose the range of RUL with feasible estimation is given from results at upstream tasks or prior knowledge. In this work, we propose the novel framework of end-to-end learning for RUL estimation, which is called RULENet. RULENet simultaneously optimizes its Dual-estimator for RUL estimation and its feasible range estimation. Experimental results on NASA C-MAPSS benchmark data show the superiority of the end-to-end framework.

Interpretable Click-Through Rate Prediction through Hierarchical Attention

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in online advertising and marketing. For this problem, existing approaches, with shallow or deep architectures, have three major drawbacks. First, they typically lack persuasive rationales to explain the outcomes of the models. Unexplainable predictions and recommendations may be difficult to validate and thus unreliable and untrustworthy. In many applications, inappropriate suggestions may even bring severe consequences. Second, existing approaches have poor efficiency in analyzing high-order feature interactions. Third, the polysemy of feature interactions in different semantic subspaces is largely ignored. In this paper, we propose InterHAt that employs a Transformer with multi-head self-attention for feature learning. On top of that, hierarchical attention layers are utilized for predicting CTR while simultaneously providing interpretable insights of the prediction results. InterHAt captures high-order feature interactions by an efficient attentional aggregation strategy with low computational complexity. Extensive experiments on four public real datasets and one synthetic dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of InterHAt.

Multivariate Long-Term State Forecasting in Cyber-Physical Systems: A Sequence to Sequence Approach

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are ubiquitous in several critical infrastructure applications. Forecasting the state of CPS, is essential for better planning, resource allocation and minimizing operational costs. It is imperative to forecast the state of a CPS multiple steps into the future to afford enough time for planning of CPS operation to minimize costs and component wear. Forecasting system state also serves as a precursor to detecting process anomalies and faults. Concomitantly, sensors used for data collection are commodity hardware and experience frequent failures resulting in periods with sparse or no data. In such cases, re-construction through imputation of the missing data sequences is imperative to alleviate data sparsity and enable better performance of down-stream analytic models. In this paper, we tackle the problem of CPS state forecasting and data imputation and characterize the performance of a wide array of deep learning architectures – unidirectional gated and non-gated recurrent architectures, sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) architectures as well as bidirectional architectures – with a specific focus towards applications in CPS. We also study the impact of procedures like scheduled sampling and attention, on model training. Our results indicate that Seq2Seq models are superior to traditional step ahead forecasting models and yield an improvement of at least 28.5% for gated recurrent architectures and about 87.6% for non-gated architectures in terms of forecasting performance. We also notice that bidirectional models learn good representations for forecasting as well as for data imputation. Bidirectional Seq2Seq models show an average improvement of 17.6% in forecasting performance over their unidirectional counterparts. We also demonstrate the effect of employing an attention mechanism in the context of Seq2Seq architectures and find that it provides an average improvement of 57.12% in the case of unidirectional Seq2Seq architectures while causing a performance decline in the case of bidirectional Seq2Seq architectures. Finally, we also find that scheduled sampling helps in training better models that yield significantly lower forecasting error.

On Novel Object Recognition: A Unified Framework for Discriminability and Adaptability

The rich and accessible labeled data fueled the revolutionary successes of deep learning in object recognition. However, recognizing objects of novel classes with limited supervision information provided, i.e., Novel Object Recognition (NOR), remains a challenging task. We identify in this paper two key factors for the success of NOR that previous approaches fail to simultaneously guarantee. The first is producing discriminative feature representations for images of novel classes, and the second is generating a flexible classifier readily adapted to novel classes provided with limited supervision signals. To secure both key factors, we propose a framework which decouples a deep classification model into a feature extraction module and a classification module. We learn the former to ensure feature discriminability with a standard multi-class classification task by fully utilizing the competing information among all classes within a training set, and learn the latter to secure adaptability by training a meta-learner network which generates classifier weights whenever provided with minimal supervision information of target classes. Extensive experiments on common benchmark datasets in the settings of both zero-shot and few-shot learning demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Rethinking Zero-Shot Learning: A Conditional Visual Classification Perspective

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize instances of unseen classes solely based on the semantic descriptions of the classes. Existing algorithms usually formulate it as a semantic-visual correspondence problem, by learning mappings from one feature space to the other. Despite being reasonable, previous approaches essentially discard the highly precious discriminative power of visual features in an implicit way, and thus produce undesirable results. We instead reformulate ZSL as a conditioned visual classification problem, i.e., classifying visual features based on the classifiers learned from the semantic descriptions. With this reformulation, we develop algorithms targeting various ZSL settings: For the conventional setting, we propose to train a deep neural network that directly generates visual feature classifiers from the semantic attributes with an episode-based training scheme; For the generalized setting, we concatenate the learned highly discriminative classifiers for seen classes and the generated classifiers for unseen classes to classify visual features of all classes; For the transductive setting, we exploit unlabeled data to effectively calibrate the classifier generator using a novel learning-without-forgetting self-training mechanism and guide the process by a robust generalized cross-entropy loss. Extensive experiments show that our proposed algorithms significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods by large margins on most benchmark datasets in all the ZSL settings.

VeCharge: Intelligent Energy Management for Electric Vehicle charging

2018’s 1.2 million North American charging ports will grow ten times to over 12.6 million by 2027, according to Navigant, which could overwhelm the nation’s grids. DC Fast charging requires grid upgrade to supply the new charging demand. However, since the utilization ratio of those charging station is currently low. Demand charge cost can reach up to 90% of the total bill. Combining fast charging with energy storage can mitigate grid impacts and reduce demand charges. EV specific pricing is proposed for EV charging by many energy suppliers. Without managed charging, EV owner will lose the benefit of lowering charging cost by avoiding peak hour charging or missing the period when renewable energy generation is abundant.

Data-Driven Day-Ahead PV Estimation Using Hybrid Deep Learning

Ongoing smart grid activities and associated automation resulted in rich set of data. These data can be utilized for monitoring and estimation of real time photovoltaic (PV) generation. Inherent variability in PV and related impact on power systems is a challenging problem. Improving the accuracy of PV generation estimation is beneficial for both the PV owners and the grid operators. Recently, deep learning algorithms possible by the availability of data have shown its advantages for time series estimation; however, its application on PV generation estimation is still in the early stage. In this paper, a hybrid estimation model with a combination of long-short-term-memory network (LSTM) and persistence model (PM) is developed to provide day-ahead PV estimation at 15-minute time interval with high accuracy and robustness. Simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed method over existing methods for most of the test c

Heterogeneous Graph Matching Networks for Unknown Malware Detection

Information systems have widely been the target of malware attacks. Traditional signature-based malicious program detection algorithms can only detect known malware and are prone to evasion techniques such as binary obfuscation, while behavior-based approaches highly rely on the malware training samples and incur prohibitively high training cost. To address the limitations of existing techniques, we propose MatchGNet, a heterogeneous Graph Matching Network model to learn the graph representation and similarity metric simultaneously based on the invariant graph modeling of the program’s execution behaviors. We conduct a systematic evaluation of our model and show that it is accurate in detecting malicious program behavior and can help detect malware attacks with less false positives. MatchGNet outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in malware detection by generating 50% less false positives while keeping zero false negatives.

Conditional GAN with Discriminative Filter Generation for Text-to-Video Synthesis

Developing conditional generative models for text-to-video synthesis is an extremely challenging yet an important topic of research in machine learning. In this work, we address this problem by introducing Text-Filter conditioning Generative Adversarial Network (TFGAN), a conditional GAN model with a novel multi-scale text-conditioning scheme that improves text-video associations. By combining the proposed conditioning scheme with a deep GAN architecture, TFGAN generates high quality videos from text on challenging real-world video datasets. In addition, we construct a synthetic dataset of text-conditioned moving shapes to systematically evaluate our conditioning scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TFGAN significantly outperforms existing approaches, and can also generate videos of novel categories not seen during training.

Deep Supervision with Intermediate Concepts (IEEE)

Read Deep Supervision with Intermediate Concepts (IEEE). Recent data-driven approaches to scene interpretation predominantly pose inference as an end-to-end black-box mapping, commonly performed by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). However, decades of work on perceptual organization in both human and machine vision suggest that there are often intermediate representations that are intrinsic to an inference task, and which provide essential structure to improve generalization. In this work, we explore an approach for injecting prior domain structure into neural network training by supervising hidden layers of a CNN with intermediate concepts that normally are not observed in practice. We formulate a probabilistic framework which formalizes these notions and predicts improved generalization via this deep supervision method. One advantage of this approach is that we are able to train only from synthetic CAD renderings of cluttered scenes, where concept values can be extracted, but apply the results to real images. Our implementation achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 2D/3D keypoint localization and image classification on real image benchmarks including KITTI, PASCALVOC, PASCAL3D+, IKEA, and CIFAR100. We provide additional evidence that our approach outperforms alternative forms of supervision, such as multi-task networks.