Machine LearningOur Machine Learning team has been at the forefront of machine learning developments, including deep learning, support vector machines, and semantic analysis, for over a decade. We develop innovative technologies integrated into NEC’s products and services. Machine learning is the critical technology for data analytics and artificial intelligence. Recent progress in this field opens opportunities for various new applications.

Deep learning will maintain prominence with more robust model architectures, training methods, and optimization techniques. Enhanced interpretability and explainability will be imperative, especially for AI systems in critical domains like healthcare and finance. Addressing bias and ensuring fairness in AI algorithms will be a top priority, leading to the development of tools and guidelines for ethical AI. Federated learning, quantum computing’s potential impact, and the growth of edge computing will diversify ML applications.

Natural language processing will continue to advance, driving progress in conversational AI, while healthcare, finance, education, and creative industries will witness profound AI integration. As quantum computing matures, it could revolutionize machine learning, while edge computing and federated learning will expand AI’s reach across various domains. Our machine learning research will produce innovation across industries, including more accurate medical diagnoses, safer autonomous systems, and efficient energy use while enabling personalized education and AI-generated creativity.

Read our news and publications from our world-class team of researchers from our Machine Learning department.

Posts

Learning to Localize Actions in Instructional Videos with LLM-Based Multi-Pathway Text-Video Alignment

/in /by

Learning to localize temporal boundaries of procedure steps in instructional videos is challenging due to the limited availability of annotated large-scale training videos. Recent works focus on learning the cross-modal alignment between video segments and ASR-transcripted narration texts through contrastive learning. However, these methods fail to account for the alignment noise, i.e., irrelevant narrations to the instructional task in videos and unreliable timestamps in narrations. To address these challenges, this work proposes a novel training framework. Motivated by the strong capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in procedure understanding and text summarization, we first apply an LLM to filter out task-irrelevant information and summarize task-related procedure steps (LLM-steps) from narrations. To further generate reliable pseudo-matching between the LLM-steps and the video for training, we propose the Multi-Pathway Text-Video Alignment (MPTVA) strategy. The key idea is to measure alignment between LLM-steps and videos via multiple pathways, including: (1) step-narration-video alignment using narration timestamps, (2) direct step-to-video alignment based on their long-term semantic similarity, and (3) direct step-to-video alignment focusing on short-term fine-grained semantic similarity learned from general video domains. The results from different pathways are fused to generate reliable pseudo step-video matching. We conducted extensive experiments across various tasks and problem settings to evaluate our proposed method. Our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods in three downstream tasks: procedure step grounding, step localization, and narration grounding by 5.9%, 3.1%, and 2.8%.

Read more

Predicting Spatially Resolved Gene Expression via Tissue Morphology using Adaptive Spatial GNNs

/in /by

Spatial transcriptomics technologies, which generate a spatial map of gene activity, can deepen the understanding of tissue architecture and its molecular underpinnings in health and disease. However, the high cost makes these technologies difficult to use in practice. Histological images co-registered with targeted tissues are more affordable and routinely generated in many research and clinical studies. Hence, predicting spatial gene expression from the morphological clues embedded in tissue histological images provides a scalable alternative approach to decoding tissue complexity.

Read more

MCTR: Multi Camera Tracking Transformer

/in /by

Multi-camera tracking plays a pivotal role in various real-world applications. While end-to-end methods have gained significant interest in single-camera tracking, multi-camera tracking remains predominantly reliant on heuristic techniques. In response to this gap, this paper introduces Multi-Camera Tracking tRansformer (MCTR), a novel end-to-end approach tailored for multi-object detection and tracking across multiple cameras with overlapping fields of view. MCTR leverages end-to-end detectors like DEtector TRansformer (DETR) to produce detections and detection embeddings independently for each camera view. The framework maintains set of track embeddings that encaplusate global information about the tracked objects, and updates them at every frame by integrating the local information from the view-specific detection embeddings. The track embeddings are probabilistically associated with detections in every camera view and frame to generate consistent object tracks. The soft probabilistic association facilitates the design of differentiable losses that enable end-to-end training of the entire system. To validate our approach, we conduct experiments on MMPTrack and AI City Challenge, two recently introduced large-scale multi-camera multi-object tracking datasets.

Read more

Introducing the Trustworthy Generative AI Project: Pioneering the Future of Compositional Generation and Reasoning

/in /by

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our latest research initiative, the Trustworthy Generative AI Project. This ambitious project is set to revolutionize how we interact with multimodal content by developing cutting-edge generative models capable of compositional generation and reasoning across text, images, reports, and even 3D videos.

Read more

zeta-QVAE: A Quantum Variational Autoencoder utilizing Regularized Mixed-state Latent Representations

/in /by

A major challenge in near-term quantum computing is its application to large real-world datasets due to scarce quantum hardware resources. One approach to enabling tractable quantum models for such datasets involves compressing the original data to manageable dimensions while still representing essential information for downstream analysis. In classical machine learning, variational autoencoders (VAEs) facilitate efficient data compression, representation learning for subsequent tasks, and novel data generation. However, no model has been proposed that exactly captures all of these features for direct application to quantum data on quantum computers. Some existing quantum models for data compression lack regularization of latent representations, thus preventing direct use for generation and control of generalization. Others are hybrid models with only some internal quantum components, impeding direct training on quantum data. To bridge this gap, we present a fully quantum framework, ?-QVAE, which encompasses all the capabilities of classical VAEs and can be directly applied for both classical and quantum data compression. Our model utilizes regularized mixed states to attain optimal latent representations. It accommodates various divergences for reconstruction and regularization. Furthermore, by accommodating mixed states at every stage, it can utilize the full-data density matrix and allow for a “global” training objective. Doing so, in turn, makes efficient optimization possible and has potential implications for private and federated learning. In addition to exploring the theoretical properties of ?-QVAE, we demonstrate its performance on representative genomics and synthetic data. Our results consistently indicate that ?-QVAE exhibits similar or better performance compared to matched classical models.

Read more

The Evolution of Disciplines: From Experimental Roots to Theoretical Frameworks

/in /by

Chris White discusses the evolution of scientific disciplines, which often begin with exploration driven by curiosity and experimentation. As fields grow in complexity and cost, they shift to theoretical frameworks that optimize research. This transition is crucial for sustainable progress. Currently, AI and ML remain largely experimental, highlighting the need for theoretical foundations to ensure development.

Read more

Monitoring AI-Modified Content at Scale: A Case Study on the Impact of ChatGPT on AI Conference Peer Reviews

/in /by

We present an approach for estimating the fraction of text in a large corpus which is likely to be substantially modified or produced by a large language model (LLM). Our maximum likelihood model leverages expert-written and AI-generated reference texts to accurately and efficiently examine real-world LLM-use at the corpus level. We apply this approach to a case study of scientific peer review in AI conferences that took place after the release of ChatGPT: ICLR 2024, NeurIPS 2023, CoRL 2023 and EMNLP 2023. Our results suggest that between 6.5% and 16.9% of text submitted as peer reviews to these conferences could have been substantially modified by LLMs, i.e. beyond spell-checking or minor writing updates. The circumstances in which generated text occurs offer insight into user behavior: the estimated fraction of LLM-generated text is higher in reviews which report lower confidence, were submitted close to the deadline, and from reviewers who are less likely to respond to author rebuttals. We also observe corpus-level trends in generated text which may be too subtle to detect at the individual level, and discuss the implications of such trends on peer review. We call for future interdisciplinary work to examine how LLM use is changing our information and knowledge practices.

Read more

LLMs and MI Bring Innovation to Material Development Platforms

/in /by

In this paper, we introduce efforts to apply large language models (LLMs) to the field of material development. NEC is advancing the development of a material development platform. By applying core technologies corresponding to two material development steps, namely investigation activities (Read paper/patent) and experimental planning (Design Experiment Plan), the platform organizes documents such as papers and reports as well as data such as experimental results and then presents in an interactive way to users. In addition, with techniquesthat reflect physical and chemical principles into machine learning models, AI can learn even with limited data and accurately predict material properties. Through this platform, we aim to achieve the seamless integration of materials informatics (MI) with a vast body of industry literature and knowledge, thereby bringing innovation to the material development process.

Read more

Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization with Multi-Modal Plateau Transformers

/in /by

Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization (WSTAL) aims to jointly localize and classify action segments in untrimmed videos with only video level annotations. To leverage video level annotations most existing methods adopt the multiple instance learning paradigm where frame/snippet level action predictions are first produced and then aggregated to form a video-level prediction. Although there are trials to improve snippet-level predictions by modeling temporal relationships we argue that those implementations have not sufficiently exploited such information. In this paper we propose Multi Modal Plateau Transformers (M2PT) for WSTAL by simultaneously exploiting temporal relationships among snippets complementary information across data modalities and temporal coherence among consecutive snippets. Specifically M2PT explores a dual Transformer architecture for RGB and optical flow modalities which models intra modality temporal relationship with a self attention mechanism and inter modality temporal relationship with a cross attention mechanism. To capture the temporal coherence that consecutive snippets are supposed to be assigned with the same action M2PT deploys a Plateau model to refine the temporal localization of action segments. Experimental results on popular benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed M2PT achieves state of the art performance.

Read more

Learning from Synthetic Human Group Activities

/in /by

The study of complex human interactions and group activities has become a focal point in human-centric computer vision. However, progress in related tasks is often hindered by the challenges of obtaining large-scale labeled datasets from real-world scenarios. To address the limitation, we introduce M3Act, a synthetic data generator for multi-view multi-group multi-person human atomic actions and group activities. Powered by Unity Engine, M3Act features multiple semantic groups, highly diverse and photorealistic images, and a comprehensive set of annotations, which facilitates the learning of human-centered tasks across single-person, multi-person, and multi-group conditions. We demonstrate the advantages of M3Act across three core experiments. The results suggest our synthetic dataset can significantly improve the performance of several downstream methods and replace real-world datasets to reduce cost. Notably, M3Act improves the state-of-the-art MOTRv2 on DanceTrack dataset, leading to a hop on the leaderboard from 10t?h to 2n?d place. Moreover, M3Act opens new research for controllable 3D group activity generation. We define multiple metrics and propose a competitive baseline for the novel task. Our code and data are available at our project page: http://cjerry1243.github.io/M3Act.

Read more