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Nowadays the robot manipulation skills are usually learned by human demonstration via trajectory-level learning, which somewhat lacks robustness and generalization. In this paper, we propose a novel contact state level learning method for robot manipulation skill acquisition via human demonstration. The robot-environment contact states are described via environment dynamics modelling and geometric constraints modelling for flexible contact and rigid contact cases, respectively. During human demonstration process, the robot-environment interaction force, the robot position, and velocity data are collected. After that, the environment dynamics and geometric constraints modelling methods are presented to determine the contact state changes during the robot manipulation process. Then the robot manipulator learns the contact state information rather than specific manipulation trajectory. On this basis, the manipulation control law using active exploration method is presented to control the robot during the button pressing process and peg-hole-insertion process, respectively. Finally, the performance of the presented methodology has been verified via experimental studies. Note to Practitioners—Intelligent robots will become the right assistants of human beings in the future, especially in various areas of manipulation occasions. The important premise of realizing this vision is that the robots should have certain ability of manipulation skill learning. A lot of research has been carried out in this field, many of which are focusing on trajectory level manipulation skill learning and reproduction. Other than the trajectory level learning, human beings can learn many other higher levels of manipulation skills, such as the contact state level and semantic level learning, which makes the learning results more robust and general. In this paper, the contact state estimation and learning method via environment dynamics and geometric constraints modelling is presented to learn the robot manipulation skill based on the contact state transition conditions. In this way, the robot needs less data in the skill learning process, and the trajectory level learning is avoided. After learning the contact state level manipulation skill, the lower trajectory level command is autonomously generated. Experiments on button pressing and peg-hole-insertion tasks by KUKA iiwa robot have obtained very good results. Other than the button pressing and peg-hole-insertion tasks, the presented methodology can be applied to many other manipulation tasks, as long as there are contact state changes in the manipulation process. The work of this paper lays a foundation for the robot learning of higher-level manipulation skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many real-world classification problems are becoming multi-label in nature, i.e., multiple class labels are assigned to an instance simultaneously. Multi-label classification is a challenging problem due to the involvement of three forms of interactions, i.e., feature-to-feature, feature-to-label, and label-to-label interactions. What further complicates the problem is that not all features are useful, and some can deteriorate the classification performance. Sparsity-based methods have been widely used to address multi-label feature selection due to their efficiency and effectiveness. However, most (if not all) existing methods do not consider the three forms of interactions simultaneously, which could hinder their ability to achieve good performance. Moreover, most existing methods are gradient-based, which are prone to getting stuck at local optima. This paper proposes a new sparsity-based feature selection approach that can simultaneously consider all three forms of interactions. Furthermore, this paper develops a novel sparse learning method based on particle swarm optimisation that can avoid local optima. The proposed method is compared against the state-of-the-art multi-label feature selection methods in terms of multi-label classification performance. The results show that our method performed significantly better in selecting high-quality feature subsets with respect to various feature subset sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human beings tend to learn unknown knowledge in a gradual process, from the basic to the complex. Based on this point, we propose a progressive learning method for producing service strategies according to requests, with a hierarchical priori knowledge and reinforcement learning. Service strategy aims to guide how to perform home services and takes into consideration the relationship between actions and objects in home environment. In this paper, strategy generation is regarded as a text generation problem in question answering (QA). Firstly, a hierarchical priori knowledge with service-object correlation at the bottom and action-object correlation at the top is constructed to assist the understanding on the relationship of objects and actions in service strategies. Service-object correlation guides how to select proper objects with the correct order, while action-object correlation associates actions in strategies according to selected objects. Based on the hierarchical priori knowledge, a progressive learning method is proposed to make the model produce effective strategies with a sequential cognition, from service-object correlation (objects) to action-object correlation (actions). After that, reinforcement learning is employed to enhance the progressive guidance, by designing rewards in terms of the hierarchical priori knowledge. Finally, the proposed method is tested with both comparative experiments and ablation studies, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority in producing comprehensive and logical strategies, indicating that the progressive learning method in our paper can further improve the QA performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the lack of distinctiveness to the background, robust monocular 6DOF pose tracking of less-distinct objects remains an important open problem. In this paper, we firstly analyze the object distinctiveness in the tracking process. Then, we propose a novel contour-part model based robust monocular pose tracking method for less-distinct objects. This paper uses the traditional contour feature for pose tracking in a novel strategy called contour part model. First, the contour part model is built by segmenting the projected contour rendered from the 3D model into contour segments of a certain length adaptively according to the Shi-Tomasi cornerness scores. Then, the correspondence is detected in the input image for each contour part by gradient orientation based template matching. Finally, pose tracking is achieved by solving the PnP problem. Experiment results on semi-synthetic and real images show that the proposed method performs better than the existing methods when pose tracking less-distinct objects and shows great robustness toward interference. Additionally, we combine the edge feature and the regional feature in a simple strategy. The overall performance of the fused method is boosted according to the experimental results on the RBOT dataset. The fact shows that the fusion of the edge and regional features has great potential for improving tracking performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special section focus on designing technologies to support professional and workplace learning in situated practices. In an era of global, organizational, and technological change, all of which are transforming the world of work, professional and workplace learning are critical for employability and organizational competitiveness. A range of fundamental transformations is changing how people work. Digital technologies are replacing human labor and, at the same time, are accelerating the expansion of job roles and work practices. Work is becoming increasingly specialized, which means that professionals in collaborative and networked ways across discipline and organization boundaries. In parallel, labor is increasingly decentralized, making decisionmaking more distributed and raising the need for remote communication and collaboration. Subsequently, work is becoming more independent from time and place, as people connect, collaborate, and work via digital technologies. These changes come with a need for substantial and continuous workplace learning, and with the need for changes in how workplace learning happens. Of course, digital technologies are already used to provide learning and training in workplaces. However, most of these learning technologies have been developed for formal education (e.g., K- 12 and higher education) rather than in workplace contexts. There is a need to understand and evidence workplace learning needs and to further develop technologies that can support and scale workplace learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncertain cut-in maneuver of vehicles from adjacent lanes makes it difficult for vehicle's automatic speed control strategy to make judgments and effective control decisions. In this paper, an intelligent speed control strategy for uncertain cut-in scenarios is established based on a basic autonomous driving system. This strategy judges cut-in maneuver from surrounding vehicles and outputs adaptive control action under current environment according to Q value of state-action pair based on a Q network. In addition, according to the analysis of cut-in scenarios, the Q network is trained based on a novel reinforcement learning method named as experience screening deep Q-learning network (ES-DQN). The proposed ES-DQN is an extension of double deep Q-learning network (DDQN) algorithm, and includes two parts: experience screening and policy learning. Based on the experience screened from the experience screening part, the proposed learning method can train an intelligent speed control strategy which has stronger adaptability and control effect in uncertain cut-in scenarios. According to simulation results, the proposed intelligent speed control strategy trained by ES-DQN has better performance under uncertain cut-in scenarios than DDQN method and traditional ACC strategy. Meanwhile, by adjusting weight value in reward function, the system can realize different control target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graph learning is a popular approach for perfor ming machine learning on graph-structured data. It has revolutionized the machine learning ability to model graph data to address downstream tasks. Its application is wide due to the availability of graph data ranging from all types of networks to information systems. Most graph learning methods assume that the graph is static and its complete structure is known during training. This limits their applicability since they cannot be applied to problems where the underlying graph grows over time and/or new tasks emerge incrementally. Such applications require a lifelong learning approach that can learn the graph continuously and accommodate new information whilst retaining previously learned knowledge. Lifelong learning methods that enable continuous learning in regular domains like images and text cannot be directly applied to continuously evolving graph data, due to its irregular structure. As a result, graph lifelong learning is gaining attention from the research community. This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of recent advancements in graph lifelong learning, including the categorization of existing methods, and the discussions of potential applications and open research problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale labeled data are generally required to train deep neural networks in order to obtain better performance in visual feature learning from images or videos for computer vision applications. To avoid extensive cost of collecting and annotating large-scale datasets, as a subset of unsupervised learning methods, self-supervised learning methods are proposed to learn general image and video features from large-scale unlabeled data without using any human-annotated labels. This paper provides an extensive review of deep learning-based self-supervised general visual feature learning methods from images or videos. First, the motivation, general pipeline, and terminologies of this field are described. Then the common deep neural network architectures that used for self-supervised learning are summarized. Next, the schema and evaluation metrics of self-supervised learning methods are reviewed followed by the commonly used datasets for images, videos, audios, and 3D data, as well as the existing self-supervised visual feature learning methods. Finally, quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on benchmark datasets are summarized and discussed for both image and video feature learning. At last, this paper is concluded and lists a set of promising future directions for self-supervised visual feature learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This papers in this special issue mainly focus on deep learning models for industry informatics, addressing both original algorithmic development and new applications of deep learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An autonomous framework to evaluate layout of a piping design in the form of piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) according to a set of standards of marine and offshore industry is proposed. The method starts with transforming a P&ID into a vector x in R^d . Transformation is done based on a concept introduced for piping known as Histogram of Connectivity. The proposed descriptor captures two essential properties of P&ID: attributes of each component and connectivity among the components. Next, linear support vector machine (SVM) is used to learn a classifier from existing compliant and noncompliant designs. Subsequently, the linear classifier can be used to check if an unseen design complies with the standards. In addition, to enable follow up on noncompliant design including correction or modification, a method to analyze the reason of noncompliance prediction by the learned SVM model is introduced. The method has demonstrated encouraging performance in two challenging data sets of designs created with advice from experienced engineers in the industry, based on International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) and Rules for Classification of Ships of Lloyd’s Register. Note to Practitioners—This paper is motivated by need of marine and offshore industry for automated solution for design appraisal. This paper aims to address this issue by using a machine learning-based approach. Some compliant and noncompliant designs are provided to a developed algorithm for a machine (or computer) to learn. After learning is completed, the machine is able to classify unseen designs as compliant or noncompliant. As highlighted in this paper, the developed method has demonstrated encouraging performance in two case studies, including specific parts in MARPOL and Rules of Lloyd’s Register. For adoption by industry, necessary steps include collecting some designs (compliant and noncompliant) available in an organization and feeding these into the developed method for learning by machine before it can predict. With ability of highlighting possible connections that cause noncompliance, follow up and correction on a noncompliant design is made possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Traffic flow prediction plays a critical role in reducing traffic congestion in transportation systems. However, accurate traffic flow prediction becomes challenging due to the impact of complex spatio-temporal (ST) correlations and the diversity of ST correlations. When modeling complicated ST correlations, researchers usu did not take the diversity of ST correlations into consideration, resulting in poor prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose ST-InNet, a deep spatio-temporal Inception network for collectively predicting traffic flow in each city region. Specifically, ST-InNet employs two Inception networks to simultaneously capture various spatial and temporal correlations of traffic data, including temporal closeness, temporal periodicity, nearby spatial dependencies, and distant spatial dependencies. For the diversity of spatial correlations, ST-InNet presents an improved variant of an Inception module to explicitly capture the different contributions of spatial correlations for each region. For the diversity of temporal correlations, ST-InNet designs a fusion component to explicitly model the varying contributions of temporal correlations on prediction. The experiments are conducted on a real-world traffic dataset in Nanjing, demonstrating that ST-InNet outperforms five state-of-the-art baselines in short-term and long-term traffic flow predictions with an average accuracy improvement of 32.09% and 30.97%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we reveal that metric learning would suffer from serious inseparable problem if without informative sample mining. Since the inseparable samples are often mixed with hard samples, current informative sample mining strategies used to deal with inseparable problem may bring up some side-effects, such as instability of objective function, etc. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel distance metric learning algorithm, named adaptive neighborhood metric learning (ANML). In ANML, we design two thresholds to adaptively identify the inseparable similar and dissimilar samples in the training procedure, thus inseparable sample removing and metric parameter learning are implemented in the same procedure. Due to the non-continuity of the proposed ANML, we develop an ingenious function, named log-exp mean function to construct a continuous formulation to surrogate it, which can be efficiently solved by the gradient descent method. Similar to Triplet loss, ANML can be used to learn both the linear and deep embeddings. By analyzing the proposed method, we find it has some interesting properties. For example, when ANML is used to learn the linear embedding, current famous metric learning algorithms such as the large margin nearest neighbor (LMNN) and neighbourhood components analysis (NCA) are the special cases of the proposed ANML by setting the parameters different values. When it is used to learn deep features, the state-of-the-art deep metric learning algorithms such as Triplet loss, Lifted structure loss, and Multi-similarity loss become the special cases of ANML. Furthermore, the log-exp mean function proposed in our method gives a new perspective to review the deep metric learning methods such as Prox-NCA and N-pairs loss. At last, promising experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-order proximity is useful for effective network embedding. In contrast to many previous works that only consider order-level weights, this paper proposes to explore a more expressive node-level weighting mechanism to encode the diverse local structure, with a scalable and theoretically justified sampling strategy for its learning. Specifically, we start with a formal definition of multi-order proximity matrix which leads to our new multi-order objective based on Laplacian Eigenmaps and Skip-Gram. Then we instantiate the node-specific multi-order weights in the objective with the help of neighborhood size estimation, which indicates node-specific multi-order information. For objective learning, it is implicitly fulfilled with our proposed branching tree-like random walk strategy termed by BTWalk, which differs from the dominant chain-like walk in existing sampling techniques. BTWalk is designed by a synergetic combination of BFS (breadth-first search) and DFS (depth-first search), which is modulated according to the weights of the considered proximity orders. We theoretically analyze its cost-efficiency, and further propose the so-called Vec4Cross framework that incorporates joint node embedding and network alignment for two partially overlapped networks based on the seed matchings, whereby BTWalk is also adopted for embedding. Promising experimental results are obtained on real-world datasets across popular tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imbalanced training is a challenge in the field of autonomous driving. For the steering estimation task, imbalanced training is the core reason that an end-to-end model cannot estimate sharp steering value well. Inspired by researches on the steering estimation, this paper proposes a novel loss function to train a high-performance end-to-end model for handling the imbalanced training problem, which is named SteeringLoss. Firstly, the imbalanced distribution of the steering value for driving datasets is analyzed, which is similar to the double long-tailed distribution. Secondly, with the feature of distribution, this paper designs a cost-sensitive loss function step by step, the new loss function can improve the impact of the sharp steering value while maintaining the impact of the small steering value. Thirdly, three typical steering estimation models are established with SteeringLoss for demonstration, including the CNN model, the CNN-LSTM model and the 3DCNN-LSTM model. Finally, three experiments are designed for SteeringLoss: Experiment I demonstrates SteeringLoss can avoid imbalanced training problem; Experiment II discusses the finetuning principle of SteeringLoss and gives the basic guideline for using SteeringLoss; Experiment III shows the results on different typical end-to-end steering estimation models, which shows effectiveness of SteeringLoss for all the models and gives different solutions for the steering estimation. Moreover, the SteeringLoss is suitable for the imbalanced training with similar distributions of datasets besides end-to-end steering estimation, which indicates the potential value of the research on SteeringLoss in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single image super-resolution (SISR) using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Most existing SISR models mainly focus on pursuing high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and neglect textures and details. As a result, the recovered images are often perceptually unpleasant. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a texture and detail-preserving network (TDPN), which focuses not only on local region feature recovery but also on preserving textures and details. Specifically, the high-resolution image is recovered from its corresponding low-resolution input in two branches. First, a multi-reception field based branch is designed to let the network fully learn local region features by adaptively selecting local region features in different reception fields. Then, a texture and detail-learning branch supervised by the textures and details decomposed from the ground-truth high resolution image is proposed to provide additional textures and details for the super-resolution process to improve the perceptual quality. Finally, we introduce a gradient loss into the SISR field and define a novel hybrid loss to strengthen boundary information recovery and to avoid overly smooth boundary in the final recovered high-resolution image caused by using only the MAE loss. More importantly, the proposed method is model-agnostic, which can be applied to most off-the-shelf SISR networks. The experimental results on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our TDPN on most state-of-the-art SISR methods in PSNR, SSIM and perceptual quality. We will share our code on https://github.com/tocaiqing/TDPN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decentralized learning has gained great popularity to improve learning efficiency and preserve data privacy. Each computing node makes equal contribution to collaboratively learn a Deep Learning model. The elimination of centralized Parameter Servers (PS) can effectively address many issues such as privacy, performance bottleneck and single-point-failure. However, how to achieve Byzantine Fault Tolerance in decentralized learning systems is rarely explored, although this problem has been extensively studied in centralized systems. In this paper, we present an in-depth study towards the Byzantine resilience of decentralized learning systems with two contributions. First, from the adversarial perspective, we theoretically illustrate that Byzantine attacks are more dangerous and feasible in decentralized learning systems: even one malicious participant can arbitrarily alter the models of other participants by sending carefully crafted updates to its neighbors. Second, from the defense perspective, we propose Ubar, a novel algorithm to enhance decentralized learning with Byzantine Fault Tolerance. Specifically, Ubar provides a Uniform Byzantine-resilient Aggregation Rule for benign nodes to select the useful parameter updates and filter out the malicious ones in each training iteration. It guarantees that each benign node in a decentralized system can train a correct model under very strong Byzantine attacks with an arbitrary number of faulty nodes. We conduct extensive experiments on standard image classification tasks and the results indicate that Ubar can effectively defeat both simple and sophisticated Byzantine attacks with higher performance efficiency than existing solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamic vehicle routing problems (DVRPs) have become a hot research topic due to their significance in logistics, although it is still very challenging for existing algorithms to solve DVRPs due to the dynamically changing customer requests during the optimization. In this paper, we propose a pairwise proximity learning-based ant colony algorithm, termed PPL-ACO, for tackling DVRPs. In PPL-ACO, a pairwise proximity learning method is suggested to predict the local visiting order of customers in the optimal route after the occurrence of changes, which is on the basis of learning from the optimal routes found before the changes occur. A radial basis function network is used to learn the local visiting order of customers based on the proximity between each pair of customer nodes, by which the optimal routes can be quickly tracked after changes occur. Experimental results on 22 popular DVRP instances show that the proposed PPL-ACO significantly outperforms four state-of-the-art approaches to DVRPs. More interestingly, the results on five large-scale DVRP instances demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PPL-ACO in solving large-scale DVPRs with up to 1000 customers. The results on a real case of Nankai Strict, Tianjin, China also verifies that the proposed PPL-ACO is more effective and efficient than the four compared approaches in solving real-world DVRPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flexible demand response (DR) resources can be leveraged to accommodate the stochasticity of some distributed energy resources. This paper develops an online learning approach that continuously estimates price sensitivities of residential DR participants and produces such price signals to the DR participants that ensure a desired level of DR capacity. The proposed learning approach incorporates the dispatch decisions on DR resources into the distributionally robust chance-constrained optimal power flow (OPF) framework. This integration is shown to adequately remunerate DR resources and co-optimize the dispatch of DR and conventional generation resources. The distributionally robust chance-constrained formulation only relies on empirical data acquired over time and makes no restrictive assumptions on the underlying distribution of the demand uncertainty. The distributional robustness also allows for robustifying the otpimal solution against systematically misestimating empirically learned parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed learning approach is shown via numerical experiments. The paper is accompanied by the code and data supplement released for public use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recommender systems, cold-start issues are situations where no previous events, e.g., ratings, are known for certain users or items. In this paper, we focus on the item cold-start problem. Both content information (e.g., item attributes) and initial user ratings are valuable for seizing users’ preferences on a new item. However, previous methods for the item cold-start problem either (1) incorporate content information into collaborative filtering to perform hybrid recommendation, or (2) actively select users to rate the new item without considering content information and then do collaborative filtering. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation scheme for the item cold-start problem by leveraging both active learning and items’ attribute information. Specifically, we design useful user selection criteria based on items’ attributes and users’ rating history, and combine the criteria in an optimization framework for selecting users. By exploiting the feedback ratings, users’ previous ratings and items’ attributes, we then generate accurate rating predictions for the other unselected users. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show the superiority of our proposed method over traditional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the “Multi-Role Project” method (MRP), a broadly applicable project-based learning method, and describes its implementation and evaluation in the context of a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) course. The MRP method is designed around a meta-principle that considers the project learning activity as a role-playing game based on two projects: a learning project and an engineering project. The meta-principle is complemented by five principles that provide a framework to guide the working practices of student teams: distribution of responsibilities; regular interactions and solicitations within the team; anticipation and continuous improvement; positive interdependence and alternating individual/collective work; and open communication and content management. This paper presents the implementation of MRP in a course teaching software engineering, UML language, and project management. The results show that MRP helped the course's students to acquire important professional knowledge and skills, experience near-real-world professional realities, and develop their abilities to work both in teams and autonomously. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Significance: The performance of traditional approaches to decoding movement intent from electromyograms (EMGs) and other biological signals commonly degrade over time. Furthermore, conventional algorithms for training neural network based decoders may not perform well outside the domain of the state transitions observed during training. The work presented in this paper mitigates both these problems, resulting in an approach that has the potential to substantially improve the quality of life of the people with limb loss. Objective: This paper presents and evaluates the performance of four decoding methods for volitional movement intent from intramuscular EMG signals. Methods: The decoders are trained using the dataset aggregation (DAgger) algorithm, in which the training dataset is augmented during each training iteration based on the decoded estimates from previous iterations. Four competing decoding methods, namely polynomial Kalman filters (KFs), multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks, convolutional neural networks (CNN), and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, were developed. The performances of the four decoding methods were evaluated using EMG datasets recorded from two human volunteers with transradial amputation. Short-term analyses, in which the training and cross-validation data came from the same dataset, and long-term analyses, in which the training and testing were done in different datasets, were performed. Results: Short-term analyses of the decoders demonstrated that CNN and MLP decoders performed significantly better than KF and LSTM decoders, showing an improvement of up to 60% in the normalized mean-square decoding error in cross-validation tests. Long-term analyses indicated that the CNN, MLP, and LSTM decoders performed significantly better than a KF-based decoder at most analyzed cases of temporal separations (0–150 days) between the acquisition of the training and testing datasets. Conclusion: The short-term and long-term performances of MLP- and CNN-based decoders trained with DAgger demonstrated their potential to provide more accurate and naturalistic control of prosthetic hands than alternate approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fuzzy relationships exist between students’ learning performance with various abilities and a test item. However, the challenges in implementing adaptive assessment agents are obtaining sufficient items, efficient and accurate computerized estimation, and a substantial feedback agent. Additionally, the agent must immediately estimate students’ ability item by item, which places a considerable burden on the server, especially for a group test. Hence, the implementation of an adaptive assessment agent is more difficult in practice. This paper proposes an agent with particle swarm optimization (PSO) based on a fuzzy markup language (FML) for students’ learning performance evaluation and educational applications, and the proposed agent is according to the response data from a conventional test and an item response theory (IRT)-based three-parameter logistic model. First, we apply a Gauss–Seidel based parameter estimation mechanism to estimate the items’ parameters according to the response data, and then to compare its results with those of an IRT-based Bayesian parameter estimation mechanism. In addition, we propose a static-IRT test assembly mechanism to assemble a form for the conventional test. The presented FML-based dynamic assessment mechanism infers the probability of making a correct response to the item for a student with various abilities. Moreover, this paper also proposes a novel PSO-based FML (PFML) learning mechanism for optimizing the parameters between items and students. Finally, we adopt a K-fold cross-validation mechanism to evaluate the performance of the proposed agent. Experimental results show that the novel PFML learning mechanism for the parameter estimation and learning optimization performs favorably. We believe the proposed PFML will be a reference for education research and pedagogy and an important colearning mechanism for future human–machine educational applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domain adaptation manages to build an effective target classifier or regression model for unlabeled target data by utilizing the well-labeled source data but lying different distributions. Intuitively, to address domain shift problem, it is crucial to learn domain invariant features across domains, and most existing approaches have concentrated on it. However, they often do not directly constrain the learned features to be class discriminative for both source and target data, which is of vital importance for the final classification. Therefore, in this paper, we put forward a novel feature learning method for domain adaptation to construct both domain invariant and class discriminative representations, referred to as DICD. Specifically, DICD is to learn a latent feature space with important data properties preserved, which reduces the domain difference by jointly matching the marginal and class-conditional distributions of both domains, and simultaneously maximizes the inter-class dispersion and minimizes the intra-class scatter as much as possible. Experiments in this paper have demonstrated that the class discriminative properties will dramatically alleviate the cross-domain distribution inconsistency, which further boosts the classification performance. Moreover, we show that exploring both domain invariance and class discriminativeness of the learned representations can be integrated into one optimization framework, and the optimal solution can be derived effectively by solving a generalized eigen-decomposition problem. Comprehensive experiments on several visual cross-domain classification tasks verify that DICD can outperform the competitors significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A model-based reinforcement learning (RL) method which interplays direct and indirect learning to update ${Q}$ functions is proposed. The environment is approximated by a virtual model that can predict the transition to the next state and the reward of the domain. This virtual model is used to train ${Q}$ functions to accelerate policy learning. Lookup table methods are usually used to establish such environmental models, but these methods need to collect tremendous amounts of experiences to enumerate responses of the environment. In this paper, a stochastic model learning method based on tree structures is presented. To model the transition probability, an online clustering method is applied to equip the model learning method with the abilities to evaluate the transition probability. By the virtual model, the RL method produces simulated experience in the stage of indirect learning. Since simulated transitions and backups are more usefully focused by working backward from the state-action, the pair estimated ${Q}$ value of which changes significantly, the useful one-step backups are actions that lead directly into the one state whose value has already obviously been changed. This, however, may induce a false positive; that is, a backup state may be an invalid state, such as an absorbing or terminal state, especially in cases where the changes of ${Q}$ values at the planning stage are still needed to put back for ranking even though they are based on a simulated experience and are possibly erroneous. It is obvious that when the agent is attracted to generate simulated experience around the area of these absorbing states, the learning efficiency is deteriorated. This paper proposes three detecting methods to solve this problem. Moreover, the policy learning can speed up. The effectiveness and generality of our method is further demonstrated in three numerical simulations. The simulation results demonstrate that the training rate of our method is obviously improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Person reidentification matches person observations captured by nonoverlapping cameras at different times and locations. Due to the appearance variations caused by view angle, pose, lighting, background, and occlusion, person reidentification is a challenging task. To improve the accuracy of person reidentification, this paper proposes a metric learning method. The main idea of our method is to learn a low-dimensional metric space, in which the features extracted from different observations of the same person are pulled, and the features extracted from observations of different persons but in the neighborhood of original feature space are pushed. Then all the features are projected to this metric space for matching. Compared with other metric learning methods, our method differentiates negative samples according to their importances in constructing the metric space, and pays more attention to restrain the more confusable negative pairs. Moreover, our method can simultaneously learn a uniform metric space for multiple features that is practical for multifeature fusion, an effective way to improve reidentification performance. Experimental results on three popular data sets show that our method is more robust against appearance changes and it outperforms other state-of-the-art reidentification methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extreme learning machine (ELM), which was originally proposed for “generalized” single-hidden layer feedforward neural networks, provides efficient unified learning solutions for the applications of regression and classification. Although, it provides promising performance and robustness and has been used for various applications, the single-layer architecture possibly lacks the effectiveness when applied for natural signals. In order to over come this shortcoming, the following work indicates a new architecture based on multilayer network framework. The significant contribution of this paper are as follows: 1) unlike existing multilayer ELM, in which hidden nodes are obtained randomly, in this paper all hidden layers with invertible functions are calculated by pulling the network output back and putting it into hidden layers. Thus, the feature learning is enriched by additional information, which results in better performance; 2) in contrast to the existing multilayer network methods, which are usually efficient for classification applications, the proposed architecture is implemented for dimension reduction and image reconstruction; and 3) unlike other iterative learning-based deep networks (DL), the hidden layers of the proposed method are obtained via four steps. Therefore, it has much better learning efficiency than DL. Experimental results on 33 datasets indicate that, in comparison to the other existing dimension reduction techniques, the proposed method performs competitively better with fast training speeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many problems in the modern world have a decentralized and distributed nature. Irregular cellular learning automata (ICLA) is a powerful mathematical model for decentralized problems and applications. Convergence of ICLA to a compatible point is very important because this convergence can provide efficient solutions for the problems. The local rule of ICLA can play a key role in this convergence. A local rule that simply rewards or punishes learning automata just based on the response of environment and actions of neighbors does not guarantee convergence of ICLA to a compatible point. In this paper, we present a new local rule that guarantees convergence to a compatible point. Formal proofs for the convergence are provided and results of the conducted experiments support our theoretical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of feature selection is to find the most representative features from the original high-dimensional data. Because of the absence of the information of class labels, selecting the appropriate features in unsupervised learning scenarios is much harder than that in supervised scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the potential of locally linear embedding (LLE), which is a popular manifold learning method, in feature selection task. It is straightforward to apply the idea of LLE to the graph-preserving feature selection framework. However, we find that this straightforward application suffers from some problems. For example, it fails when the elements in the feature are all equal; it does not enjoy the property of scaling invariance and cannot capture the change of the graph efficiently. To solve these problems, we propose a new filter-based feature selection method based on LLE in this paper, which is named as LLE score. The proposed criterion measures the difference between the local structure of each feature and that of the original data. Our experiments of classification task on two face image data sets, an object image data set, and a handwriting digits data set show that LLE score outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including data variance, Laplacian score, and sparsity score. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multi-view representation learning is a promising and challenging research topic, which aims to integrate multiple data information from different views to improve the learning performance. The recent deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) have the advantages of good uncertainty estimates, powerful non-linear mapping ability and great generalization capability, which can be used as an excellent data representation learning method. However, DGPs only focus on single view data and are rarely applied to the multi-view scenario. In this paper, we propose a multi-view representation learning algorithm with deep Gaussian processes (named MvDGPs), which inherits the advantages of deep Gaussian processes and multi-view representation learning, and can learn more effective representation of multi-view data. The MvDGPs consist of two stages. The first stage is multi-view data representation learning, which is mainly used to learn more comprehensive representations of multi-view data. The second stage is classifier design, which aims to select an appropriate classifier to better employ the representations obtained in the first stage. In contrast with DGPs, MvDGPs support asymmetrical modeling depths for different views of data, resulting in better characterizations of the discrepancies among different views. Experimental results on real-world multi-view data sets verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which indicates that MvDGPs can integrate the complementary information in multiple views to discover a good representation of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In autonomous driving, many learning-based methods for motion planing have been proposed in literature, which can predict motion commands directly from the sensory data of the environment, but these methods can neither predict multiple motion commands, such as steering angle, accelerator and brake, nor balance errors among different motion commands. In this paper, we propose a deep cascaded neural network for predicting multiple motion commands which can be trained in an end-to-end manner for autonomous driving. The proposed deep cascaded neural network consists of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and three long short-term memory (LSTM) units, fed with images from a front-facing camera installed at the vehicle. As the outputs, the proposed model can predict thee motion planning commands simultaneously including steering angle, acceleration, and brake to enable the autonomous driving. In order to balance errors among different motion commands and improve prediction accuracy, we propose a new network training algorithm, where three independent loss functions are designed to separately update the weights in the three LSTMs connected to three motion commands. We conduct comprehensive experiments using the data from a driving simulator and compare our method with the state-of-the-art methods. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed motion planning model achieves better accuracy performance than other models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel Deep Multi-view Joint Clustering (DMJC) framework is proposed, where multiple deep embedded features, multi-view fusion mechanism, and clustering assignments can be learned simultaneously. Through the joint learning strategy, the clustering-friendly multi-view features and useful multi-view complementary information can be exploited effectively to improve the clustering performance. Under the proposed joint learning framework, we design two ingenious variants of deep multi-view joint clustering models, whose multi-view fusion is implemented by two kinds of simple yet effective schemes. The first model, called DMJC-S, performs multi-view fusion in an implicit way via a novel multi-view soft assignment distribution. The second model, termed DMJC-T, defines a novel multi-view auxiliary target distribution to conduct the multi-view fusion explicitly. Both DMJC-S and DMJC-T are optimized under a KL divergence objective. Experiments on eight challenging image datasets demonstrate the superiority of both DMJC-S and DMJC-T over single/multi-view baselines and the state-of-the-art multi-view clustering methods, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed DMJC framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to model the multi-view clustering in a deep joint framework, which will provide a meaningful thinking in unsupervised multi-view learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel Takagi-Sugeno–Kang (TSK) fuzzy classification system (FCS) is firstly presented for pattern classification tasks. It is distinguished by having the large margin criterion properly integrated into its objective function. In order to exploit the applicability of fuzzy systems in multiview scenarios, the proposed TSK-FCS is extended to a two-view version, called two-view TSK-FCS (TwoV-TSK-FCS), by using a collaborative learning mechanism. The adopted collaborative learning mechanism not only fully considers the independent information of each view, but also effectively discovers the correlation information hidden in the two views. Thus, the performance of TwoV-TSK-FCS can be enhanced accordingly. Comprehensive experiments on two-view synthetic and UCI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-view FCS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a hardness-aware deep metric learning (HDML) framework for image clustering and retrieval. Most existing deep metric learning methods employ the hard negative mining strategy to alleviate the lack of informative samples for training. However, this mining strategy only utilizes a subset of training data, which may not be enough to characterize the global geometry of the embedding space comprehensively. To address this problem, we perform linear interpolation on embeddings to adaptively manipulate their hardness levels and generate corresponding label-preserving synthetics for recycled training so that information buried in all samples can be fully exploited and the metric is always challenged with proper difficulty. As a single synthetic for each sample may still not be enough to describe the unobserved distributions of the training data which is crucial for the generalization performance, we further extend HDML to generate multiple synthetics for each sample. We propose a randomly hardness-aware deep metric learning (HDML-R) method and an adaptively hardness-aware deep metric learning (HDML-A) method to sample multiple random and adaptive directions, respectively, for hardness-aware synthesis. Since the generated multiple synthetics might not all be useful and adaptive, we propose a synthetic selection method with three criteria for the selection of qualified synthetics that are beneficial to the training of the metric. Extensive experimental results on the widely used CUB-200-2011, Cars196, Stanford Online Products, In-Shop Clothes Retrieval, and VehicleID datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Survival analysis aims at predicting the time to event of interest along with its probability on longitudinal data. It is commonly used to make predictions for a single specific event of interest at a given time point. However, predicting the occurrence of multiple events of interest simultaneously and dynamically is needed in many real-world applications. An intuitive way to solve this problem is to simply apply the standard survival analysis method independently to each prediction task at each time point. However, it often leads to a sub-optimal solution since the underlying dependencies between these tasks are ignored. This motivates us to analyze these prediction tasks jointly in order to select the common features shared across all the tasks. In this paper, we formulate a temporal (Multiple Time points) Multi-Task learning framework (MTMT) for survival analysis problems using tensor representation. More specifically, given a survival dataset and a sequence of time points, which are considered as the monitored time points for the events of interest, we reformulate the survival analysis problem to jointly handle each task at each time point and optimize them simultaneously. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed MTMT model on important real-world datasets, including employee attrition and medical records. We show the superior performance of the MTMT model compared to several state-of-the-art models using standard metrics. We also provide the list of important features selected by our MTMT model thus demonstrating the interpretability of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]