Designing neural network architectures is a challenging task and knowing which specific layers of a model must be adapted to improve the performance is almost a mystery. In this paper, we introduce a novel theory and metric to identify layers that decrease the test accuracy of the trained models, this identification is done as early as at the beginning of training… In the worst-case, such a layer could lead to a network that can not be trained at all. More […]

Editing facial images created by StyleGAN is a popular research topic with important applications. Through editing the latent vectors, it is possible to control the facial attributes such as smile, age, textit{etc}… However, facial attributes are entangled in the latent space and this makes it very difficult to independently control a specific attribute without affecting the others. The key to developing neat semantic control is to completely disentangle the latent space and perform image editing in an unsupervised manner. In […]

This paper presents CompressAI, a platform that provides custom operations, layers, models and tools to research, develop and evaluate end-to-end image and video compression codecs. In particular, CompressAI includes pre-trained models and evaluation tools to compare learned methods with traditional codecs… Multiple models from the state-of-the-art on learned end-to-end compression have thus been reimplemented in PyTorch and trained from scratch. We also report objective comparison results using PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics vs. bit-rate, using the Kodak image dataset as test […]

When only limited target domain data is available, domain adaptation could be used to promote performance of deep neural network (DNN) acoustic model by leveraging well-trained source model and target domain data. However, suffering from domain mismatch and data sparsity, domain adaptation is very challenging… This paper proposes a novel adaptation method for DNN acoustic model using class similarity. Since the output distribution of DNN model contains the knowledge of similarity among classes, which is applicable to both source and […]

The support vector machines (SVM) is one of the most widely used and practical optimization based classification models in machine learning because of its interpretability and flexibility to produce high quality results. However, the big data imposes a certain difficulty to the most sophisticated but relatively slow versions of SVM, namely, the nonlinear SVM… The complexity of nonlinear SVM solvers and the number of elements in the kernel matrix quadratically increases with the number of samples in training data. Therefore, […]

Training RNNs to learn long-term dependencies is difficult due to vanishing gradients. We explore an alternative solution based on explicit memorization using linear autoencoders for sequences, which allows to maximize the short-term memory and that can be solved with a closed-form solution without backpropagation… We introduce an initialization schema that pretrains the weights of a recurrent neural network to approximate the linear autoencoder of the input sequences and we show how such pretraining can better support solving hard classification tasks […]

We consider a natural model of online preference aggregation, where sets of preferred items $R_1, R_2, ldots, R_t$ along with a demand for $k_t$ items in each $R_t$, appear online. Without prior knowledge of $(R_t, k_t)$, the learner maintains a ranking $pi_t$ aiming that at least $k_t$ items from $R_t$ appear high in $pi_t$… This is a fundamental problem in preference aggregation with applications to, e.g., ordering product or news items in web pages based on user scrolling and click […]

We propose a novel medical term embedding method named CODER, which stands for mediCal knOwledge embeDded tErm Representation. CODER is designed for medical term normalization by providing close vector representations for terms that represent the same or similar concepts with multi-language support… CODER is trained on top of BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) with the innovation that token vector aggregation is trained using relations from the UMLS Metathesaurus (Bodenreider, 2004), which is a comprehensive medical knowledge graph with multi-language support. […]

Contrastive loss and its variants have become very popular recently for learning visual representations without supervision. In this work, we first generalize the standard contrastive loss based on cross entropy to a broader family of losses that share an abstract form of $mathcal{L}_{text{alignment}} + lambda mathcal{L}_{text{distribution}}$, where hidden representations are encouraged to (1) be aligned under some transformations/augmentations, and (2) match a prior distribution of high entropy… We show that various instantiations of the generalized loss perform similarly under the […]