Son N. Tran

Steve J. Bickley, Ho Fai Chan, Bang Dao et al.

This white paper presents our work on SurveyLM, a platform for analyzing augmented language models' (ALMs) emergent alignment behaviors through their dynamically evolving attitude and value perspectives in complex social contexts. Social Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, like ALMs, often function within nuanced social scenarios where there is no singular correct response, or where an answer is heavily dependent on contextual factors, thus necessitating an in-depth understanding of their alignment dynamics. To address this, we apply survey and experimental methodologies, traditionally used in studying social behaviors, to evaluate ALMs systematically, thus providing unprecedented insights into their alignment and emergent behaviors. Moreover, the SurveyLM platform leverages the ALMs' own feedback to enhance survey and experiment designs, exploiting an underutilized aspect of ALMs, which accelerates the development and testing of high-quality survey frameworks while conserving resources. Through SurveyLM, we aim to shed light on factors influencing ALMs' emergent behaviors, facilitate their alignment with human intentions and expectations, and thereby contributed to the responsible development and deployment of advanced social AI systems. This white paper underscores the platform's potential to deliver robust results, highlighting its significance to alignment research and its implications for future social AI systems.

Renjie Li, Xinyi Wang, Guan Huang et al.

Deep supervision, or known as 'intermediate supervision' or 'auxiliary supervision', is to add supervision at hidden layers of a neural network. This technique has been increasingly applied in deep neural network learning systems for various computer vision applications recently. There is a consensus that deep supervision helps improve neural network performance by alleviating the gradient vanishing problem, as one of the many strengths of deep supervision. Besides, in different computer vision applications, deep supervision can be applied in different ways. How to make the most use of deep supervision to improve network performance in different applications has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive in-depth review of deep supervision in both theories and applications. We propose a new classification of different deep supervision networks, and discuss advantages and limitations of current deep supervision networks in computer vision applications.

Rohit Gupta, Mamshad Nayeem Rizve, Jayakrishnan Unnikrishnan et al.

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled significant progress in open vocabulary computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection and image segmentation. Some recent works have focused on extending VLMs to open vocabulary single label action classification in videos. However, previous methods fall short in holistic video understanding which requires the ability to simultaneously recognize multiple actions and entities e.g., objects in the video in an open vocabulary setting. We formulate this problem as open vocabulary multilabel video classification and propose a method to adapt a pre-trained VLM such as CLIP to solve this task. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to provide semantic guidance to the VLM about class labels to improve its open vocabulary performance with two key contributions. First, we propose an end-to-end trainable architecture that learns to prompt an LLM to generate soft attributes for the CLIP text-encoder to enable it to recognize novel classes. Second, we integrate a temporal modeling module into CLIP's vision encoder to effectively model the spatio-temporal dynamics of video concepts as well as propose a novel regularized finetuning technique to ensure strong open vocabulary classification performance in the video domain. Our extensive experimentation showcases the efficacy of our approach on multiple benchmark datasets.

Jianping Yao, Son N. Tran, Saurabh Garg et al.

Deep learning plays an important role in modern agriculture, especially in plant pathology using leaf images where convolutional neural networks (CNN) are attracting a lot of attention. While numerous reviews have explored the applications of deep learning within this research domain, there remains a notable absence of an empirical study to offer insightful comparisons due to the employment of varied datasets in the evaluation. Furthermore, a majority of these approaches tend to address the problem as a singular prediction task, overlooking the multifaceted nature of predicting various aspects of plant species and disease types. Lastly, there is an evident need for a more profound consideration of the semantic relationships that underlie plant species and disease types. In this paper, we start our study by surveying current deep learning approaches for plant identification and disease classification. We categorise the approaches into multi-model, multi-label, multi-output, and multi-task, in which different backbone CNNs can be employed. Furthermore, based on the survey of existing approaches in plant pathology and the study of available approaches in machine learning, we propose a new model named Generalised Stacking Multi-output CNN (GSMo-CNN). To investigate the effectiveness of different backbone CNNs and learning approaches, we conduct an intensive experiment on three benchmark datasets Plant Village, Plant Leaves, and PlantDoc. The experimental results demonstrate that InceptionV3 can be a good choice for a backbone CNN as its performance is better than AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet101, EfficientNet, MobileNet, and a custom CNN developed by us. Interestingly, empirical results support the hypothesis that using a single model can be comparable or better than using two models. Finally, we show that the proposed GSMo-CNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets.

Jianping Yao, Son N. Tran, Samantha Sawyer et al.

The growing demand for sustainable development brings a series of information technologies to help agriculture production. Especially, the emergence of machine learning applications, a branch of artificial intelligence, has shown multiple breakthroughs which can enhance and revolutionize plant pathology approaches. In recent years, machine learning has been adopted for leaf disease classification in both academic research and industrial applications. Therefore, it is enormously beneficial for researchers, engineers, managers, and entrepreneurs to have a comprehensive view about the recent development of machine learning technologies and applications for leaf disease detection. This study will provide a survey in different aspects of the topic including data, techniques, and applications. The paper will start with publicly available datasets. After that, we summarize common machine learning techniques, including traditional (shallow) learning, deep learning, and augmented learning. Finally, we discuss related applications. This paper would provide useful resources for future study and application of machine learning for smart agriculture in general and leaf disease classification in particular.

Renjie Li, Chun Yu Lao, Rebecca St. George et al.

Objective The coordination of human movement directly reflects function of the central nervous system. Small deficits in movement are often the first sign of an underlying neurological problem. The objective of this research is to develop a new end-to-end, deep learning-based system, Rapid-Motion-Track (RMT) that can track the fastest human movement accurately when webcams or laptop cameras are used. Materials and Methods We applied RMT to finger tapping, a well-validated test of motor control that is one of the most challenging human motions to track with computer vision due to the small keypoints of digits and the high velocities that are generated. We recorded 160 finger tapping assessments simultaneously with a standard 2D laptop camera (30 frames/sec) and a high-speed wearable sensor-based 3D motion tracking system (250 frames/sec). RMT and a range of DLC models were applied to the video data with tapping frequencies up to 8Hz to extract movement features. Results The movement features (e.g. speed, rhythm, variance) identified with the new RMT system exhibited very high concurrent validity with the gold-standard measurements (97.3\% of RMT measures were within +/-0.5Hz of the Optotrak measures), and outperformed DLC and other advanced computer vision tools (around 88.2\% of DLC measures were within +/-0.5Hz of the Optotrak measures). RMT also accurately tracked a range of other rapid human movements such as foot tapping, head turning and sit-to -stand movements. Conclusion: With the ubiquity of video technology in smart devices, the RMT method holds potential to transform access and accuracy of human movement assessment.

Xuan-Son Vu, Son N. Tran, Lili Jiang

This paper firstly proposes a simple yet efficient generalized approach to apply differential privacy to text representation (i.e., word embedding). Based on it, we propose a user-level approach to learn personalized differentially private word embedding model on user generated contents (UGC). To our best knowledge, this is the first work of learning user-level differentially private word embedding model from text for sharing. The proposed approaches protect the privacy of the individual from re-identification, especially provide better trade-off of privacy and data utility on UGC data for sharing. The experimental results show that the trained embedding models are applicable for the classic text analysis tasks (e.g., regression). Moreover, the proposed approaches of learning differentially private embedding models are both framework- and data- independent, which facilitates the deployment and sharing. The source code is available at https://github.com/sonvx/dpText.

Xuan-Son Vu, Thanh Vu, Son N. Tran et al.

Given many recent advanced embedding models, selecting pre-trained word embedding (a.k.a., word representation) models best fit for a specific downstream task is non-trivial. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach, called ETNLP, for extracting, evaluating, and visualizing multiple sets of pre-trained word embeddings to determine which embeddings should be used in a downstream task. For extraction, we provide a method to extract subsets of the embeddings to be used in the downstream task. For evaluation, we analyse the quality of pre-trained embeddings using an input word analogy list. Finally, we visualize the word representations in the embedding space to explore the embedded words interactively. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on our pre-trained word embedding models in Vietnamese to select which models are suitable for a named entity recognition (NER) task. Specifically, we create a large Vietnamese word analogy list to evaluate and select the pre-trained embedding models for the task. We then utilize the selected embeddings for the NER task and achieve the new state-of-the-art results on the task benchmark dataset. We also apply the approach to another downstream task of privacy-guaranteed embedding selection, and show that it helps users quickly select the most suitable embeddings. In addition, we create an open-source system using the proposed systematic approach to facilitate similar studies on other NLP tasks. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/vietnlp/etnlp.

Kai Hu, Feng Gao, Xiaohan Nie et al.

Recent advances in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (M-LLMs) show promising results in video reasoning. Popular Multi-Modal Large Language Model (M-LLM) frameworks usually apply naive uniform sampling to reduce the number of video frames that are fed into an M-LLM, particularly for long context videos. However, it could lose crucial context in certain periods of a video, so that the downstream M-LLM may not have sufficient visual information to answer a question. To attack this pain point, we propose a light-weight M-LLM -based frame selection method that adaptively select frames that are more relevant to users' queries. In order to train the proposed frame selector, we introduce two supervision signals (i) Spatial signal, where single frame importance score by prompting a M-LLM; (ii) Temporal signal, in which multiple frames selection by prompting Large Language Model (LLM) using the captions of all frame candidates. The selected frames are then digested by a frozen downstream video M-LLM for visual reasoning and question answering. Empirical results show that the proposed M-LLM video frame selector improves the performances various downstream video Large Language Model (video-LLM) across medium (ActivityNet, NExT-QA) and long (EgoSchema, LongVideoBench) context video question answering benchmarks.

Jianping Yao, Son N. Tran

Plant leaf disease classification is an important task in smart agriculture which plays a critical role in sustainable production. Modern machine learning approaches have shown unprecedented potential in this classification task which offers an array of benefits including time saving and cost reduction. However, most recent approaches directly employ convolutional neural networks where the effect of the relationship between plant species and disease types on prediction performance is not properly studied. In this study, we proposed a new model named Multi-output Deep Supervised Classifier Chains (Mo-DsCC) which weaves the prediction of plant species and disease by chaining the output layers for the two labels. Mo-DsCC consists of three components: A modified VGG-16 network as the backbone, deep supervision training, and a stack of classification chains. To evaluate the advantages of our model, we perform intensive experiments on two benchmark datasets Plant Village and PlantDoc. Comparison to recent approaches, including multi-model, multi-label (Power-set), multi-output and multi-task, demonstrates that Mo-DsCC achieves better accuracy and F1-score. The empirical study in this paper shows that the application of Mo-DsCC could be a useful puzzle for smart agriculture to benefit farms and bring new ideas to industry and academia.

Jianping Yao, Son N. Tran, Hieu Nguyen et al.

The purpose of this paper is to use absorbance data obtained by human tasting and an ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) scanning spectrophotometer to predict the attributes of grape juice (GJ) and to classify the wine's origin, respectively. The approach combined machine learning (ML) techniques with spectroscopy to find a relatively simple way to apply them in two stages of winemaking and help improve the traditional wine analysis methods regarding sensory data and wine's origins. This new technique has overcome the disadvantages of the complex sensors by taking advantage of spectral fingerprinting technology and forming a comprehensive study of the employment of AI in the wine analysis domain. In the results, Support Vector Machine (SVM) was the most efficient and robust in both attributes and origin prediction tasks. Both the accuracy and F1 score of the origin prediction exceed 91%. The feature ranking approach found that the more influential wavelengths usually appear at the lower end of the scan range, 250 nm (nanometers) to 420 nm, which is believed to be of great help for selecting appropriate validation methods and sensors to extract wine data in future research. The knowledge of this research provides new ideas and early solutions for the wine industry or other beverage industries to integrate big data and IoT in the future, which significantly promotes the development of 'Smart Wineries'.

Son Tran, Edjard Mota, Artur d'Avila Garcez

Knowledge representation and reasoning in neural networks have been a long-standing endeavor which has attracted much attention recently. The principled integration of reasoning and learning in neural networks is a main objective of the area of neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this chapter, a simple energy-based neurosymbolic AI system is described that can represent and reason formally about any propositional logic formula. This creates a powerful combination of learning from data and knowledge and logical reasoning. We start by positioning neurosymbolic AI in the context of the current AI landscape that is unsurprisingly dominated by Large Language Models (LLMs). We identify important challenges of data efficiency, fairness and safety of LLMs that might be addressed by neurosymbolic reasoning systems with formal reasoning capabilities. We then discuss the representation of logic by the specific energy-based system, including illustrative examples and empirical evaluation of the correspondence between logical reasoning and energy minimization using Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM). Learning from data and knowledge is also evaluated empirically and compared with a symbolic, neural and a neurosymbolic system. Results reported in this chapter in an accessible way are expected to reignite the research on the use of neural networks as massively-parallel models for logical reasoning and promote the principled integration of reasoning and learning in deep networks. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the importance of positioning neurosymbolic AI within a broader framework of formal reasoning and accountability in AI, discussing the challenges for neurosynbolic AI to tackle the various known problems of reliability of deep learning.

Jiali Duan, Liqun Chen, Son Tran et al.

Aligning signals from different modalities is an important step in vision-language representation learning as it affects the performance of later stages such as cross-modality fusion. Since image and text typically reside in different regions of the feature space, directly aligning them at instance level is challenging especially when features are still evolving during training. In this paper, we propose to align at a higher and more stable level using cluster representation. Specifically, we treat image and text as two "views" of the same entity, and encode them into a joint vision-language coding space spanned by a dictionary of cluster centers (codebook). We contrast positive and negative samples via their cluster assignments while simultaneously optimizing the cluster centers. To further smooth out the learning process, we adopt a teacher-student distillation paradigm, where the momentum teacher of one view guides the student learning of the other. We evaluated our approach on common vision language benchmarks and obtain new SoTA on zero-shot cross modality retrieval while being competitive on various other transfer tasks.

Jinyu Yang, Jiali Duan, Son Tran et al.

Vision-language representation learning largely benefits from image-text alignment through contrastive losses (e.g., InfoNCE loss). The success of this alignment strategy is attributed to its capability in maximizing the mutual information (MI) between an image and its matched text. However, simply performing cross-modal alignment (CMA) ignores data potential within each modality, which may result in degraded representations. For instance, although CMA-based models are able to map image-text pairs close together in the embedding space, they fail to ensure that similar inputs from the same modality stay close by. This problem can get even worse when the pre-training data is noisy. In this paper, we propose triple contrastive learning (TCL) for vision-language pre-training by leveraging both cross-modal and intra-modal self-supervision. Besides CMA, TCL introduces an intra-modal contrastive objective to provide complementary benefits in representation learning. To take advantage of localized and structural information from image and text input, TCL further maximizes the average MI between local regions of image/text and their global summary. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work that takes into account local structure information for multi-modality representation learning. Experimental evaluations show that our approach is competitive and achieves the new state of the art on various common down-stream vision-language tasks such as image-text retrieval and visual question answering.

Renjie Li, Son Tran, Saurabh Garg et al.

Keypoint detection plays an important role in a wide range of applications. However, predicting keypoints of small objects such as human hands is a challenging problem. Recent works fuse feature maps of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), either via multi-level feature integration or multi-resolution aggregation. Despite achieving some success, the feature fusion approaches increase the complexity and the opacity of CNNs. To address this issue, we propose a novel CNN model named Multi-Scale Deep Supervision Network (P-MSDSNet) that learns feature maps at different scales with deep supervisions to produce attention maps for adaptive feature propagation from layers to layers. P-MSDSNet has a multi-stage architecture which makes it scalable while its deep supervision with spatial attention improves transparency to the feature learning at each stage. We show that P-MSDSNet outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets while requiring fewer number of parameters. We also show the application of P-MSDSNet to quantify finger tapping hand movements in a neuroscience study.

Son N. Tran, Artur d'Avila Garcez

The idea of representing symbolic knowledge in connectionist systems has been a long-standing endeavour which has attracted much attention recently with the objective of combining machine learning and scalable sound reasoning. Early work has shown a correspondence between propositional logic and symmetrical neural networks which nevertheless did not scale well with the number of variables and whose training regime was inefficient. In this paper, we introduce Logical Boltzmann Machines (LBM), a neurosymbolic system that can represent any propositional logic formula in strict disjunctive normal form. We prove equivalence between energy minimization in LBM and logical satisfiability thus showing that LBM is capable of sound reasoning. We evaluate reasoning empirically to show that LBM is capable of finding all satisfying assignments of a class of logical formulae by searching fewer than 0.75% of the possible (approximately 1 billion) assignments. We compare learning in LBM with a symbolic inductive logic programming system, a state-of-the-art neurosymbolic system and a purely neural network-based system, achieving better learning performance in five out of seven data sets.

Guan Huang, Son N. Tran, Quan Bai et al.

Our team are developing a new online test that analyses hand movement features associated with ageing that can be completed remotely from the research centre. To obtain hand movement features, participants will be asked to perform a variety of hand gestures using their own computer cameras. However, it is challenging to collect high quality hand movement video data, especially for older participants, many of whom have no IT background. During the data collection process, one of the key steps is to detect whether the participants are following the test instructions correctly and also to detect similar gestures from different devices. Furthermore, we need this process to be automated and accurate as we expect many thousands of participants to complete the test. We have implemented a hand gesture detector to detect the gestures in the hand movement tests and our detection mAP is 0.782 which is better than the state-of-the-art. In this research, we have processed 20,000 images collected from hand movement tests and labelled 6,450 images to detect different hand gestures in the hand movement tests. This paper has the following three contributions. Firstly, we compared and analysed the performance of different network structures for hand gesture detection. Secondly, we have made many attempts to improve the accuracy of the model and have succeeded in improving the classification accuracy for similar gestures by implementing attention layers. Thirdly, we have created two datasets and included 20 percent of blurred images in the dataset to investigate how different network structures were impacted by noisy data, our experiments have also shown our network has better performance on the noisy dataset.

Jiali Duan, Yen-Liang Lin, Son Tran et al.

Most existing distance metric learning approaches use fully labeled data to learn the sample similarities in an embedding space. We present a self-training framework, SLADE, to improve retrieval performance by leveraging additional unlabeled data. We first train a teacher model on the labeled data and use it to generate pseudo labels for the unlabeled data. We then train a student model on both labels and pseudo labels to generate final feature embeddings. We use self-supervised representation learning to initialize the teacher model. To better deal with noisy pseudo labels generated by the teacher network, we design a new feature basis learning component for the student network, which learns basis functions of feature representations for unlabeled data. The learned basis vectors better measure the pairwise similarity and are used to select high-confident samples for training the student network. We evaluate our method on standard retrieval benchmarks: CUB-200, Cars-196 and In-shop. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the performance over the state-of-the-art methods.

Xinping Liu, Zehong Cao, Son Tran

Word embeddings can reflect the semantic representations, and the embedding qualities can be comprehensively evaluated with human natural reading-related cognitive data sources. In this paper, we proposed the CogniFNN framework, which is the first attempt at using fuzzy neural networks to extract non-linear and non-stationary characteristics for evaluations of English word embeddings against the corresponding cognitive datasets. In our experiment, we used 15 human cognitive datasets across three modalities: EEG, fMRI, and eye-tracking, and selected the mean square error and multiple hypotheses testing as metrics to evaluate our proposed CogniFNN framework. Compared to the recent pioneer framework, our proposed CogniFNN showed smaller prediction errors of both context-independent (GloVe) and context-sensitive (BERT) word embeddings, and achieved higher significant ratios with randomly generated word embeddings. Our findings suggested that the CogniFNN framework could provide a more accurate and comprehensive evaluation of cognitive word embeddings. It will potentially be beneficial to the further word embeddings evaluation on extrinsic natural language processing tasks.

Dung Nguyen, Duc Thanh Nguyen, Rui Zeng et al.

Multimodal dimensional emotion recognition has drawn a great attention from the affective computing community and numerous schemes have been extensively investigated, making a significant progress in this area. However, several questions still remain unanswered for most of existing approaches including: (i) how to simultaneously learn compact yet representative features from multimodal data, (ii) how to effectively capture complementary features from multimodal streams, and (iii) how to perform all the tasks in an end-to-end manner. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network architecture consisting of a two-stream auto-encoder and a long short term memory for effectively integrating visual and audio signal streams for emotion recognition. To validate the robustness of our proposed architecture, we carry out extensive experiments on the multimodal emotion in the wild dataset: RECOLA. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art recognition performance and surpasses existing schemes by a significant margin.

Dung Nguyen, Sridha Sridharan, Duc Thanh Nguyen et al.

Deep learning has been applied to achieve significant progress in emotion recognition. Despite such substantial progress, existing approaches are still hindered by insufficient training data, and the resulting models do not generalize well under mismatched conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a learning strategy which jointly transfers the knowledge learned from rich datasets to source-poor datasets. Our method is also able to learn cross-domain features which lead to improved recognition performance. To demonstrate the robustness of our proposed framework, we conducted experiments on three benchmark emotion datasets including eNTERFACE, SAVEE, and EMODB. Experimental results show that the proposed method surpassed state-of-the-art transfer learning schemes by a significant margin.

Yen-Liang Lin, Son Tran, Larry S. Davis

Complementary fashion item recommendation is critical for fashion outfit completion. Existing methods mainly focus on outfit compatibility prediction but not in a retrieval setting. We propose a new framework for outfit complementary item retrieval. Specifically, a category-based subspace attention network is presented, which is a scalable approach for learning the subspace attentions. In addition, we introduce an outfit ranking loss that better models the item relationships of an entire outfit. We evaluate our method on the outfit compatibility, FITB and new retrieval tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both compatibility prediction and complementary item retrieval

Son Tran, Ming Du, Sampath Chanda et al.

In this age of social media, people often look at what others are wearing. In particular, Instagram and Twitter influencers often provide images of themselves wearing different outfits and their followers are often inspired to buy similar clothes.We propose a system to automatically find the closest visually similar clothes in the online Catalog (street-to-shop searching). The problem is challenging since the original images are taken under different pose and lighting conditions. The system initially localizes high-level descriptive regions (top, bottom, wristwear. . . ) using multiple CNN detectors such as YOLO and SSD that are trained specifically for apparel domain. It then classifies these regions into more specific regions such as t-shirts, tunic or dresses. Finally, a feature embedding learned using a multi-task function is recovered for every item and then compared with corresponding items in the online Catalog database and ranked according to distance. We validate our approach component-wise using benchmark datasets and end-to-end using human evaluation.

Artur d'Avila Garcez, Marco Gori, Luis C. Lamb et al.

Current advances in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning in general, and deep learning in particular have reached unprecedented impact not only across research communities, but also over popular media channels. However, concerns about interpretability and accountability of AI have been raised by influential thinkers. In spite of the recent impact of AI, several works have identified the need for principled knowledge representation and reasoning mechanisms integrated with deep learning-based systems to provide sound and explainable models for such systems. Neural-symbolic computing aims at integrating, as foreseen by Valiant, two most fundamental cognitive abilities: the ability to learn from the environment, and the ability to reason from what has been learned. Neural-symbolic computing has been an active topic of research for many years, reconciling the advantages of robust learning in neural networks and reasoning and interpretability of symbolic representation. In this paper, we survey recent accomplishments of neural-symbolic computing as a principled methodology for integrated machine learning and reasoning. We illustrate the effectiveness of the approach by outlining the main characteristics of the methodology: principled integration of neural learning with symbolic knowledge representation and reasoning allowing for the construction of explainable AI systems. The insights provided by neural-symbolic computing shed new light on the increasingly prominent need for interpretable and accountable AI systems.

Son N. Tran, Qing Zhang, Mohan Karunanithi

Increasing attention to the research on activity monitoring in smart homes has motivated the employment of ambient intelligence to reduce the deployment cost and solve the privacy issue. Several approaches have been proposed for multi-resident activity recognition, however, there still lacks a comprehensive benchmark for future research and practical selection of models. In this paper we study different methods for multi-resident activity recognition and evaluate them on same sets of data. The experimental results show that recurrent neural network with gated recurrent units is better than other models and also considerably efficient, and that using combined activities as single labels is more effective than represent them as separate labels.

Son N. Tran, Srikanth Cherla, Artur Garcez et al.

Classification of sequence data is the topic of interest for dynamic Bayesian models and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). While the former can explicitly model the temporal dependencies between class variables, the latter have a capability of learning representations. Several attempts have been made to improve performance by combining these two approaches or increasing the processing capability of the hidden units in RNNs. This often results in complex models with a large number of learning parameters. In this paper, a compact model is proposed which offers both representation learning and temporal inference of class variables by rolling Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and class variables over time. We address the key issue of intractability in this variant of RBMs by optimising a conditional distribution, instead of a joint distribution. Experiments reported in the paper on melody modelling and optical character recognition show that the proposed model can outperform the state-of-the-art. Also, the experimental results on optical character recognition, part-of-speech tagging and text chunking demonstrate that our model is comparable to recurrent neural networks with complex memory gates while requiring far fewer parameters.

Son N. Tran

Symbolic has been long considered as a language of human intelligence while neural networks have advantages of robust computation and dealing with noisy data. The integration of neural-symbolic can offer better learning and reasoning while providing a means for interpretability through the representation of symbolic knowledge. Although previous works focus intensively on supervised feedforward neural networks, little has been done for the unsupervised counterparts. In this paper we show how to integrate symbolic knowledge into unsupervised neural networks. We exemplify our approach with knowledge in different forms, including propositional logic for DNA promoter prediction and first-order logic for understanding family relationship.

Son N. Tran

While knowledge representation and reasoning are considered the keys for human-level artificial intelligence, connectionist networks have been shown successful in a broad range of applications due to their capacity for robust learning and flexible inference under uncertainty. The idea of representing symbolic knowledge in connectionist networks has been well-received and attracted much attention from research community as this can establish a foundation for integration of scalable learning and sound reasoning. In previous work, there exist a number of approaches that map logical inference rules with feed-forward propagation of artificial neural networks (ANN). However, the discriminative structure of an ANN requires the separation of input/output variables which makes it difficult for general reasoning where any variables should be inferable. Other approaches address this issue by employing generative models such as symmetric connectionist networks, however, they are difficult and convoluted. In this paper we propose a novel method to represent propositional formulas in restricted Boltzmann machines which is less complex, especially in the cases of logical implications and Horn clauses. An integration system is then developed and evaluated in real datasets which shows promising results.

Srikanth Cherla, Son N Tran, Tillman Weyde et al.

We present a novel theoretical result that generalises the Discriminative Restricted Boltzmann Machine (DRBM). While originally the DRBM was defined assuming the {0, 1}-Bernoulli distribution in each of its hidden units, this result makes it possible to derive cost functions for variants of the DRBM that utilise other distributions, including some that are often encountered in the literature. This is illustrated with the Binomial and {-1, +1}-Bernoulli distributions here. We evaluate these two DRBM variants and compare them with the original one on three benchmark datasets, namely the MNIST and USPS digit classification datasets, and the 20 Newsgroups document classification dataset. Results show that each of the three compared models outperforms the remaining two in one of the three datasets, thus indicating that the proposed theoretical generalisation of the DRBM may be valuable in practice.

Son N. Tran, Artur d'Avila Garcez

Transfer Learning is concerned with the application of knowledge gained from solving a problem to a different but related problem domain. In this paper, we propose a method and efficient algorithm for ranking and selecting representations from a Restricted Boltzmann Machine trained on a source domain to be transferred onto a target domain. Experiments carried out using the MNIST, ICDAR and TiCC image datasets show that the proposed adaptive feature ranking and transfer learning method offers statistically significant improvements on the training of RBMs. Our method is general in that the knowledge chosen by the ranking function does not depend on its relation to any specific target domain, and it works with unsupervised learning and knowledge-based transfer.