Dong Liu

Dong Liu, Antoine Honoré, Saikat Chatterjee et al.

Hidden Markov model (HMM) has been successfully used for sequential data modeling problems. In this work, we propose to power the modeling capacity of HMM by bringing in neural network based generative models. The proposed model is termed as GenHMM. In the proposed GenHMM, each HMM hidden state is associated with a neural network based generative model that has tractability of exact likelihood and provides efficient likelihood computation. A generative model in GenHMM consists of mixture of generators that are realized by flow models. A learning algorithm for GenHMM is proposed in expectation-maximization framework. The convergence of the learning GenHMM is analyzed. We demonstrate the efficiency of GenHMM by classification tasks on practical sequential data. Code available at https://github.com/FirstHandScientist/genhmm.

Anubhab Ghosh, Antoine Honoré, Dong Liu et al.

In pursuit of explainability, we develop generative models for sequential data. The proposed models provide state-of-the-art classification results and robust performance for speech phone classification. We combine modern neural networks (normalizing flows) and traditional generative models (hidden Markov models - HMMs). Normalizing flow-based mixture models (NMMs) are used to model the conditional probability distribution given the hidden state in the HMMs. Model parameters are learned through judicious combinations of time-tested Bayesian learning methods and contemporary neural network learning methods. We mainly combine expectation-maximization (EM) and mini-batch gradient descent. The proposed generative models can compute likelihood of a data and hence directly suitable for maximum-likelihood (ML) classification approach. Due to structural flexibility of HMMs, we can use different normalizing flow models. This leads to different types of HMMs providing diversity in data modeling capacity. The diversity provides an opportunity for easy decision fusion from different models. For a standard speech phone classification setup involving 39 phones (classes) and the TIMIT dataset, we show that the use of standard features called mel-frequency-cepstral-coeffcients (MFCCs), the proposed generative models, and the decision fusion together can achieve $86.6\%$ accuracy by generative training only. This result is close to state-of-the-art results, for examples, $86.2\%$ accuracy of PyTorch-Kaldi toolkit [1], and $85.1\%$ accuracy using light gated recurrent units [2]. We do not use any discriminative learning approach and related sophisticated features in this article.

Andrea Scotti, Nima N. Moghadam, Dong Liu et al.

In this paper, we innovately use graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn a message-passing solution for the inference task of massive multiple multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection in wireless communication. We adopt a graphical model based on the Markov random field (MRF) where belief propagation (BP) yields poor results when it assumes a uniform prior over the transmitted symbols. Numerical simulations show that, under the uniform prior assumption, our GNN-based MIMO detection solution outperforms the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) baseline detector, in contrast to BP. Furthermore, experiments demonstrate that the performance of the algorithm slightly improves by incorporating MMSE information into the prior.

Antoine Honore, Dong Liu, David Forsberg et al.

We explore the use of traditional and contemporary hidden Markov models (HMMs) for sequential physiological data analysis and sepsis prediction in preterm infants. We investigate the use of classical Gaussian mixture model based HMM, and a recently proposed neural network based HMM. To improve the neural network based HMM, we propose a discriminative training approach. Experimental results show the potential of HMMs over logistic regression, support vector machine and extreme learning machine.

Dong Liu, Minh Thành Vu, Saikat Chatterjee et al.

We propose two neural network based mixture models in this article. The proposed mixture models are explicit in nature. The explicit models have analytical forms with the advantages of computing likelihood and efficiency of generating samples. Computation of likelihood is an important aspect of our models. Expectation-maximization based algorithms are developed for learning parameters of the proposed models. We provide sufficient conditions to realize the expectation-maximization based learning. The main requirements are invertibility of neural networks that are used as generators and Jacobian computation of functional form of the neural networks. The requirements are practically realized using a flow-based neural network. In our first mixture model, we use multiple flow-based neural networks as generators. Naturally the model is complex. A single latent variable is used as the common input to all the neural networks. The second mixture model uses a single flow-based neural network as a generator to reduce complexity. The single generator has a latent variable input that follows a Gaussian mixture distribution. We demonstrate efficiency of proposed mixture models through extensive experiments for generating samples and maximum likelihood based classification.