Zhe Zhang

Lei Kou, Chuang Liu, Guowei Cai et al.

A fault diagnosis method for power electronics converters based on deep feedforward network and wavelet compression is proposed in this paper. The transient historical data after wavelet compression are used to realize the training of fault diagnosis classifier. Firstly, the correlation analysis of the voltage or current data running in various fault states is performed to remove the redundant features and the sampling point. Secondly, the wavelet transform is used to remove the redundant data of the features, and then the training sample data is greatly compressed. The deep feedforward network is trained by the low frequency component of the features, while the training speed is greatly accelerated. The average accuracy of fault diagnosis classifier can reach over 97%. Finally, the fault diagnosis classifier is tested, and final diagnosis result is determined by multiple-groups transient data, by which the reliability of diagnosis results is improved. The experimental result proves that the classifier has strong generalization ability and can accurately locate the open-circuit faults in IGBTs.

Kou Lei, Liu Chuang, Cai Guo-Wei et al.

Three-phase PWM rectifiers are adopted extensively in industry because of their excellent properties and potential advantages. However, while the IGBT has an open-circuit fault, the system does not crash suddenly, the performance will be reduced for instance voltages fluctuation and current harmonics. A fault diagnosis method based on deep feedforward network with transient synthetic features is proposed to reduce the dependence on the fault mathematical models in this paper, which mainly uses the transient phase current to train the deep feedforward network classifier. Firstly, the features of fault phase current are analyzed in this paper. Secondly, the historical fault data after feature synthesis is employed to train the deep feedforward network classifier, and the average fault diagnosis accuracy can reach 97.85% for transient synthetic fault data, the classifier trained by the transient synthetic features obtained more than 1% gain in performance compared with original transient features. Finally, the online fault diagnosis experiments show that the method can accurately locate the fault IGBTs, and the final diagnosis result is determined by multiple groups results, which has the ability to increase the accuracy and reliability of the diagnosis results. (c) 2020 ISA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Chuang Liu, Lei Kou, Guowei Cai et al.

Power electronics converters have been widely used in aerospace system, DC transmission, distributed energy, smart grid and so forth, and the reliability of power electronics converters has been a hotspot in academia and industry. It is of great significance to carry out power electronics converters open-circuit faults monitoring and intelligent fault diagnosis to avoid secondary faults, reduce time and cost of operation and maintenance, and improve the reliability of power electronics system. Firstly, the faults features of power electronic converters are analyzed and summarized. Secondly, some AI-based fault diagnosis methods and application examples in power electronics converters are reviewed, and a fault diagnosis method based on the combination of random forests and transient fault features is proposed for three-phase power electronics converters. Finally, the future research challenges and directions of AI-based fault diagnosis methods are pointed out.

Guanghui Lan, Zhe Zhang

This paper studies the communication complexity of convex risk-averse optimization over a network. The problem generalizes the well-studied risk-neutral finite-sum distributed optimization problem and its importance stems from the need to handle risk in an uncertain environment. For algorithms in the literature, there exists a gap in communication complexities for solving risk-averse and risk-neutral problems. We propose two distributed algorithms, namely the distributed risk averse optimization (DRAO) method and the distributed risk averse optimization with sliding (DRAO-S) method, to close the gap. Specifically, the DRAO method achieves the optimal communication complexity by assuming a certain saddle point subproblem can be easily solved in the server node. The DRAO-S method removes the strong assumption by introducing a novel saddle point sliding subroutine which only requires the projection over the ambiguity set $P$. We observe that the number of $P$-projections performed by DRAO-S is optimal. Moreover, we develop matching lower complexity bounds to show the communication complexities of both DRAO and DRAO-S to be improvable. Numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the encouraging empirical performance of the DRAO-S method.

Jinghui Xiao, Qun Liu, Xin Jiang et al.

Pinyin to Character conversion (P2C) task is the key task of Input Method Engine (IME) in commercial input software for Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, Thai language and so on. It's usually treated as sequence labelling task and resolved by language model, i.e. n-gram or RNN. However, the low capacity of the n-gram or RNN limits its performance. This paper introduces a new solution named PERT which stands for bidirectional Pinyin Encoder Representations from Transformers. It achieves significant improvement of performance over baselines. Furthermore, we combine PERT with n-gram under a Markov framework, and improve performance further. Lastly, the external lexicon is incorporated into PERT so as to resolve the OOD issue of IME.

Zhe Zhang, Suvrit Sra

We develop efficient algorithms for optimizing piecewise smooth (PWS) functions where the underlying partition of the domain into smooth pieces is \emph{unknown}. For PWS functions satisfying a quadratic growth (QG) condition, we propose a bundle-level (BL) type method that achieves global linear convergence -- to our knowledge, the first such result for any algorithm for this problem class. We extend this method to handle approximately PWS functions and to solve weakly-convex PWS problems, improving the state-of-the-art complexity to match the benchmark for smooth non-convex optimization. Furthermore, we introduce the first verifiable and accurate termination criterion for PWS optimization. Similar to the gradient norm in smooth optimization, this certificate tightly characterizes the optimality gap under the QG condition, and can moreover be evaluated without knowledge of any problem parameters. We develop a search subroutine for this certificate and embed it within a guess-and-check framework, resulting in an almost parameter-free algorithm for both the convex QG and weakly-convex settings.

Zhe Zhang, Linjun Zhang

In this paper, we develop a general framework to design differentially private expectation-maximization (EM) algorithms in high-dimensional latent variable models, based on the noisy iterative hard-thresholding. We derive the statistical guarantees of the proposed framework and apply it to three specific models: Gaussian mixture, mixture of regression, and regression with missing covariates. In each model, we establish the near-optimal rate of convergence with differential privacy constraints, and show the proposed algorithm is minimax rate optimal up to logarithm factors. The technical tools developed for the high-dimensional setting are then extended to the classic low-dimensional latent variable models, and we propose a near rate-optimal EM algorithm with differential privacy guarantees in this setting. Simulation studies and real data analysis are conducted to support our results.

Longyu Jiang, Zhe Zhang, Rui Jin et al.

Compressive sensing (CS) has been applied to estimate the direction of arrival (DOA) in underwater acoustics. However, the key problem needed to be resolved in a {multipath} propagation environment is to suppress the interferences between the raypaths. Thus, in this paper, {a subspace-based compressive sensing algorithm that formulates the statistic information of the signal subspace in a CS framework is proposed.} The experiment results show that (1) the proposed algorithm enables the separation of raypaths that arrive closely at the {receiver} array and (2) the existing algorithms fail, especially in a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environment.

Yaozhong Gan, Zhe Zhang, Xiaoyang Tan

Learning complicated value functions in high dimensional state space by function approximation is a challenging task, partially due to that the max-operator used in temporal difference updates can theoretically cause instability for most linear or non-linear approximation schemes. Mellowmax is a recently proposed differentiable and non-expansion softmax operator that allows a convergent behavior in learning and planning. Unfortunately, the performance bound for the fixed point it converges to remains unclear, and in practice, its parameter is sensitive to various domains and has to be tuned case by case. Finally, the Mellowmax operator may suffer from oversmoothing as it ignores the probability being taken for each action when aggregating them. In this paper, we address all the above issues with an enhanced Mellowmax operator, named SM2 (Soft Mellowmax). Particularly, the proposed operator is reliable, easy to implement, and has provable performance guarantee, while preserving all the advantages of Mellowmax. Furthermore, we show that our SM2 operator can be applied to the challenging multi-agent reinforcement learning scenarios, leading to stable value function approximation and state of the art performance.

Zhaoyue Chen, Nick Koudas, Zhe Zhang et al.

Machine Learning (ML) applications are proliferating in the enterprise. Relational data which are prevalent in enterprise applications are typically normalized; as a result, data has to be denormalized via primary/foreign-key joins to be provided as input to ML algorithms. In this paper, we study the implementation of popular nonlinear ML models, Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) and Neural Networks (NN), over normalized data addressing both cases of binary and multi-way joins over normalized relations. For the case of GMM, we show how it is possible to decompose computation in a systematic way both for binary joins and for multi-way joins to construct mixture models. We demonstrate that by factoring the computation, one can conduct the training of the models much faster compared to other applicable approaches, without any loss in accuracy. For the case of NN, we propose algorithms to train the network taking normalized data as the input. Similarly, we present algorithms that can conduct the training of the network in a factorized way and offer performance advantages. The redundancy introduced by denormalization can be exploited for certain types of activation functions. However, we demonstrate that attempting to explore this redundancy is helpful up to a certain point; exploring redundancy at higher layers of the network will always result in increased costs and is not recommended. We present the results of a thorough experimental evaluation, varying several parameters of the input relations involved and demonstrate that our proposals for the training of GMM and NN yield drastic performance improvements typically starting at 100%, which become increasingly higher as parameters of the underlying data vary, without any loss in accuracy.

Jim Pivarski, Peter Elmer, Brian Bockelman et al.

Big Data query systems represent data in a columnar format for fast, selective access, and in some cases (e.g. Apache Drill), perform calculations directly on the columnar data without row materialization, avoiding runtime costs. However, many analysis procedures cannot be easily or efficiently expressed as SQL. In High Energy Physics, the majority of data processing requires nested loops with complex dependencies. When faced with tasks like these, the conventional approach is to convert the columnar data back into an object form, usually with a performance price. This paper describes a new technique to transform procedural code so that it operates on hierarchically nested, columnar data natively, without row materialization. It can be viewed as a compiler pass on the typed abstract syntax tree, rewriting references to objects as columnar array lookups. We will also present performance comparisons between transformed code and conventional object-oriented code in a High Energy Physics context.

Shaoshan Liu, Bolin Ding, Jie Tang et al.

The rise of robotic applications has led to the generation of a huge volume of unstructured data, whereas the current cloud infrastructure was designed to process limited amounts of structured data. To address this problem, we propose a learn-memorize-recall-reduce paradigm for robotic cloud computing. The learning stage converts incoming unstructured data into structured data; the memorization stage provides effective storage for the massive amount of data; the recall stage provides efficient means to retrieve the raw data; while the reduction stage provides means to make sense of this massive amount of unstructured data with limited computing resources.

Shaoshan Liu, Jie Tang, Zhe Zhang et al.

We describe the computing tasks involved in autonomous driving, examine existing autonomous driving computing platform implementations. To enable autonomous driving, the computing stack needs to simultaneously provide high performance, low power consumption, and low thermal dissipation, at low cost. We discuss possible approaches to design computing platforms that will meet these needs.

Zhe Zhang, Daniel B. Neill

We present a novel subset scan method to detect if a probabilistic binary classifier has statistically significant bias -- over or under predicting the risk -- for some subgroup, and identify the characteristics of this subgroup. This form of model checking and goodness-of-fit test provides a way to interpretably detect the presence of classifier bias or regions of poor classifier fit. This allows consideration of not just subgroups of a priori interest or small dimensions, but the space of all possible subgroups of features. To address the difficulty of considering these exponentially many possible subgroups, we use subset scan and parametric bootstrap-based methods. Extending this method, we can penalize the complexity of the detected subgroup and also identify subgroups with high classification errors. We demonstrate these methods and find interesting results on the COMPAS crime recidivism and credit delinquency data.