No Arabic abstract
Fast and reliable prediction of riverine flow velocities is important in many applications, including flood risk management. The shallow water equations (SWEs) are commonly used for prediction of the flow velocities. However, accurate and fast prediction with standard SWE solvers is challenging in many cases. Traditional approaches are computationally expensive and require high-resolution riverbed profile measurement ( bathymetry) for accurate predictions. As a result, they are a poor fit in situations where they need to be evaluated repetitively due, for example, to varying boundary condition (BC), or when the bathymetry is not known with certainty. In this work, we propose a two-stage process that tackles these issues. First, using the principal component geostatistical approach (PCGA) we estimate the probability density function of the bathymetry from flow velocity measurements, and then we use multiple machine learning algorithms to obtain a fast solver of the SWEs, given augmented realizations from the posterior bathymetry distribution and the prescribed range of BCs. The first step allows us to predict flow velocities without direct measurement of the bathymetry. Furthermore, the augmentation of the distribution in the second stage allows incorporation of the additional bathymetry information into the flow velocity prediction for improved accuracy and generalization, even if the bathymetry changes over time. Here, we use three solvers, referred to as PCA-DNN (principal component analysis-deep neural network), SE (supervised encoder), and SVE (supervised variational encoder), and validate them on a reach of the Savannah river near Augusta, GA. Our results show that the fast solvers are capable of predicting flow velocities with good accuracy, at a computational cost that is significantly lower than the cost of solving the full boundary value problem with traditional methods.
The economic and banking importance of the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector is well recognized in contemporary society. Business credit loans are very important for the operation of SMEs, and the revenue is a key indicator of credit limit management. Therefore, it is very beneficial to construct a reliable revenue forecasting model. If the uncertainty of an enterprises revenue forecasting can be estimated, a more proper credit limit can be granted. Natural gradient boosting approach, which estimates the uncertainty of prediction by a multi-parameter boosting algorithm based on the natural gradient. However, its original implementation is not easy to scale into big data scenarios, and computationally expensive compared to state-of-the-art tree-based models (such as XGBoost). In this paper, we propose a Scalable Natural Gradient Boosting Machines that is simple to implement, readily parallelizable, interpretable and yields high-quality predictive uncertainty estimates. According to the characteristics of revenue distribution, we derive an uncertainty quantification function. We demonstrate that our method can distinguish between samples that are accurate and inaccurate on revenue forecasting of SMEs. Whats more, interpretability can be naturally obtained from the model, satisfying the financial needs.
On April 13th, 2019, OpenAI Five became the first AI system to defeat the world champions at an esports game. The game of Dota 2 presents novel challenges for AI systems such as long time horizons, imperfect information, and complex, continuous state-action spaces, all challenges which will become increasingly central to more capable AI systems. OpenAI Five leveraged existing reinforcement learning techniques, scaled to learn from batches of approximately 2 million frames every 2 seconds. We developed a distributed training system and tools for continual training which allowed us to train OpenAI Five for 10 months. By defeating the Dota 2 world champion (Team OG), OpenAI Five demonstrates that self-play reinforcement learning can achieve superhuman performance on a difficult task.
Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly being used for computer aided diagnosis of brain related disorders based on structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Most of such work employs biologically and medically meaningful hand-crafted features calculated from different regions of the brain. The construction of such highly specialized features requires a considerable amount of time, manual oversight and careful quality control to ensure the absence of errors in the computational process. Recent advances in Deep Representation Learning have shown great promise in extracting highly non-linear and information-rich features from data. In this paper, we present a novel large-scale deep unsupervised approach to learn generic feature representations of structural brain MRI scans, which requires no specialized domain knowledge or manual intervention. Our method produces low-dimensional representations of brain structure, which can be used to reconstruct brain images with very low error and exhibit performance comparable to FreeSurfer features on various classification tasks.
Deep learning models in large-scale machine learning systems are often continuously trained with enormous data from production environments. The sheer volume of streaming training data poses a significant challenge to real-time training subsystems and ad-hoc sampling is the standard practice. Our key insight is that these deployed ML systems continuously perform forward passes on data instances during inference, but ad-hoc sampling does not take advantage of this substantial computational effort. Therefore, we propose to record a constant amount of information per instance from these forward passes. The extra information measurably improves the selection of which data instances should participate in forward and backward passes. A novel optimization framework is proposed to analyze this problem and we provide an efficient approximation algorithm under the framework of Mini-batch gradient descent as a practical solution. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and algorithm on several large-scale classification and regression tasks, when compared with competitive baselines widely used in industry.
Surrogate models for partial-differential equations are widely used in the design of meta-materials to rapidly evaluate the behavior of composable components. However, the training cost of accurate surrogates by machine learning can rapidly increase with the number of variables. For photonic-device models, we find that this training becomes especially challenging as design regions grow larger than the optical wavelength. We present an active learning algorithm that reduces the number of training points by more than an order of magnitude for a neural-network surrogate model of optical-surface components compared to random samples. Results show that the surrogate evaluation is over two orders of magnitude faster than a direct solve, and we demonstrate how this can be exploited to accelerate large-scale engineering optimization.