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Research has shown that climate change creates warmer temperatures and drier conditions, leading to longer wildfire seasons and increased wildfire risks in the United States. These factors have in turn led to increases in the frequency, extent, and severity of wildfires in recent years. Given the danger posed by wildland fires to people, property, wildlife, and the environment, there is an urgency to provide tools for effective wildfire management. Early detection of wildfires is essential to minimizing potentially catastrophic destruction. In this paper, we present our work on integrating multiple data sources in SmokeyNet, a deep learning model using spatio-temporal information to detect smoke from wildland fires. Camera image data is integrated with weather sensor measurements and processed by SmokeyNet to create a multimodal wildland fire smoke detection system. We present our results comparing performance in terms of both accuracy and time-to-detection for multimodal data vs. a single data source. With a time-to-detection of only a few minutes, SmokeyNet can serve as an automated early notification system, providing a useful tool in the fight against destructive wildfires.

Despite recent advances in Visual QuestionAnswering (VQA), it remains a challenge todetermine how much success can be attributedto sound reasoning and comprehension ability.We seek to investigate this question by propos-ing a new task ofrationale generation. Es-sentially, we task a VQA model with generat-ing rationales for the answers it predicts. Weuse data from the Visual Commonsense Rea-soning (VCR) task, as it contains ground-truthrationales along with visual questions and an-swers. We first investigate commonsense un-derstanding in one of the leading VCR mod-els, ViLBERT, by generating rationales frompretrained weights using a state-of-the-art lan-guage model, GPT-2. Next, we seek to jointlytrain ViLBERT with GPT-2 in an end-to-endfashion with the dual task of predicting the an-swer in VQA and generating rationales. Weshow that this kind of training injects com-monsense understanding in the VQA modelthrough quantitative and qualitative evaluationmetrics

Deep networks often suffer from vanishing or exploding gradients due to inefficient signal propagation, leading to long training times or convergence difficulties. Various architecture designs, sophisticated residual-style networks, and initialization schemes have been shown to improve deep signal propagation. Recently, Pennington et al. used free probability theory to show that dynamical isometry plays an integral role in efficient deep learning. We show that the simplest architecture change of gating each residual connection using a single zero-initialized parameter satisfies initial dynamical isometry and outperforms more complex approaches. Although much simpler than its predecessors, this gate enables training thousands of fully connected layers with fast convergence and better test performance for ResNets trained on CIFAR-10. We apply this technique to language modeling and find that we can easily train 120-layer Transformers. When applied to 12 layer Transformers, it converges 56% faster on enwiki8.

As an efficient recurrent neural network (RNN) model, reservoir computing (RC) models, such as Echo State Networks, have attracted widespread attention in the last decade. However, while they have had great success with time series data [1], [2], many time series have a multiscale structure, which a single-hidden-layer RC model may have difficulty capturing. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical reservoir computing framework we call Deep Echo State Networks (Deep-ESNs). The most distinctive feature of a Deep-ESN is its ability to deal with time series through hierarchical projections. Specifically, when an input time series is projected into the high-dimensional echo-state space of a reservoir, a subsequent encoding layer (e.g., a PCA, autoencoder, or a random projection) can project the echo-state representations into a lower-dimensional space. These low-dimensional representations can then be processed by another ESN. By using projection layers and encoding layers alternately in the hierarchical framework, a Deep-ESN can not only attenuate the effects of the collinearity problem in ESNs, but also fully take advantage of the temporal kernel property of ESNs to explore multiscale dynamics of time series. To fuse the multiscale representations obtained by each reservoir, we add connections from each encoding layer to the last output layer. Theoretical analyses prove that stability of a Deep-ESN is guaranteed by the echo state property (ESP), and the time complexity is equivalent to a conventional ESN. Experimental results on some artificial and real world time series demonstrate that Deep-ESNs can capture multiscale dynamics, and outperform both standard ESNs and previous hierarchical ESN-based models.

Recent advances in deep learning have led to significant progress in the computer vision field, especially for visual object recognition tasks. The features useful for object classification are learned by feed-forward deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) automatically, and they are shown to be able to predict and decode neural representations in the ventral visual pathway of humans and monkeys. However, despite the huge amount of work on optimizing CNNs, there has not been much research focused on linking CNNs with guiding principles from the human visual cortex. In this work, we propose a network optimization strategy inspired by both of the developmental trajectory of children's visual object recognition capabilities, and Bar (2003), who hypothesized that basic level information is carried in the fast magnocellular pathway through the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and then projected back to inferior temporal cortex (IT), where subordinate level categorization is achieved. We instantiate this idea by training a deep CNN to perform basic level object categorization first, and then train it on subordinate level categorization. We apply this idea to training AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al., 2012) on the ILSVRC 2012 dataset and show that the top-5 accuracy increases from 80.13% to 82.14%, demonstrating the effectiveness of the method. We also show that subsequent transfer learning on smaller datasets gives superior results., ICLR 2016 submission R1

International audience; We developed a series of dynamic geometric Navon figures in order to study global/local rotation processing. These figures consist of a global figure (a triangle or a square) made up of local figures (also triangles or squares). Both global and local figures can rotate in either clockwise or counterclockwise directions independently. We found that there is no right or left visual field perceptual advantage for either the global or local levels of these figures, as in Sergent (1982). We did, however, find a significant processing advantage for clockwise motion compared to counterclockwise motion. We also found a highly significant interaction between the detection of a particular rotational motion and the presence or absence of that motion in the figure being examined. Our data also strongly support the Global Precedence Hypothesis which says that people generally tend to focus on the global properties of an object before local properties.

In unsupervised learning, an unbiased uniform sampling strategy is typically used, in order that the learned features faithfully encode the statistical structure of the training data. In this work, we explore whether active example selection strategies - algorithms that select which examples to use, based on the current estimate of the features - can accelerate learning. Specifically, we investigate effects of heuristic and saliency-inspired selection algorithms on the dictionary learning task with sparse activations. We show that some selection algorithms do improve the speed of learning, and we speculate on why they might work.