在本文中，我们提出了一种称为MINIBATCH随机三点（MISTP）方法的新的零订单优化方法，以在只有目标函数评估的近似值的情况下解决无约束的最小化问题。它基于最近提出的随机三点（STP）方法（Bergou等，2020）。在每次迭代中，MISTP以与STP相似的方式生成一个随机搜索方向，但是仅根据目标函数的近似而不是其精确评估选择下一个迭代。我们还分析了方法在非凸和凸病例中的复杂性，并评估其在多个机器学习任务上的性能。

与训练数据中心的训练传统机器学习（ML）模型相反，联合学习（FL）训练ML模型，这些模型在资源受限的异质边缘设备上包含的本地数据集上。现有的FL算法旨在为所有参与的设备学习一个单一的全球模型，这对于所有参与培训的设备可能没有帮助，这是由于整个设备的数据的异质性。最近，Hanzely和Richt \'{A} Rik（2020）提出了一种新的配方，以培训个性化的FL模型，旨在平衡传统的全球模型与本地模型之间的权衡，该模型可以使用其私人数据对单个设备进行培训只要。他们得出了一种称为无环梯度下降（L2GD）的新算法，以解决该算法，并表明该算法会在需要更多个性化的情况下，可以改善沟通复杂性。在本文中，我们为其L2GD算法配备了双向压缩机制，以进一步减少本地设备和服务器之间的通信瓶颈。与FL设置中使用的其他基于压缩的算法不同，我们的压缩L2GD算法在概率通信协议上运行，在概率通信协议中，通信不会按固定的时间表进行。此外，我们的压缩L2GD算法在没有压缩的情况下保持与香草SGD相似的收敛速率。为了验证算法的效率，我们在凸和非凸问题上都进行了多种数值实验，并使用各种压缩技术。

联合学习（FL）使多个设备能够在不共享其个人数据的情况下协作学习全局模型。在现实世界应用中，不同的各方可能具有异质数据分布和有限的通信带宽。在本文中，我们有兴趣提高FL系统的通信效率。我们根据梯度规范的重要性调查和设计设备选择策略。特别是，我们的方法包括在每个通信轮中选择具有最高梯度值的最高规范的设备。我们研究了这种选择技术的收敛性和性能，并将其与现有技术进行比较。我们用非IID设置执行几个实验。结果显示了我们的方法的收敛性，与随机选择比较的测试精度相当大。

Non-linear state-space models, also known as general hidden Markov models, are ubiquitous in statistical machine learning, being the most classical generative models for serial data and sequences in general. The particle-based, rapid incremental smoother PaRIS is a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique allowing for efficient online approximation of expectations of additive functionals under the smoothing distribution in these models. Such expectations appear naturally in several learning contexts, such as likelihood estimation (MLE) and Markov score climbing (MSC). PARIS has linear computational complexity, limited memory requirements and comes with non-asymptotic bounds, convergence results and stability guarantees. Still, being based on self-normalised importance sampling, the PaRIS estimator is biased. Our first contribution is to design a novel additive smoothing algorithm, the Parisian particle Gibbs PPG sampler, which can be viewed as a PaRIS algorithm driven by conditional SMC moves, resulting in bias-reduced estimates of the targeted quantities. We substantiate the PPG algorithm with theoretical results, including new bounds on bias and variance as well as deviation inequalities. Our second contribution is to apply PPG in a learning framework, covering MLE and MSC as special examples. In this context, we establish, under standard assumptions, non-asymptotic bounds highlighting the value of bias reduction and the implicit Rao--Blackwellization of PPG. These are the first non-asymptotic results of this kind in this setting. We illustrate our theoretical results with numerical experiments supporting our claims.

Nowadays, the current neural network models of dialogue generation(chatbots) show great promise for generating answers for chatty agents. But they are short-sighted in that they predict utterances one at a time while disregarding their impact on future outcomes. Modelling a dialogue's future direction is critical for generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need that has led traditional NLP dialogue models that rely on reinforcement learning. In this article, we explain how to combine these objectives by using deep reinforcement learning to predict future rewards in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates conversations between two virtual agents, with policy gradient methods used to reward sequences that exhibit three useful conversational characteristics: the flow of informality, coherence, and simplicity of response (related to forward-looking function). We assess our model based on its diversity, length, and complexity with regard to humans. In dialogue simulation, evaluations demonstrated that the proposed model generates more interactive responses and encourages a more sustained successful conversation. This work commemorates a preliminary step toward developing a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues.

Three-dimensional (3D) technologies have been developing rapidly recent years, and have influenced industrial, medical, cultural, and many other fields. In this paper, we introduce an automatic 3D human head scanning-printing system, which provides a complete pipeline to scan, reconstruct, select, and finally print out physical 3D human heads. To enhance the accuracy of our system, we developed a consumer-grade composite sensor (including a gyroscope, an accelerometer, a digital compass, and a Kinect v2 depth sensor) as our sensing device. This sensing device is then mounted on a robot, which automatically rotates around the human subject with approximate 1-meter radius, to capture the full-view information. The data streams are further processed and fused into a 3D model of the subject using a tablet located on the robot. In addition, an automatic selection method, based on our specific system configurations, is proposed to select the head portion. We evaluated the accuracy of the proposed system by comparing our generated 3D head models, from both standard human head model and real human subjects, with the ones reconstructed from FastSCAN and Cyberware commercial laser scanning systems through computing and visualizing Hausdorff distances. Computational cost is also provided to further assess our proposed system.

We propose a 6D RGB-D odometry approach that finds the relative camera pose between consecutive RGB-D frames by keypoint extraction and feature matching both on the RGB and depth image planes. Furthermore, we feed the estimated pose to the highly accurate KinectFusion algorithm, which uses a fast ICP (Iterative Closest Point) to fine-tune the frame-to-frame relative pose and fuse the depth data into a global implicit surface. We evaluate our method on a publicly available RGB-D SLAM benchmark dataset by Sturm et al. The experimental results show that our proposed reconstruction method solely based on visual odometry and KinectFusion outperforms the state-of-the-art RGB-D SLAM system accuracy. Moreover, our algorithm outputs a ready-to-use polygon mesh (highly suitable for creating 3D virtual worlds) without any postprocessing steps.

In this paper, a Kinect-based distributed and real-time motion capture system is developed. A trigonometric method is applied to calculate the relative position of Kinect v2 sensors with a calibration wand and register the sensors' positions automatically. By combining results from multiple sensors with a nonlinear least square method, the accuracy of the motion capture is optimized. Moreover, to exclude inaccurate results from sensors, a computational geometry is applied in the occlusion approach, which discovers occluded joint data. The synchronization approach is based on an NTP protocol that synchronizes the time between the clocks of a server and clients dynamically, ensuring that the proposed system is a real-time system. Experiments for validating the proposed system are conducted from the perspective of calibration, occlusion, accuracy, and efficiency. Furthermore, to demonstrate the practical performance of our system, a comparison of previously developed motion capture systems (the linear trilateration approach and the geometric trilateration approach) with the benchmark OptiTrack system is conducted, therein showing that the accuracy of our proposed system is $38.3\%$ and 24.1% better than the two aforementioned trilateration systems, respectively.

With the increase in health consciousness, noninvasive body monitoring has aroused interest among researchers. As one of the most important pieces of physiological information, researchers have remotely estimated the heart rate (HR) from facial videos in recent years. Although progress has been made over the past few years, there are still some limitations, like the processing time increasing with accuracy and the lack of comprehensive and challenging datasets for use and comparison. Recently, it was shown that HR information can be extracted from facial videos by spatial decomposition and temporal filtering. Inspired by this, a new framework is introduced in this paper to remotely estimate the HR under realistic conditions by combining spatial and temporal filtering and a convolutional neural network. Our proposed approach shows better performance compared with the benchmark on the MMSE-HR dataset in terms of both the average HR estimation and short-time HR estimation. High consistency in short-time HR estimation is observed between our method and the ground truth.

3D pose estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision. Most of the existing neural-network-based approaches address color or depth images through convolution networks (CNNs). In this paper, we study the task of 3D human pose estimation from depth images. Different from the existing CNN-based human pose estimation method, we propose a deep human pose network for 3D pose estimation by taking the point cloud data as input data to model the surface of complex human structures. We first cast the 3D human pose estimation from 2D depth images to 3D point clouds and directly predict the 3D joint position. Our experiments on two public datasets show that our approach achieves higher accuracy than previous state-of-art methods. The reported results on both ITOP and EVAL datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the targeted tasks.