This paper proposes a neural network approach for efficiently solving general nonlinear convex programs with second-order cone constraints. The proposed neural network model was developed based on a smoothed natural residual merit function involving an unconstrained minimization reformulation of the complementarity problem. We study the existence and convergence of the trajectory of the neural network. Moreover, we show some stability properties for the considered neural network, such as the Lyapunov stability, asymptotic stability, and exponential stability. The examples in this paper provide a further demonstration of the effectiveness of the proposed neural network. This paper can be viewed as a follow-up version of [20], [26] because more stability results are obtained.

When sample, X = x, is observed from intractable c.d.f. Fθ, or a Black-Box with input θ, an Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) method provides approximate posterior, π_ϵ. θ^∗ is included in the support of π_ϵ when the Matching distance ρ(S(x^∗), S(x)) ≤ ϵ; x^∗ is a sample drawn from F_{θ^∗}, θ^∗ is obtained from prior π, S is a summary statistic, ϵ > 0. ABC concerns include: the use of only one sample, x^∗, for each θ^∗; the choices of S, ρ and ϵ; π_ϵ(θ^∗), which is determined by arbitrary kernel, K(x, x^∗; ϵ), creating visual π_ϵ-artifacts. The concerns are accommodated with the introduced Fiducial(F)-ABC for all (θ^∗ drawn): M x^∗ are drawn from F_{θ^∗}; a universal S is used, the empirical measure indexed by sets which activate its sufficiency for exchangeable observations-vectors and have been neglected; a strong, probability distance ρ is used, inherently connected with S and Matching; light is thrown to ϵ’s nature and value; πϵ is obtained from the proportions of x∗ matching x. F-ABC for all posterior is closer to Bayesian philosophy, which does not use θ^∗-exclusions. Under few, mild assumptions, π_ϵ converges to the posterior, π(θ|x), when ϵ ↓ 0, and rates of concentration of T (F_{θ^∗}) to T (F_θ) are obtained when n ↑ ∞; T is a functional. Satisfactory F-ABC for all θ^∗ drawn posteriors are depicted for parametric and data generating models, including Tukey’s (a, b, g, h)-model, a 5-parameter normal mixture and a time series model. Various advantages of the F-ABC for all are presented over coarsened posteriors for observations in R^d, d ≥ 1.

In a Data-Generating Experiment (DGE), the data, X, is often obtained either from a Black-Box with inputs θ and Y, or from a Quantile function or a learning machine, f(Y, θ); θ is unknown, element of metric space (Θ, ρ), Y is random. If X has intractable or unknown c.d.f., Fθ, non-identifiability of θ cannot be confirmed and when present, among others, limits the predictive accuracy of the learned model, f(Y, \hat{θ}); \hat{θ} estimate of θ. In Machine Learning, non-identifiability of θ is ubiquitous and its extent is a criterion for selecting a learning machine. Empirical indices, EDI and PPVI, are introduced using P-values of Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests: i) to confirm almost surely, using generated data, the discrimination of θ from θ^∗, namely that the Kolmogorov distance, dK(Fθ, Fθ^∗), is positive, ii) to confirm identifiability of θ(∈ Θ) by repeating i) for θ^∗ in a sieve of Θ, since neighboring parameter values are in practice indistinguishable, and iii) most important, to compare EDI-graphs of DGEs, preferring more discrimination and less non-identifiability among parameters, and select one DGE to use. In applications, EDI-graphs confirm nonidentifiability in mixture models and in models parametrised with sums of parameters. EDI and PPVI explain why Tukey’s g-and-h model (DGE1) has better g-discrimination than the g-and-k model (DGE2), unless the sample size is extremely large; h_0 = k_0. EDIgraphs indicate that Normal learning machines have better parameter discrimination thanSigmoid learning machines and their parameters are non-identifiable.

Computing the distance among linguistic objects is an essential problem in natural language processing. The word mover’s distance (WMD) has been successfully applied to measure the document distance by synthesizing the low-level word similarity with the framework of optimal transport (OT). However, due to the global transportation nature of OT, the WMD may overestimate the semantic dissimilarity when documents contain unequal semantic details. In this paper, we propose to address this overestimation issue with a novel Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao (WFR) document distance grounded on unbalanced optimal transport theory. Compared to the WMD, the WFR document distance provides a trade-off between global transportation and local truncation, which leads to a better similarity measure for unequal semantic details. Moreover, an efficient prune strategy is particularly designed for the WFR document distance to facilitate the top-k queries among a large number of documents. Extensive experimental results show that the WFR document distance achieves higher accuracy that WMD and even its supervised variation s-WMD.

Image retargeting techniques adjust images into different sizes and have attracted much attention recently. Objective quality assessment (OQA) of image retargeting results is often desired to automatically select the best results. Existing OQA methods train a model using some benchmarks (e.g., RetargetMe), in which subjective scores evaluated by users are provided. Observing that it is challenging even for human subjects to give consistent scores for retargeting results of different source images (diff-source-results), in this paper we propose a learning-based OQA method that trains a General Regression Neural Network (GRNN) model based on relative scores --- which preserve the ranking --- of retargeting results of the same source image (same-source-results). In particular, we develop a novel training scheme with provable convergence that learns a common base scalar for same-source-results. With this source specific offset, our computed scores not only preserve the ranking of subjective scores for same-source-results, but also provide a reference to compare the diff-source-results. We train and evaluate our GRNN model using human preference data collected in RetargetMe. We further introduce a subjective benchmark to evaluate the generalizability of different OQA methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms ten representative OQA methods in ranking prediction and has better generalizability to different datasets.