One-Shot Learning using Mixture of Variational Autoencoders: a Generalization Learning approach

Deep learning, even if it is very successful nowadays, traditionally needs very large amounts of labeled data to perform excellent on the classification task. In an attempt to solve this problem, the one-shot learning paradigm, which makes use of just one labeled sample per class and prior knowledge, becomes increasingly important. In this paper, we propose a new one-shot learning method, dubbed MoVAE (Mixture of Variational AutoEncoders), to perform classification. Complementary to prior studies, MoVAE represents a shift of paradigm in comparison with the usual one-shot learning methods, as it does not use any prior knowledge. Instead, it starts from zero knowledge and one labeled sample per class. Afterward, by using unlabeled data and the generalization learning concept (in a way, more as humans do), it is capable to gradually improve by itself its performance. Even more, if there are no unlabeled data available MoVAE can still perform well in one-shot learning classification. We demonstrate empirically the efficiency of our proposed approach on three datasets, i.e. the handwritten digits (MNIST), fashion products (Fashion-MNIST), and handwritten characters (Omniglot), showing that MoVAE outperforms state-of-the-art one-shot learning algorithms

An INTRODUCTION TO CUDA Programming

The graphics boards have become so powerful that they are usded for mathematical computations, such as matrix multiplication and transposition, which are required for complex visual and physics simulations in computer games. NVIDIA has supported this trend by releasing the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) interface library to allow applications developers to write code that can be uploaded into an NVIDIA-based card for execution by NVIDIA's massively parallel GPUs. This paper is an introduction to the CUDA programming based on the documentation from [2] and [4].cuda programming

FINANCIAL CRISIS IMPACT ON CONSTRUCTION AND REAL ESTATE SECTORS IN ROMANIA

This paper presents the evolution of construction and real estate sectors in Romania in the context of current financial crisis, highlighting the internal and international economic climate. The evolutions of the main macroeconomic indicators and sectoral factors of influence on them are presented. Construction and real estate sectors are particularly affected by the worsening perception of the risk, of financing difficulties, doubling the risk of liquidity with the solvency one.financial crisis, construction sector, gross domestic product, added value, liquidity

Cosmological evolution of finite temperature Bose-Einstein Condensate dark matter

Once the temperature of a bosonic gas is smaller than the critical, density dependent, transition temperature, a Bose - Einstein Condensation process can take place during the cosmological evolution of the Universe. Bose - Einstein Condensates are very strong candidates for dark matter, since they can solve some major issues in observational astrophysics, like, for example, the galactic core/cusp problem. The presence of the dark matter condensates also drastically affects the cosmic history of the Universe. In the present paper we analyze the effects of the finite dark matter temperature on the cosmological evolution of the Bose-Einstein Condensate dark matter systems. We formulate the basic equations describing the finite temperature condensate, representing a generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equation that takes into account the presence of the thermal cloud in thermodynamic equilibrium with the condensate. The temperature dependent equations of state of the thermal cloud and of the condensate are explicitly obtained in an analytical form. By assuming a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) geometry, the cosmological evolution of the finite temperature dark matter filled Universe is considered in detail in the framework of a two interacting fluid dark matter model, describing the transition from the initial thermal cloud to the low temperature condensate state. The dynamics of the cosmological parameters during the finite temperature dominated phase of the dark matter evolution are investigated in detail, and it is shown that the presence of the thermal excitations leads to an overall increase in the expansion rate of the Universe.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in PR