We present a conceptually simple, flexible, and general framework for few-shot learning, where a classifier must learn to recognise new classes given only few examples from each. Our method, called the Relation Network (RN), is trained end-to-end from scratch. During meta-learning, it learns to learn a deep distance metric to compare a small number of images within episodes, each of which is designed to simulate the few-shot setting. Once trained, a RN is able to classify images of new classes by computing relation scores between query images and the few examples of each new class without further updating the network. Besides providing improved performance on few-shot learning, our framework is easily extended to zero-shot learning. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that our simple approach provides a unified and effective approach for both of these two tasks.

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We propose a novel investment decision strategy (IDS) based on deep learning. The performance of many IDSs is affected by stock similarity. Most existing stock similarity measurements have the problems: (a) The linear nature of many measurements cannot capture nonlinear stock dynamics; (b) The estimation of many similarity metrics (e.g. covariance) needs very long period historic data (e.g. 3K days) which cannot represent current market effectively; (c) They cannot capture translation-invariance. To solve these problems, we apply Convolutional AutoEncoder to learn a stock representation, based on which we propose a novel portfolio construction strategy by: (i) using the deeply learned representation and modularity optimisation to cluster stocks and identify diverse sectors, (ii) picking stocks within each cluster according to their Sharpe ratio (Sharpe 1994). Overall this strategy provides low-risk high-return portfolios. We use the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index (FTSE 100) data for evaluation. Results show our portfolio outperforms FTSE 100 index and many well known funds in terms of total return in 2000 trading days.

Generating natural language descriptions of images is an important capability for a robot or other visual-intelligence driven AI agent that may need to communicate with human users about what it is seeing. Such image captioning methods are typically trained by maximising the likelihood of ground-truth annotated caption given the image. While simple and easy to implement, this approach does not directly maximise the language quality metrics we care about such as CIDEr. In this paper we investigate training image captioning methods based on actor-critic reinforcement learning in order to directly optimise non-differentiable quality metrics of interest. By formulating a per-token advantage and value computation strategy in this novel reinforcement learning based captioning model, we show that it is possible to achieve the state of the art performance on the widely used MSCOCO benchmark.

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