Hierarchical, Memory-Based Movement Models for Translocated Elk (Cervus canadensis)

The use of spatial memory is well-documented in many animal species and has been shown to be critical for the emergence of spatial learning. Adaptive behaviors based on learning can emerge thanks to an interdependence between the acquisition of information over time and movement decisions. The study of how spatio-ecological knowledge is constructed throughout the life of an individual has not been carried out in a quantitative and comprehensive way, hindered by the lack of knowledge of the information an animal already has of its environment at the time monitoring begins. Identifying how animals use memory to make beneficial decisions is fundamental to developing a general theory of animal movement and space use. Here we propose several mobility models based on memory and perform hierarchical Bayesian inference on 11-month trajectories of 21 elk after they were released in a completely new environment. Almost all the observed animals exhibited preferential returns to previously visited patches, such that memory and random exploration phases occurred. Memory decay was mild or negligible over the study period. The fact that individual elk rapidly become used to a relatively small number of patches was consistent with the hypothesis that they seek places with predictable resources and reduced mortality risks such as predation.

Multimodal emotion recognition with hierarchical memory networks

Emotion recognition in conversations is crucial as there is an urgent need to improve the overall experience of human-computer interactions. A promising improvement in this field is to develop a model that can effectively extract adequate contexts of a test utterance. We introduce a novel model, termed hierarchical memory networks (HMN), to address the issues of recognizing utterance level emotions. HMN divides the contexts into different aspects and employs different step lengths to represent the weights of these aspects. To model the self dependencies, HMN takes independent local memory networks to model these aspects. Further, to capture the interpersonal dependencies, HMN employs global memory networks to integrate the local outputs into global storages. Such storages can generate contextual summaries and help to find the emotional dependent utterance that is most relevant to the test utterance. With an attention-based multi-hops scheme, these storages are then merged with the test utterance using an addition operation in the iterations. Experiments on the IEMOCAP dataset show our model outperforms the compared methods with accuracy improvement.

Hierarchical, Memory-based Movement Models for Translocated Elk (Cervus canadensis)

The use of spatial memory is well documented in many animal species and has been shown to be critical for the emergence of spatial learning. Adaptive behaviors based on learning can emerge thanks to an interdependence between the acquisition of information over time and movement decisions. The study of how spatio-ecological knowledge is constructed throughout the life of an individual has not been carried out in a quantitative and comprehensive way, hindered by the lack of knowledge of the information an animal already has of its environment at the time monitoring begins. Identifying how animals use memory to make beneficial decisions is fundamental to developing a general theory of animal movement and space use. Here we propose several mobility models based on memory and perform hierarchical Bayesian inference on 11-month trajectories of 21 elk after they were released in a completely new environment. Almost all the observed animals exhibited preferential returns to previously visited patches, such that memory and random exploration phases occurred. Memory decay was mild or negligible over the study period. The fact that individual elk rapidly become used to a relatively small number of patches was consistent with the hypothesis that they seek places with predictable resources and reduced mortality risks such as predation.