AI News, Relationships with other machine learning techniques

Relationships with other machine learning techniques

Deep learning is a new and exciting subfield of machine learning which attempts to sidestep the whole feature design process, instead learning complex predictors directly from the data.

Most deep learning approaches are based on neural nets, where complex high-level representations are built through a cascade of units computing simple nonlinear functions.

(Geoff is a pioneer in the field, and invented or influenced a large fraction of the work discussed here.) But it’s one thing to learn the basics, and another to be able to get them to work well.

You can also check out one of several review papers, which give readable overviews of recent progress in the field: If you’re interested in using neural nets, it’s likely that you want to automatically predict something.

Supervised learning is a machine learning framework where you have a particular task you’d like the computer to solve, and a training set where the correct predictions are labeled.

For instance, you might want to automatically classify email messages as spam or not-spam, and in supervised learning, you have a dataset of 100,000 emails labeled as 'spam' or 'not spam' that you use to train your classifier so it can classify new emails it has never seen before.

Before diving into neural nets, you'll first want to be familiar with “shallow” machine learning algorithms, such as linear regression, logistic regression, and support vector machines (SVMs).

You’ll need to understand how to balance the tradeoff between underfitting and overfitting: you want your model to be expressive enough to model relevant aspects of the data, but not so complex that it “overfits” by modeling all the idiosyncrasies.

Or maybe you think the data are better explained in terms of clusters, where data points within a cluster are more similar than data points in different clusters.

E.g., if you’re working on object recognition, labeling the objects in images is a laborious task, whereas unlabeled data includes the billions of images available on the Internet.

The idea is that you start by training an unsupervised neural net on the unlabeled data (I’ll cover examples shortly), and then convert it to a supervised network with a similar architecture.

The evidence for generative pre-training is still mixed, and many of the most successful applications of deep neural nets have avoided it entirely, especially in the big data setting.

each unit activates only rarely), or feed the network corrupted versions of its inputs and make it reconstruct the clean ones (this is known as a denoising autoencoder).

The basic workhorse for neural net training is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where one visits a single training example at a time (or a “minibatch” of training examples), and takes a small step to reduce the loss on those examples.

There is a broad class of optimization problems known as convex optimization, where SGD and other local search algorithms are guaranteed to find the global optimum.

While neural net training isn’t convex, the problem of curvature also shows up for convex problems, and many of the techniques for dealing with it are borrowed from convex optimization.

As general background, it’s useful to read the following sections of Boyd and Vandenberghe’s book, Convex Optimization: While Newton’s method is very good at dealing with curvature, it is impractical for large-scale neural net training for two reasons.

(Matrix inversion is only practical up to tens of thousands of parameters, whereas neural nets typically have millions.) Still, it serves as an idealized second-order training method which one can try to approximate.

Practical algorithms for doing so include: Compared with most neural net models, training RBMs introduces another complication: computing the objective function requires computing the partition function, and computing the gradient requires performing inference.

(This is true for learning Markov random fields (MRFs) more generally.) Contrastive divergence and persistent contrastive divergence are widely used approximations to the gradient which often work quite well in practice.

One can estimate the model likelihood using annealed importance sampling, but this is delicate, and failures in estimation tend to overstate the model's performance.

As early as 1998, convolutional nets were successfully applied to recognizing handwritten digits, and the MNIST handrwritten digit dataset has long been a major benchmark for neural net research.

More recently, convolutional nets made a big splash by significantly pushing forward the state of the art in classifying between thousands of object categories.

There is actually a surprising relationship between neural nets and kernels: Bayesian neural nets converge to Gaussian processes (a kernelized regression model) in the limit of infinitely many hidden units.

Doubly unfortunately, neuroscience and cognitive science seem not to have the same commitment to open access that machine learning does, so this section might only be useful if you have access to a university library.

(This is worth reading, even if you read nothing else in this section.) While not all researchers agree with this way of partitioning things, it's useful to keep in mind when trying to understand exactly what someone is claiming.

Connectionism is a branch of cognitive science, especially influential during the 1980s, which attempted to model high-level cognitive processes in terms of networks of neuron-like units.

Artificial neural network

Artificial neural networks (ANN) or connectionist systems are computing systems vaguely inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains.&#91;1&#93;

The neural network itself isn't an algorithm, but rather a framework for many different machine learning algorithms to work together and process complex data inputs.&#91;2&#93;

For example, in image recognition, they might learn to identify images that contain cats by analyzing example images that have been manually labeled as 'cat' or 'no cat' and using the results to identify cats in other images.

An ANN is based on a collection of connected units or nodes called artificial neurons, which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain.

In common ANN implementations, the signal at a connection between artificial neurons is a real number, and the output of each artificial neuron is computed by some non-linear function of the sum of its inputs.

Signals travel from the first layer (the input layer), to the last layer (the output layer), possibly after traversing the layers multiple times.

Artificial neural networks have been used on a variety of tasks, including computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation, social network filtering, playing board and video games and medical diagnosis.

(1943) created a computational model for neural networks based on mathematics and algorithms called threshold logic.

With mathematical notation, Rosenblatt described circuitry not in the basic perceptron, such as the exclusive-or circuit that could not be processed by neural networks at the time.&#91;9&#93;

In 1959, a biological model proposed by Nobel laureates Hubel and Wiesel was based on their discovery of two types of cells in the primary visual cortex: simple cells and complex cells.&#91;10&#93;

Much of artificial intelligence had focused on high-level (symbolic) models that are processed by using algorithms, characterized for example by expert systems with knowledge embodied in if-then rules, until in the late 1980s research expanded to low-level (sub-symbolic) machine learning, characterized by knowledge embodied in the parameters of a cognitive model.&#91;citation needed&#93;

key trigger for renewed interest in neural networks and learning was Werbos's (1975) backpropagation algorithm that effectively solved the exclusive-or problem by making the training of multi-layer networks feasible and efficient.

Support vector machines and other, much simpler methods such as linear classifiers gradually overtook neural networks in machine learning popularity.

The vanishing gradient problem affects many-layered feedforward networks that used backpropagation and also recurrent neural networks (RNNs).&#91;22&#93;&#91;23&#93;

As errors propagate from layer to layer, they shrink exponentially with the number of layers, impeding the tuning of neuron weights that is based on those errors, particularly affecting deep networks.

To overcome this problem, Schmidhuber adopted a multi-level hierarchy of networks (1992) pre-trained one level at a time by unsupervised learning and fine-tuned by backpropagation.&#91;24&#93;

(2006) proposed learning a high-level representation using successive layers of binary or real-valued latent variables with a restricted Boltzmann machine&#91;26&#93;

Once sufficiently many layers have been learned, the deep architecture may be used as a generative model by reproducing the data when sampling down the model (an 'ancestral pass') from the top level feature activations.&#91;27&#93;&#91;28&#93;

In 2012, Ng and Dean created a network that learned to recognize higher-level concepts, such as cats, only from watching unlabeled images taken from YouTube videos.&#91;29&#93;

Earlier challenges in training deep neural networks were successfully addressed with methods such as unsupervised pre-training, while available computing power increased through the use of GPUs and distributed computing.

for very large scale principal components analyses and convolution may create a new class of neural computing because they are fundamentally analog rather than digital (even though the first implementations may use digital devices).&#91;31&#93;

in Schmidhuber's group showed that despite the vanishing gradient problem, GPUs makes back-propagation feasible for many-layered feedforward neural networks.

Between 2009 and 2012, recurrent neural networks and deep feedforward neural networks developed in Schmidhuber's research group won eight international competitions in pattern recognition and machine learning.&#91;33&#93;&#91;34&#93;

Researchers demonstrated (2010) that deep neural networks interfaced to a hidden Markov model with context-dependent states that define the neural network output layer can drastically reduce errors in large-vocabulary speech recognition tasks such as voice search.

A team from his lab won a 2012 contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might identify new drugs.&#91;47&#93;

As of 2011&#91;update&#93;, the state of the art in deep learning feedforward networks alternated between convolutional layers and max-pooling layers,&#91;42&#93;&#91;48&#93;

Artificial neural networks were able to guarantee shift invariance to deal with small and large natural objects in large cluttered scenes, only when invariance extended beyond shift, to all ANN-learned concepts, such as location, type (object class label), scale, lighting and others.

An artificial neural network is a network of simple elements called artificial neurons, which receive input, change their internal state (activation) according to that input, and produce output depending on the input and activation.

An artificial neuron mimics the working of a biophysical neuron with inputs and outputs, but is not a biological neuron model.

The network forms by connecting the output of certain neurons to the input of other neurons forming a directed, weighted graph.

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Sometimes a bias term added to total weighted sum of inputs to serve as threshold to shift the activation function.&#91;53&#93;

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The learning rule is a rule or an algorithm which modifies the parameters of the neural network, in order for a given input to the network to produce a favored output.

A common use of the phrase 'ANN model' is really the definition of a class of such functions (where members of the class are obtained by varying parameters, connection weights, or specifics of the architecture such as the number of neurons or their connectivity).

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(commonly referred to as the activation function&#91;55&#93;) is some predefined function, such as the hyperbolic tangent or sigmoid function or softmax function or rectifier function.

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is an important concept in learning, as it is a measure of how far away a particular solution is from an optimal solution to the problem to be solved.

For applications where the solution is data dependent, the cost must necessarily be a function of the observations, otherwise the model would not relate to the data.

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While it is possible to define an ad hoc cost function, frequently a particular cost (function) is used, either because it has desirable properties (such as convexity) or because it arises naturally from a particular formulation of the problem (e.g., in a probabilistic formulation the posterior probability of the model can be used as an inverse cost).

In 1970, Linnainmaa finally published the general method for automatic differentiation (AD) of discrete connected networks of nested differentiable functions.&#91;64&#93;&#91;65&#93;

In 1986, Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams noted that this method can generate useful internal representations of incoming data in hidden layers of neural networks.&#91;71&#93;

The choice of the cost function depends on factors such as the learning type (supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement, etc.) and the activation function.

For example, when performing supervised learning on a multiclass classification problem, common choices for the activation function and cost function are the softmax function and cross entropy function, respectively.

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The network is trained to minimize L2 error for predicting the mask ranging over the entire training set containing bounding boxes represented as masks.

the cost function is related to the mismatch between our mapping and the data and it implicitly contains prior knowledge about the problem domain.&#91;79&#93;

commonly used cost is the mean-squared error, which tries to minimize the average squared error between the network's output,

Minimizing this cost using gradient descent for the class of neural networks called multilayer perceptrons (MLP), produces the backpropagation algorithm for training neural networks.

Tasks that fall within the paradigm of supervised learning are pattern recognition (also known as classification) and regression (also known as function approximation).

The supervised learning paradigm is also applicable to sequential data (e.g., for hand writing, speech and gesture recognition).

This can be thought of as learning with a 'teacher', in the form of a function that provides continuous feedback on the quality of solutions obtained thus far.

The cost function is dependent on the task (the model domain) and any a priori assumptions (the implicit properties of the model, its parameters and the observed variables).

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whereas in statistical modeling, it could be related to the posterior probability of the model given the data (note that in both of those examples those quantities would be maximized rather than minimized).

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The aim is to discover a policy for selecting actions that minimizes some measure of a long-term cost, e.g., the expected cumulative cost.

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because of the ability of Artificial neural networks to mitigate losses of accuracy even when reducing the discretization grid density for numerically approximating the solution of the original control problems.

Tasks that fall within the paradigm of reinforcement learning are control problems, games and other sequential decision making tasks.

Training a neural network model essentially means selecting one model from the set of allowed models (or, in a Bayesian framework, determining a distribution over the set of allowed models) that minimizes the cost.

This is done by simply taking the derivative of the cost function with respect to the network parameters and then changing those parameters in a gradient-related direction.

convolutional neural network (CNN) is a class of deep, feed-forward networks, composed of one or more convolutional layers with fully connected layers (matching those in typical Artificial neural networks) on top.

recent development has been that of Capsule Neural Network (CapsNet), the idea behind which is to add structures called capsules to a CNN and to reuse output from several of those capsules to form more stable (with respect to various perturbations) representations for higher order capsules.&#91;103&#93;

can find an RNN weight matrix that maximizes the probability of the label sequences in a training set, given the corresponding input sequences.

provide a framework for efficiently trained models&#160;for hierarchical processing of temporal data, while enabling the investigation of the inherent role of RNN layered composition.&#91;clarification needed&#93;

This is particularly helpful when training data are limited, because poorly initialized weights can significantly hinder model performance.

that integrate the various and usually different filters (preprocessing functions) into its many layers and to dynamically rank the significance of the various layers and functions relative to a given learning task.

This grossly imitates biological learning which integrates various preprocessors (cochlea, retina, etc.) and cortexes (auditory, visual, etc.) and their various regions.

Its deep learning capability is further enhanced by using inhibition, correlation and its ability to cope with incomplete data, or 'lost' neurons or layers even amidst a task.

The link-weights allow dynamic determination of innovation and redundancy, and facilitate the ranking of layers, of filters or of individual neurons relative to a task.

LAMSTAR had a much faster learning speed and somewhat lower error rate than a CNN based on ReLU-function filters and max pooling, in 20 comparative studies.&#91;140&#93;

These applications demonstrate delving into aspects of the data that are hidden from shallow learning networks and the human senses, such as in the cases of predicting onset of sleep apnea events,&#91;132&#93;

The whole process of auto encoding is to compare this reconstructed input to the original and try to minimize the error to make the reconstructed value as close as possible to the original.

with a specific approach to good representation, a good representation is one that can be obtained robustly from a corrupted input and that will be useful for recovering the corresponding clean input.

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of the first denoising auto encoder is learned and used to uncorrupt the input (corrupted input), the second level can be trained.&#91;146&#93;

Once the stacked auto encoder is trained, its output can be used as the input to a supervised learning algorithm such as support vector machine classifier or a multi-class logistic regression.&#91;146&#93;

It formulates the learning as a convex optimization problem with a closed-form solution, emphasizing the mechanism's similarity to stacked generalization.&#91;150&#93;

Each block estimates the same final label class y, and its estimate is concatenated with original input X to form the expanded input for the next block.

Thus, the input to the first block contains the original data only, while downstream blocks' input adds the output of preceding blocks.

It offers two important improvements: it uses higher-order information from covariance statistics, and it transforms the non-convex problem of a lower-layer to a convex sub-problem of an upper-layer.&#91;152&#93;

TDSNs use covariance statistics in a bilinear mapping from each of two distinct sets of hidden units in the same layer to predictions, via a third-order tensor.

The need for deep learning with real-valued inputs, as in Gaussian restricted Boltzmann machines, led to the spike-and-slab RBM (ssRBM), which models continuous-valued inputs with strictly binary latent variables.&#91;156&#93;

One of these terms enables the model to form a conditional distribution of the spike variables by marginalizing out the slab variables given an observation.

However, these architectures are poor at learning novel classes with few examples, because all network units are involved in representing the input (a distributed representation) and must be adjusted together (high degree of freedom).

It is a full generative model, generalized from abstract concepts flowing through the layers of the model, which is able to synthesize new examples in novel classes that look 'reasonably' natural.

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deep predictive coding network (DPCN) is a predictive coding scheme that uses top-down information to empirically adjust the priors needed for a bottom-up inference procedure by means of a deep, locally connected, generative model.

DPCNs predict the representation of the layer, by using a top-down approach using the information in upper layer and temporal dependencies from previous states.&#91;174&#93;

For example, in sparse distributed memory or hierarchical temporal memory, the patterns encoded by neural networks are used as addresses for content-addressable memory, with 'neurons' essentially serving as address encoders and decoders.

Preliminary results demonstrate that neural Turing machines can infer simple algorithms such as copying, sorting and associative recall from input and output examples.

Approaches that represent previous experiences directly and use a similar experience to form a local model are often called nearest neighbour or k-nearest neighbors methods.&#91;189&#93;

Unlike sparse distributed memory that operates on 1000-bit addresses, semantic hashing works on 32 or 64-bit addresses found in a conventional computer architecture.

These models have been applied in the context of question answering (QA) where the long-term memory effectively acts as a (dynamic) knowledge base and the output is a textual response.&#91;194&#93;

While training extremely deep (e.g., 1 million layers) neural networks might not be practical, CPU-like architectures such as pointer networks&#91;196&#93;

overcome this limitation by using external random-access memory and other components that typically belong to a computer architecture such as registers, ALU and pointers.

The key characteristic of these models is that their depth, the size of their short-term memory, and the number of parameters can be altered independently – unlike models like LSTM, whose number of parameters grows quadratically with memory size.

In that work, an LSTM RNN or CNN was used as an encoder to summarize a source sentence, and the summary was decoded using a conditional RNN language model to produce the translation.&#91;201&#93;

For the sake of dimensionality reduction of the updated representation in each layer, a supervised strategy selects the best informative features among features extracted by KPCA.

The main idea is to use a kernel machine to approximate a shallow neural net with an infinite number of hidden units, then use stacking to splice the output of the kernel machine and the raw input in building the next, higher level of the kernel machine.

The basic search algorithm is to propose a candidate model, evaluate it against a dataset and use the results as feedback to teach the NAS network.&#91;205&#93;

game-playing and decision making (backgammon, chess, poker), pattern recognition (radar systems, face identification, signal classification,&#91;208&#93;

object recognition and more), sequence recognition (gesture, speech, handwritten and printed text recognition), medical diagnosis, finance&#91;209&#93;

models of how the dynamics of neural circuitry arise from interactions between individual neurons and finally to models of how behavior can arise from abstract neural modules that represent complete subsystems.

These include models of the long-term, and short-term plasticity, of neural systems and their relations to learning and memory from the individual neuron to the system level.

specific recurrent architecture with rational valued weights (as opposed to full precision real number-valued weights) has the full power of a universal Turing machine,&#91;223&#93;

but also in statistical learning theory, where the goal is to minimize over two quantities: the 'empirical risk' and the 'structural risk', which roughly corresponds to the error over the training set and the predicted error in unseen data due to overfitting.

Supervised neural networks that use a mean squared error (MSE) cost function can use formal statistical methods to determine the confidence of the trained model.

A confidence analysis made this way is statistically valid as long as the output probability distribution stays the same and the network is not modified.

By assigning a softmax activation function, a generalization of the logistic function, on the output layer of the neural network (or a softmax component in a component-based neural network) for categorical target variables, the outputs can be interpreted as posterior probabilities.

Potential solutions include randomly shuffling training examples, by using a numerical optimization algorithm that does not take too large steps when changing the network connections following an example and by grouping examples in so-called mini-batches.

No neural network has solved computationally difficult problems such as the n-Queens problem, the travelling salesman problem, or the problem of factoring large integers.

Sensor neurons fire action potentials more frequently with sensor activation and muscle cells pull more strongly when their associated motor neurons receive action potentials more frequently.&#91;226&#93;

Other than the case of relaying information from a sensor neuron to a motor neuron, almost nothing of the principles of how information is handled by biological neural networks is known.

The motivation behind Artificial neural networks is not necessarily to strictly replicate neural function, but to use biological neural networks as an inspiration.

Alexander Dewdney commented that, as a result, artificial neural networks have a 'something-for-nothing quality, one that imparts a peculiar aura of laziness and a distinct lack of curiosity about just how good these computing systems are.

argued that the brain self-wires largely according to signal statistics and therefore, a serial cascade cannot catch all major statistical dependencies.

While the brain has hardware tailored to the task of processing signals through a graph of neurons, simulating even a simplified neuron on von Neumann architecture may compel a neural network designer to fill many millions of database rows for its connections&#160;&#8211;&#32;

Schmidhuber notes that the resurgence of neural networks in the twenty-first century is largely attributable to advances in hardware: from 1991 to 2015, computing power, especially as delivered by GPGPUs (on GPUs), has increased around a million-fold, making the standard backpropagation algorithm feasible for training networks that are several layers deeper than before.&#91;231&#93;

Arguments against Dewdney's position are that neural networks have been successfully used to solve many complex and diverse tasks, ranging from autonomously flying aircraft&#91;233&#93;

Neural networks, for instance, are in the dock not only because they have been hyped to high heaven, (what hasn't?) but also because you could create a successful net without understanding how it worked: the bunch of numbers that captures its behaviour would in all probability be 'an opaque, unreadable table...valueless as a scientific resource'.

In spite of his emphatic declaration that science is not technology, Dewdney seems here to pillory neural nets as bad science when most of those devising them are just trying to be good engineers.

Although it is true that analyzing what has been learned by an artificial neural network is difficult, it is much easier to do so than to analyze what has been learned by a biological neural network.

Furthermore, researchers involved in exploring learning algorithms for neural networks are gradually uncovering general principles that allow a learning machine to be successful.

Advocates of hybrid models (combining neural networks and symbolic approaches), claim that such a mixture can better capture the mechanisms of the human mind.&#91;236&#93;&#91;237&#93;

The simplest, static types have one or more static components, including number of units, number of layers, unit weights and topology.

Deep learning

Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning or hierarchical learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on learning data representations, as opposed to task-specific algorithms.

Deep learning architectures such as deep neural networks, deep belief networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied to fields including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, audio recognition, social network filtering, machine translation, bioinformatics, drug design and board game programs, where they have produced results comparable to and in some cases superior to human experts.&#91;4&#93;&#91;5&#93;&#91;6&#93;

Deep learning models are vaguely inspired by information processing and communication patterns in biological nervous systems yet have various differences from the structural and functional properties of biological brains (especially human brain), which make them incompatible with neuroscience evidences.&#91;7&#93;&#91;8&#93;&#91;9&#93;

Most modern deep learning models are based on an artificial neural network, although they can also include propositional formulas or latent variables organized layer-wise in deep generative models such as the nodes in deep belief networks and deep Boltzmann machines.&#91;11&#93;

No universally agreed upon threshold of depth divides shallow learning from deep learning, but most researchers agree that deep learning involves CAP depth &gt;

For supervised learning tasks, deep learning methods obviate feature engineering, by translating the data into compact intermediate representations akin to principal components, and derive layered structures that remove redundancy in representation.

The universal approximation theorem concerns the capacity of feedforward neural networks with a single hidden layer of finite size to approximate continuous functions.&#91;15&#93;&#91;16&#93;&#91;17&#93;&#91;18&#93;&#91;19&#93;

By 1991 such systems were used for recognizing isolated 2-D hand-written digits, while recognizing 3-D objects was done by matching 2-D images with a handcrafted 3-D object model.

But while Neocognitron required a human programmer to hand-merge features, Cresceptron learned an open number of features in each layer without supervision, where each feature is represented by a convolution kernel.

In 1994, André de Carvalho, together with Mike Fairhurst and David Bisset, published experimental results of a multi-layer boolean neural network, also known as a weightless neural network, composed of a 3-layers self-organising feature extraction neural network module (SOFT) followed by a multi-layer classification neural network module (GSN), which were independently trained.

In 1995, Brendan Frey demonstrated that it was possible to train (over two days) a network containing six fully connected layers and several hundred hidden units using the wake-sleep algorithm, co-developed with Peter Dayan and Hinton.&#91;39&#93;

Simpler models that use task-specific handcrafted features such as Gabor filters and support vector machines (SVMs) were a popular choice in the 1990s and 2000s, because of ANNs' computational cost and a lack of understanding of how the brain wires its biological networks.

These methods never outperformed non-uniform internal-handcrafting Gaussian mixture model/Hidden Markov model (GMM-HMM) technology based on generative models of speech trained discriminatively.&#91;45&#93;

The principle of elevating 'raw' features over hand-crafted optimization was first explored successfully in the architecture of deep autoencoder on the 'raw' spectrogram or linear filter-bank features in the late 1990s,&#91;48&#93;

Many aspects of speech recognition were taken over by a deep learning method called long short-term memory (LSTM), a recurrent neural network published by Hochreiter and Schmidhuber in 1997.&#91;50&#93;

showed how a many-layered feedforward neural network could be effectively pre-trained one layer at a time, treating each layer in turn as an unsupervised restricted Boltzmann machine, then fine-tuning it using supervised backpropagation.&#91;58&#93;

The impact of deep learning in industry began in the early 2000s, when CNNs already processed an estimated 10% to 20% of all the checks written in the US, according to Yann LeCun.&#91;67&#93;

was motivated by the limitations of deep generative models of speech, and the possibility that given more capable hardware and large-scale data sets that deep neural nets (DNN) might become practical.

However, it was discovered that replacing pre-training with large amounts of training data for straightforward backpropagation when using DNNs with large, context-dependent output layers produced error rates dramatically lower than then-state-of-the-art Gaussian mixture model (GMM)/Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and also than more-advanced generative model-based systems.&#91;59&#93;&#91;70&#93;

offering technical insights into how to integrate deep learning into the existing highly efficient, run-time speech decoding system deployed by all major speech recognition systems.&#91;10&#93;&#91;72&#93;&#91;73&#93;

In 2010, researchers extended deep learning from TIMIT to large vocabulary speech recognition, by adopting large output layers of the DNN based on context-dependent HMM states constructed by decision trees.&#91;75&#93;&#91;76&#93;&#91;77&#93;&#91;72&#93;

In 2009, Nvidia was involved in what was called the “big bang” of deep learning, “as deep-learning neural networks were trained with Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs).”&#91;78&#93;

In 2014, Hochreiter's group used deep learning to detect off-target and toxic effects of environmental chemicals in nutrients, household products and drugs and won the 'Tox21 Data Challenge' of NIH, FDA and NCATS.&#91;87&#93;&#91;88&#93;&#91;89&#93;

Although CNNs trained by backpropagation had been around for decades, and GPU implementations of NNs for years, including CNNs, fast implementations of CNNs with max-pooling on GPUs in the style of Ciresan and colleagues were needed to progress on computer vision.&#91;80&#93;&#91;81&#93;&#91;34&#93;&#91;90&#93;&#91;2&#93;

In November 2012, Ciresan et al.'s system also won the ICPR contest on analysis of large medical images for cancer detection, and in the following year also the MICCAI Grand Challenge on the same topic.&#91;92&#93;

In 2013 and 2014, the error rate on the ImageNet task using deep learning was further reduced, following a similar trend in large-scale speech recognition.

For example, in image recognition, they might learn to identify images that contain cats by analyzing example images that have been manually labeled as 'cat' or 'no cat' and using the analytic results to identify cats in other images.

Over time, attention focused on matching specific mental abilities, leading to deviations from biology such as backpropagation, or passing information in the reverse direction and adjusting the network to reflect that information.

Neural networks have been used on a variety of tasks, including computer vision, speech recognition, machine translation, social network filtering, playing board and video games and medical diagnosis.

Despite this number being several order of magnitude less than the number of neurons on a human brain, these networks can perform many tasks at a level beyond that of humans (e.g., recognizing faces, playing 'Go'&#91;99&#93;

The user can review the results and select which probabilities the network should display (above a certain threshold, etc.) and return the proposed label.

The extra layers enable composition of features from lower layers, potentially modeling complex data with fewer units than a similarly performing shallow network.&#91;11&#93;

The training process can be guaranteed to converge in one step with a new batch of data, and the computational complexity of the training algorithm is linear with respect to the number of neurons involved.&#91;115&#93;&#91;116&#93;

that involve multi-second intervals containing speech events separated by thousands of discrete time steps, where one time step corresponds to about 10 ms.

All major commercial speech recognition systems (e.g., Microsoft Cortana, Xbox, Skype Translator, Amazon Alexa, Google Now, Apple Siri, Baidu and iFlyTek voice search, and a range of Nuance speech products, etc.) are based on deep learning.&#91;10&#93;&#91;122&#93;&#91;123&#93;&#91;124&#93;

DNNs have proven themselves capable, for example, of a) identifying the style period of a given painting, b) 'capturing' the style of a given painting and applying it in a visually pleasing manner to an arbitrary photograph, and c) generating striking imagery based on random visual input fields.&#91;128&#93;&#91;129&#93;

Word embedding, such as word2vec, can be thought of as a representational layer in a deep learning architecture that transforms an atomic word into a positional representation of the word relative to other words in the dataset;

Finding the appropriate mobile audience for mobile advertising is always challenging, since many data points must be considered and assimilated before a target segment can be created and used in ad serving by any ad server.&#91;161&#93;&#91;162&#93;

'Deep anti-money laundering detection system can spot and recognize relationships and similarities between data and, further down the road, learn to detect anomalies or classify and predict specific events'.

Deep learning is closely related to a class of theories of brain development (specifically, neocortical development) proposed by cognitive neuroscientists in the early 1990s.&#91;166&#93;&#91;167&#93;&#91;168&#93;&#91;169&#93;

These developmental models share the property that various proposed learning dynamics in the brain (e.g., a wave of nerve growth factor) support the self-organization somewhat analogous to the neural networks utilized in deep learning models.

Like the neocortex, neural networks employ a hierarchy of layered filters in which each layer considers information from a prior layer (or the operating environment), and then passes its output (and possibly the original input), to other layers.

Other researchers have argued that unsupervised forms of deep learning, such as those based on hierarchical generative models and deep belief networks, may be closer to biological reality.&#91;173&#93;&#91;174&#93;

researchers at The University of Texas at Austin (UT) developed a machine learning framework called Training an Agent Manually via Evaluative Reinforcement, or TAMER, which proposed new methods for robots or computer programs to learn how to perform tasks by interacting with a human instructor.&#91;165&#93;

Such techniques lack ways of representing causal relationships (...) have no obvious ways of performing logical inferences, and they are also still a long way from integrating abstract knowledge, such as information about what objects are, what they are for, and how they are typically used.

systems, like Watson (...) use techniques like deep learning as just one element in a very complicated ensemble of techniques, ranging from the statistical technique of Bayesian inference to deductive reasoning.'&#91;190&#93;

As an alternative to this emphasis on the limits of deep learning, one author speculated that it might be possible to train a machine vision stack to perform the sophisticated task of discriminating between 'old master' and amateur figure drawings, and hypothesized that such a sensitivity might represent the rudiments of a non-trivial machine empathy.&#91;191&#93;

In further reference to the idea that artistic sensitivity might inhere within relatively low levels of the cognitive hierarchy, a published series of graphic representations of the internal states of deep (20-30 layers) neural networks attempting to discern within essentially random data the images on which they were trained&#91;193&#93;

Learning a grammar (visual or linguistic) from training data would be equivalent to restricting the system to commonsense reasoning that operates on concepts in terms of grammatical production rules and is a basic goal of both human language acquisition&#91;199&#93;

Such a manipulation is termed an “adversarial attack.” In 2016 researchers used one ANN to doctor images in trial and error fashion, identify another's focal points and thereby generate images that deceived it.

Another group showed that certain psychedelic spectacles could fool a facial recognition system into thinking ordinary people were celebrities, potentially allowing one person to impersonate another.

ANNs can however be further trained to detect attempts at deception, potentially leading attackers and defenders into an arms race similar to the kind that already defines the malware defense industry.

ANNs have been trained to defeat ANN-based anti-malware software by repeatedly attacking a defense with malware that was continually altered by a genetic algorithm until it tricked the anti-malware while retaining its ability to damage the target.&#91;201&#93;

Distributed Deep Learning, Part 1: An Introduction to Distributed Training of Neural Networks

In Part 1, we’ll look at how the training of deep learning models can be significantly accelerated with distributed computing on GPUs, as well as discuss some of the challenges and examine current research on the topic.

Modern neural network architectures trained on large data sets can obtain impressive performance across a wide variety of domains, from speech and image recognition, to natural language processing to industry-focused applications such as fraud detection and recommendation systems.

Although in recent years significant advances have been made in GPU hardware, network architectures and training methods, the fact remains that network training can take an impractically long time on a single machine.

In model parallelism, different machines in the distributed system are responsible for the computations in different parts of a single network - for example, each layer in the neural network may be assigned to a different machine.

A number of different approaches have been discussed in the literature, and the primary differences between approaches are Deeplearning4j’s current Spark implementation is a synchronous parameter averaging where the Spark driver and reduction operations take the place of a parameter server.

these restructions are parameter averaging after each minibatch, no updater (i.e., no momentum etc - just multiplication by learning rate), and an identical number of examples processed by each worker.

If we process all nm examples on a single machine with learning rate α, our weight update rule is given by: $W_{i+1} = W_i - \frac{\alpha}{nm}\sum_{j=1}^{nm}\frac{\partial L^j}{\partial W_i}$ Now, if we instead perform learning on m examples in each of the n workers (where worker 1 gets examples 1, ..., m, worker 2 gets examples m + 1, ..., 2m and so on), we have: $\begin{split} W_{i+1} & = W_i - \frac{\alpha}{nm}\sum_{j=1}^{nm}\frac{\partial L^{j}}{\partial W_i}\ \end{split}$ Of course, this result doesn’t hold in practice (averaging every minibatch and not using an updater such as momentum or RMSProp are both ill-advised, for performance and convergence reasons respectively), but it does give us an intuition as to why parameter averaging should work well, especially when the parameters are averaged frequently.

The primary difference between the two is that instead of transferring parameters from the workers to the parameter server, we will transfer the updates (i.e., gradients post learning rate and momentum, etc.) instead.

If we again define our loss function as L, then parameter vector W at iteration i + 1 for simple SGD training with learning rate α is obtained by: $$W_{i+1,j} = W_{i} - \alpha \nabla L_j) with (\nabla L = \left(\frac{\partial L}{\partial w_1},\ldots,\frac{\partial L}{\partial w_n}\right)$$ for $$n$$ parameters.

Now, if we take the weight update rule shown above, and let $$\lambda=\frac{1}{n}$$ for $$n$$ executors, and note that (again using SGD only with learning rate $$\alpha$$, for brevity)) the update is $$\Delta W_{i,j} = \alpha \nabla L_j$$, then we have: \[\begin{split} W_{i+1} &

That is, by allowing the updates ∆Wi,j to be applied to the parameter vector as soon as they are computed (instead of waiting for N ≥ 1 iterations by all workers), we obtain asynchronous stochastic gradient descent algorithm.

Most variants of asynchronous stochastic gradient descent maintain the same basic approach, but apply a variety of strategies to minimize the impact of the stale gradients, whilst attempting to maintaining high cluster utilization.

Soft synchronization ([9]) is quite simple: instead of updating the global parameter vector immediately, the parameter server waits to collect some number s of updates ∆Wj from any of the n learners (where 1 ≤ s ≤ n).

In a standard data parallel implementation (using either parameter averaging or async SGD), the size of the network transfers are equal to the parameter vector size (as we are transferring either copies of the parameter vector, or one gradient value per parameter).

While the idea of compressing parameters or updates isn’t exactly new, the implementation goes a way beyond other simple compression mechanisms (such as applying a compression codec or converting to 16-bit floating point representation).

The neat thing about this design is that update vectors δi,j are: Furthermore, to account for the fact that the compression method is very lossy, the difference between the original update vector $$\Delta W_{i,j}$$ and the compressed/quantized update vector $$\delta_{i,j}$$ is stored in what is known as a residual vector, $$r_j$$ on each executor j, instead of simply being discarded.

Take for example a model with 14.6 million parameters, as reported in Strom’s paper: Larger values of τ can be used, and result in greater compression (for example, τ = 15 is reported to result in an update size of only 4.5 KB per minibatch!) but model accuracy noticeably suffers as τ increases.

For one thing, we could define different approaches as best, according to any of the following criteria: Furthermore, the answers to these questions will likely depend on a number of factors, such as the type and size of neural network, cluster hardware, use of features such as compression, as well as the specific implementation and configuration of the training method.

parameter averaging (or equivalently, synchronous update-based) approaches win out in terms of accuracy per epoch, and the overall attainable accuracy, especially with small averaging periods.

Perhaps the greatest issue with parameter averaging (and synchronous approaches in general) is the so-called ‘last executor’ effect: that is, synchronous systems have to wait on the slowest executor before completing each iteration.

Async SGD implementations with a centralized parameter server may introduce a communication bottleneck (by comparison, synchronous approaches may utilize tree-reduce or similar algorithms, avoiding some of this communication bottleneck).

Distributed training isn’t free - distributed systems necessarily have an overhead compared to training on a single machine, due to things like synchonization and network transfers of data and parameters.

In part 2 of 3 of our distributed deep learning series of posts, we’ll look at Deeplearning4j’s parameter averaging implementation using Apache Spark, and walk through an end-to-end example of how to use it to train a neural network on a Spark cluster.

NanoNets : How to use Deep Learning when you have Limited Data

Disclaimer: I’m building nanonets.com to help build ML with less data There has been a recent surge in popularity of Deep Learning, achieving state of the art performance in various tasks like Language Translation, playing Strategy Games and Self Driving Cars requiring millions of data points.

Basic reasoning is that your model should be large enough to capture relations in your data (eg textures and shapes in images, grammar in text and phonemes in speech) along with specifics of your problem (eg number of categories).

With transfer learning, we can take a pretrained model, which was trained on a large readily available dataset (trained on a completely different task, with the same input but different output).

This smaller network only needs to learn the relations for your specific problem having already learnt about patterns in the data from the pretrained model.

This way a model trained to detect Cats can be reused to Reproduce the work of Van Gogh Another major advantage of using transfer learning is how well the model generalizes.

Larger models tend to overfit (ie modeling the data more than the underlying phenomenon) the data and don’t work as well when you test it out on unseen data.

Calculating the number of parameters needed to train for this problem using transfer learning: No of parameters = [Size(inputs) + 1] * [Size(outputs) + 1] =

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