BEIJING, CHINA--(Marketwired - Sep 12, 2016) - GPU Technology Conference China - NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today unveiled the latest additions to its Pascal architecture-based deep learning platform, with new NVIDIA Tesla P4 and P40 GPU accelerators and new software that deliver massive leaps in efficiency and speed to accelerate inferencing production workloads for artificial intelligence services. Modern AI services such as voice-activated assistance, email spam filters, and movie and product recommendation engines are rapidly growing in complexity, requiring up to 10x more compute compared to neural networks from a year ago. Current CPU-based technology isn't capable of delivering real-time responsiveness required for modern AI services, leading to a poor user experience. The Tesla P4 and P40 are specifically designed for inferencing, which uses trained deep neural networks to recognize speech, images or text in response to queries from users and devices. Based on the Pascal architecture, these GPUs feature specialized inference instructions based on 8-bit (INT8) operations, delivering 45x faster response than CPUs1 and a 4x improvement over GPU solutions launched less than a year ago.2

Thinking about how and when you'll die might be morbid, but it has creeped into everyone's mind at some point. Online tools like The Death Clock provide a very unscientific, and entertaining, prediction of your demise, but researchers have figured out a way to estimate a person's lifespan with 69 percent accuracy. In a very small study of 48 participants, all of whom were at least 60 years old, scientists from the University of Adelaide in Australia analyzed photos of people's organs using artificial intelligence. They were able to predict who would die within five years with 69 percent accuracy, which is roughly the same as an oncologist's. Using deep learning, which involves inputting data into a computer system to help it make decisions, the researchers used radiological images because they provide undetectable clues, according to study co-author and epidemiologist Dr. Lyle Palmer, Ph.D, in a story on ResearchGate.

A working definition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the "theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence." While this explanation is useful, it doesn't capture the enormity of the AI phenomenon, being billed as a massive change agent in the financial services industry. The interesting bit is that the scope and impact of AI in the industry is not limited to technology alone. The way we interact, decide and learn is increasingly being influenced by new technologies, AI in particular. More and more enterprises are waking up to the potential of AI, as was evident in a recent survey commissioned by Infosys, where 64% respondents stated that their organisation's future growth is dependent on large-scale AI adoption.

In iterative supervised learning algorithms it is common to reach a point in the search where no further induction seems to be possible with the available data. If the search is continued beyond this point, the risk of overfitting increases significantly. Following the recent developments in inductive semantic stochastic methods, this paper studies the feasibility of using information gathered from the semantic neighborhood to decide when to stop the search. Two semantic stopping criteria are proposed and experimentally assessed in Geometric Semantic Genetic Programming (GSGP) and in the Semantic Learning Machine (SLM) algorithm (the equivalent algorithm for neural networks). The experiments are performed on real-world high-dimensional regression datasets. The results show that the proposed semantic stopping criteria are able to detect stopping points that result in a competitive generalization for both GSGP and SLM. This approach also yields computationally efficient algorithms as it allows the evolution of neural networks in less than 3 seconds on average, and of GP trees in at most 10 seconds. The usage of the proposed semantic stopping criteria in conjunction with the computation of optimal mutation/learning steps also results in small trees and neural networks.

An overview of current debates and contemporary research devoted to the modeling of decision making processes and their facilitation directs attention to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). At the core of the AHP are various prioritization procedures (PPs) and consistency measures (CMs) for a Pairwise Comparison Matrix (PCM) which, in a sense, reflects preferences of decision makers. Certainly, when judgments about these preferences are perfectly consistent (cardinally transitive), all PPs coincide and the quality of the priority ratios (PRs) estimation is exemplary. However, human judgments are very rarely consistent, thus the quality of PRs estimation may significantly vary. The scale of these variations depends on the applied PP and utilized CM for a PCM. This is why it is important to find out which PPs and which CMs for a PCM lead directly to an improvement of the PRs estimation accuracy. The main goal of this research is realized through the properly designed, coded and executed seminal and sophisticated simulation algorithms in Wolfram Mathematica 8.0. These research results convince that the embedded in the AHP and commonly applied, both genuine PP and CM for PCM may significantly deteriorate the quality of PRs estimation; however, solutions proposed in this paper can significantly improve the methodology.

Generative adversarial nets (GANs) are a promising technique for modeling a distribution from samples. It is however well known that GAN training suffers from instability due to the nature of its maximin formulation. In this paper, we explore ways to tackle the instability problem by dualizing the discriminator. We start from linear discriminators in which case conjugate duality provides a mechanism to reformulate the saddle point objective into a maximization problem, such that both the generator and the discriminator of this 'dualing GAN' act in concert. We then demonstrate how to extend this intuition to non-linear formulations. For GANs with linear discriminators our approach is able to remove the instability in training, while for GANs with nonlinear discriminators our approach provides an alternative to the commonly used GAN training algorithm.

We propose a novel approach for inferring the individualized causal effects of a treatment (intervention) from observational data. Our approach conceptualizes causal inference as a multitask learning problem; we model a subject's potential outcomes using a deep multitask network with a set of shared layers among the factual and counterfactual outcomes, and a set of outcome-specific layers. The impact of selection bias in the observational data is alleviated via a propensity-dropout regularization scheme, in which the network is thinned for every training example via a dropout probability that depends on the associated propensity score. The network is trained in alternating phases, where in each phase we use the training examples of one of the two potential outcomes (treated and control populations) to update the weights of the shared layers and the respective outcome-specific layers. Experiments conducted on data based on a real-world observational study show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Regularization is an essential mechanism in Machine Learning that usually refers to the set of techniques that attempt to improve the estimates by biasing them away from their samplebased values towards values that are deemed to be more "physically plausible" [1]. In practice, it is often used to avoid overfitting, use some prior knowledge about the problem at hand or induce some desirable properties over the resulting learning machine. One of these properties is the so called sparsity, which can be roughly defined as expressing the learning machines using only a part of the training information. This has advantages in terms of the interpretability of the model and its manageability, and also preventing the over-fitting. Two representatives of this type of models are the Support Vector Machines (SVM [2]) and the Lasso model [3], based on inducing sparsity at two different levels. On the one hand, the SVMs are sparse in their representation in terms of the training patterns, which means that the model is characterized only by a subsample of the original training dataset. On the other hand, the Lasso models induce sparsity at the level of the features, in the sense that the model is defined only as a function of a subset of the inputs, hence performing an implicit feature selection.

We consider a priori generalization bounds developed in terms of cross-validation estimates and the stability of learners. In particular, we first derive an exponential Efron-Stein type tail inequality for the concentration of a general function of n independent random variables. Next, under some reasonable notion of stability, we use this exponential tail bound to analyze the concentration of the k-fold crossvalidation (KFCV) estimate around the true risk of a hypothesis generated by a general learning rule. While the accumulated literature has often attributed this concentration to the bias and variance of the estimator, our bound attributes this concentration to the stability of the learning rule and the number of folds k. This insight raises valid concerns related to the practical use of KFCV, and suggests research directions to obtain reliable empirical estimates of the actual risk.

This paper introduces self-paced task selection to multitask learning, where instances from more closely related tasks are selected in a progression of easier-to-harder tasks, to emulate an effective human education strategy, but applied to multitask machine learning. We develop the mathematical foundation for the approach based on iterative selection of the most appropriate task, learning the task parameters, and updating the shared knowledge, optimizing a new bi-convex loss function. This proposed method applies quite generally, including to multitask feature learning, multitask learning with alternating structure optimization, etc. Results show that in each of the above formulations self-paced (easier-to-harder) task selection outperforms the baseline version of these methods in all the experiments.