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A TensorFlow Modeling Pipeline using TensorFlow Datasets and TensorBoard

#artificialintelligence

This article investigates TensorFlow components for building a toolset to make modeling evaluation more efficient. Specifically, TensorFlow Datasets (TFDS) and TensorBoard (TB) can be quite helpful in this task. While completing a highly informative AICamp online class taught by Tyler Elliot Bettilyon (TEB) called Deep Learning for Developers, I got interested in creating a more structured way for machine-learning model builders -- like me as the student -- to understand and evaluate various models and observe their performance when applied to new datasets. Since this particular class focused on TensorFlow (TF), I started to investigate TF components for building a toolset to make this type of modeling evaluation more efficient. In doing so, I learned about two components, TensorFlow Datasets (TFDS) and TensorBoard (TB), that can be quite helpful and this blog post discusses their application in this task.


Vol 14, No 19 (2019) International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET)

#artificialintelligence

Hoy traemos a este espacio el último número Vol 14, No 19 (2019) del International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET) This interdisciplinary journal aims to focus on the exchange of relevant trends and research results as well as the presentation of practical experiences gained while developing and testing elements of technology enhanced learning. So it aims to bridge the gap between pure academic research journals and more practical publications. So it covers the full range from research, application development to experience reports and product descriptions.


Deep Learning for Business Managers: Neural Networks in R

#artificialintelligence

You're looking for a complete Artificial Neural Network (ANN) course that teaches you everything you need to create a Neural Network model in R, right? You've found the right Neural Networks course! Identify the business problem which can be solved using Neural network Models. Have a clear understanding of Advanced Neural network concepts such as Gradient Descent, forward and Backward Propagation etc. Create Neural network models in R using Keras and Tensorflow libraries and analyze their results. How this course will help you?


Active World Model Learning with Progress Curiosity

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

World models are self-supervised predictive models of how the world evolves. Humans learn world models by curiously exploring their environment, in the process acquiring compact abstractions of high bandwidth sensory inputs, the ability to plan across long temporal horizons, and an understanding of the behavioral patterns of other agents. In this work, we study how to design such a curiosity-driven Active World Model Learning (AWML) system. To do so, we construct a curious agent building world models while visually exploring a 3D physical environment rich with distillations of representative real-world agents. We propose an AWML system driven by $\gamma$-Progress: a scalable and effective learning progress-based curiosity signal. We show that $\gamma$-Progress naturally gives rise to an exploration policy that directs attention to complex but learnable dynamics in a balanced manner, thus overcoming the "white noise problem". As a result, our $\gamma$-Progress-driven controller achieves significantly higher AWML performance than baseline controllers equipped with state-of-the-art exploration strategies such as Random Network Distillation and Model Disagreement.


Developmental Reinforcement Learning of Control Policy of a Quadcopter UAV with Thrust Vectoring Rotors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we present a novel developmental reinforcement learning-based controller for a quadcopter with thrust vectoring capabilities. This multirotor UAV design has tilt-enabled rotors. It utilizes the rotor force magnitude and direction to achieve the desired state during flight. The control policy of this robot is learned using the policy transfer from the learned controller of the quadcopter (comparatively simple UAV design without thrust vectoring). This approach allows learning a control policy for systems with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. The performance of the learned policy is evaluated by physics-based simulations for the tasks of hovering and way-point navigation. The flight simulations utilize a flight controller based on reinforcement learning without any additional PID components. The results show faster learning with the presented approach as opposed to learning the control policy from scratch for this new UAV design created by modifications in a conventional quadcopter, i.e., the addition of more degrees of freedom (4-actuators in conventional quadcopter to 8-actuators in tilt-rotor quadcopter). We demonstrate the robustness of our learned policy by showing the recovery of the tilt-rotor platform in the simulation from various non-static initial conditions in order to reach a desired state. The developmental policy for the tilt-rotor UAV also showed superior fault tolerance when compared with the policy learned from the scratch. The results show the ability of the presented approach to bootstrap the learned behavior from a simpler system (lower-dimensional action-space) to a more complex robot (comparatively higher-dimensional action-space) and reach better performance faster.


Lifelong Learning of Compositional Structures

arXiv.org Machine Learning

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to construct self-contained chunks of knowledge and adequately reuse them in novel combinations for solving different yet structurally related problems. Learning such compositional structures has been a significant challenge for artificial systems, due to the combinatorial nature of the underlying search problem. To date, research into compositional learning has largely proceeded separately from work on lifelong or continual learning. We integrate these two lines of work to present a general-purpose framework for lifelong learning of compositional structures that can be used for solving a stream of related tasks. Our framework separates the learning process into two broad stages: learning how to best combine existing components in order to assimilate a novel problem, and learning how to adapt the set of existing components to accommodate the new problem. This separation explicitly handles the trade-off between the stability required to remember how to solve earlier tasks and the flexibility required to solve new tasks, as we show empirically in an extensive evaluation.


The Monte Carlo Transformer: a stochastic self-attention model for sequence prediction

arXiv.org Machine Learning

While neural networks excel at predicting a single-point estimate of a given target for complex machine learning problems, an open research question is the design of neural generative models able to output a predictive distribution, that can capture the inherent variability of the observations or the model's level of confidence in its predictions. The main motivation behind uncertainty quantification is the design of AI systems for critical applications that are safe, and are mitigating risks while automatizing decision-making. On one hand, Bayesian statistics offer a mathematically grounded framework to reason about uncertainty; however, such models generally require prohibitive computational costs, which make them not widely used in practice. On the other hand, frequentist methods and metrics have been developed for confidence estimation in neural networks, in particular in the classification setting [Brosse et al., 2020], [Corbière et al., 2019].


Differential Replication in Machine Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

When deployed in the wild, machine learning models are usually confronted with data and requirements that constantly vary, either because of changes in the generating distribution or because external constraints change the environment where the model operates. To survive in such an ecosystem, machine learning models need to adapt to new conditions by evolving over time. The idea of model adaptability has been studied from different perspectives. In this paper, we propose a solution based on reusing the knowledge acquired by the already deployed machine learning models and leveraging it to train future generations. This is the idea behind differential replication of machine learning models. "If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organization, [...] I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being's own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection."


Qgraph-bounded Q-learning: Stabilizing Model-Free Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In state of the art model-free off-policy deep reinforcement learning, a replay memory is used to store past experience and derive all network updates. Even if both state and action spaces are continuous, the replay memory only holds a finite number of transitions. We represent these transitions in a data graph and link its structure to soft divergence. By selecting a subgraph with a favorable structure, we construct a simplified Markov Decision Process for which exact Q-values can be computed efficiently as more data comes in. The subgraph and its associated Q-values can be represented as a QGraph. We show that the Q-value for each transition in the simplified MDP is a lower bound of the Q-value for the same transition in the original continuous Q-learning problem. By using these lower bounds in temporal difference learning, our method QG-DDPG is less prone to soft divergence and exhibits increased sample efficiency while being more robust to hyperparameters. QGraphs also retain information from transitions that have already been overwritten in the replay memory, which can decrease the algorithm's sensitivity to the replay memory capacity.


Online Approximate Bayesian learning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We introduce in this work a new method for online approximate Bayesian learning, whose main idea is to approximate the sequence $(\pi_t)_{t\geq 1}$ of posterior distributions by a sequence $(\tilde{\pi}_t)_{t\geq 1}$ which (i) can be estimated in an online fashion using sequential Monte Carlo methods and (ii) is shown to converge to the same distribution as the sequence $(\pi_t)_{t\geq 1}$, under weak assumptions on the statistical model at hand. In its simplest version, the proposed approach amounts to take for $(\tilde{\pi}_t)_{t\geq 1}$ the sequence of filtering distributions associated to a particular state-space model, and to approximate this sequence using a standard particle filter algorithm. We illustrate on several challenging examples the benefits of this procedure for online approximate Bayesian parameter inference, and with one real data example we show that its online predictive performance can significantly outperform that of stochastic gradient descent and of streaming variational Bayes.