Education
Seven Key Dimensions to Understand Any Machine Learning Problem
Tackling a machine learning problem might feel overwhelming at first. What model to choose?, which architecture might work best? In a process that is mostly driven by trial and error experimentation, those decisions result incredibly important. One aspect that really helps to navigate that universe of decisions is to clearly understand the nature of the problem. In machine learning scenarios, an important part of understanding the problem is based on understanding its environment.
A Complete 4-Year Course Plan for an Artificial Intelligence Undergraduate Degree - Mihail Eric
Having been out of school for a while now, I've had a lot of time to reflect on how well certain courses prepared me for my career in artificial intelligence and machine learning. I finally decided to put my thoughts to the page and design a complete curriculum for a 4-year undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence. These courses are intended to provide both breadth and depth to newcomers in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer science. This curriculum is inspired heavily by the courses that I took and is a reflection of the skills I believe are necessary to succeed in an artificial intelligence career today. While you might be able to acquire some knowledge of AI through a single Coursera class, my emphasis here is instead on developing a deep conceptual understanding coupled with practical application of those concepts.
Teacher-Student Framework Enhanced Multi-domain Dialogue Generation
Peng, Shuke, Huang, Xinjing, Lin, Zehao, Ji, Feng, Chen, Haiqing, Zhang, Yin
Dialogue systems dealing with multi-domain tasks are highly required. How to record the state remains a key problem in a task-oriented dialogue system. Normally we use human-defined features as dialogue states and apply a state tracker to extract these features. However, the performance of such a system is limited by the error propagation of a state tracker. In this paper, we propose a dialogue generation model that needs no external state trackers and still benefits from human-labeled semantic data. By using a teacher-student framework, several teacher models are firstly trained in their individual domains, learn dialogue policies from labeled states. And then the learned knowledge and experience are merged and transferred to a universal student model, which takes raw utterance as its input. Experiments show that the dialogue system trained under our framework outperforms the one uses a belief tracker.
Active Measure Reinforcement Learning for Observation Cost Minimization
Bellinger, Colin, Coles, Rory, Crowley, Mark, Tamblyn, Isaac
Standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that the observation of the next state comes instantaneously and at no cost. In a wide variety of sequential decision making tasks ranging from medical treatment to scientific discovery, however, multiple classes of state observations are possible, each of which has an associated cost. We propose the active measure RL framework (Amrl) as an initial solution to this problem where the agent learns to maximize the costed return, which we define as the discounted sum of rewards minus the sum of observation costs. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that Amrl-Q agents are able to learn a policy and state estimator in parallel during online training. During training the agent naturally shifts from its reliance on costly measurements of the environment to its state estimator in order to increase its reward. It does this without harm to the learned policy. Our results show that the Amrl-Q agent learns at a rate similar to standard Q-learning and Dyna-Q. Critically, by utilizing an active strategy, Amrl-Q achieves a higher costed return.
Active Imitation Learning with Noisy Guidance
Brantley, Kiantรฉ, Sharaf, Amr, Daumรฉ, Hal III
Imitation learning algorithms provide state-of-the-art results on many structured prediction tasks by learning near-optimal search policies. Such algorithms assume training-time access to an expert that can provide the optimal action at any queried state; unfortunately, the number of such queries is often prohibitive, frequently rendering these approaches impractical. To combat this query complexity, we consider an active learning setting in which the learning algorithm has additional access to a much cheaper noisy heuristic that provides noisy guidance. Our algorithm, LEAQI, learns a difference classifier that predicts when the expert is likely to disagree with the heuristic, and queries the expert only when necessary. We apply LEAQI to three sequence labeling tasks, demonstrating significantly fewer queries to the expert and comparable (or better) accuracies over a passive approach.
Continual Local Training for Better Initialization of Federated Models
Federated learning (FL) refers to the learning paradigm that trains machine learning models directly in the decentralized systems consisting of smart edge devices without transmitting the raw data, which avoids the heavy communication costs and privacy concerns. Given the typical heterogeneous data distributions in such situations, the popular FL algorithm \emph{Federated Averaging} (FedAvg) suffers from weight divergence and thus cannot achieve a competitive performance for the global model (denoted as the \emph{initial performance} in FL) compared to centralized methods. In this paper, we propose the local continual training strategy to address this problem. Importance weights are evaluated on a small proxy dataset on the central server and then used to constrain the local training. With this additional term, we alleviate the weight divergence and continually integrate the knowledge on different local clients into the global model, which ensures a better generalization ability. Experiments on various FL settings demonstrate that our method significantly improves the initial performance of federated models with few extra communication costs.
Seven steps to integrate artificial intelligence into your company
Martin Spano is the author of Artificial Intelligence in a Nutshell, a book that explores the mystified subject of artificial intelligence (AI) with simple, non-technical language. Spano's passion for AI began after he watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he insists this ever-changing technology is not just the subject of sci-fi novels and movies; artificial intelligence is present in our everyday lives. As we said in the previous sections, artificial intelligence brings many benefits for everyone, including companies. It can minimise costs, maximise revenue and optimise processes within a company. In this article, we'll outline how you can integrate artificial intelligence into your business.
Top 10 B.Tech Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Colleges In India
Are you a student looking for the top 10 colleges for pursuing bachelor's/Btech in data science and artificial intelligence? In fact, as soon as a child passes high school, he/she starts to inquire about various colleges and universities which match his learning profile so that he gains proficiency in the subject which he decides to study. There are subjects that are not traditional in nature and require extra efforts to look into so that the right decision is taken. One such subject is Artificial Intelligence, which calls for counterfeit of human intelligence procedures by computers and other machines. This course requires expert faculty to teach so that students get adequate knowledge and are able to meet the industries' demands with their skills.