With the continuous evolution of its components, 2019 will be considered as the renaissance period of the entire eLearning industry. There are a few trends that will form the future of the educational system. It has become increasingly popular over the past decade, especially among youth. With eLearning, it has become possible to take a lecture even without being physically present in a classroom. With technological advancement, all that is required is a high-speed internet connection to easily access the lectures online, and in the comforts of your home.

Amazon announced today that it's making the machine learning courses it uses to train its engineers available to everybody for free. The coursework is tailored to four major groups -- developers, data scientists, data platform engineers and business professionals -- and it offers both foundational level lessons as well as more advanced instruction. "Each course starts with the fundamentals, and builds on those through real-world examples and labs, allowing developers to explore machine learning through some fun problems we have had to solve at Amazon," Amazon said in the announcement. "Coursework helps consolidate best practices, and demonstrates how to get started on a range of AWS machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, AWS DeepLens, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly and Amazon Comprehend." More than 30 courses totalling over 45 hours are available as are videos, labs and other relevant documentation initially developed for training Amazon employees.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have proven to be a powerful framework for learning to draw samples from complex distributions. However, GANs are also notoriously difficult to train, with mode collapse and oscillations a common problem. We hypothesize that this is at least in part due to the evolution of the generator distribution and the catastrophic forgetting tendency of neural networks, which leads to the discriminator losing the ability to remember synthesized samples from previous instantiations of the generator. Recognizing this, our contributions are twofold. First, we show that GAN training makes for a more interesting and realistic benchmark for continual learning methods evaluation than some of the more canonical datasets. Second, we propose leveraging continual learning techniques to augment the discriminator, preserving its ability to recognize previous generator samples. We show that the resulting methods add only a light amount of computation, involve minimal changes to the model, and result in better overall performance on the examined image and text generation tasks.

Abstract--While the Machine Learning (ML) landscape is evolving rapidly, there has been a relative lag in the development of the "learning systems" needed to enable broad adoption. Furthermore, few such systems are designed to support the specialized requirements of scientific ML. Here we present the Data and Learning Hub for science (DLHub), a multi-tenant system that provides both model repository and serving capabilities witha focus on science applications. First, its selfservice modelrepository allows users to share, publish, verify, reproduce, and reuse models, and addresses concerns related to model reproducibility by packaging and distributing models and all constituent components. Second, it implements scalable and low-latency serving capabilities that can leverage parallel and distributed computing resources to democratize access to published modelsthrough a simple web interface. Unlike other model serving frameworks, DLHub can store and serve any Python 3-compatible model or processing function, plus multiple-function pipelines. We show that relative to other model serving systems including TensorFlow Serving, SageMaker, and Clipper, DLHub provides greater capabilities, comparable performance without memoization and batching, and significantly better performance when the latter two techniques can be employed. We also describe early uses of DLHub for scientific applications. I. INTRODUCTION Machine Learning (ML) is disrupting nearly every aspect of computing. Researchers now turn to ML methods to uncover patterns in vast data collections and to make decisions with little or no human input. As ML becomes increasingly pervasive, newsystems are required to support the development, adoption, and application of ML. We refer to the broad class of systems designed to support ML as "learning systems." Learning systems need to support the entire ML lifecycle (see Figure 1), including model development [1, 2]; scalable training across potentially tens of thousands of cores and GPUs [3]; model publication and sharing [4]; and low latency and highthroughput inference[5]; all while encouraging best-practice software engineering when developing models [6].

In bandits, arms' distributions are stationary. This is often violated in practice, where rewards change over time. In applications as recommendation systems, online advertising, and crowdsourcing, the changes may be triggered by the pulls, so that the arms' rewards change as a function of the number of pulls. In this paper, we consider the specific case of non-parametric rotting bandits, where the expected reward of an arm may decrease every time it is pulled. We introduce the filtering on expanding window average (FEWA) algorithm that at each round constructs moving averages of increasing windows to identify arms that are more likely to return high rewards when pulled once more. We prove that, without any knowledge on the decreasing behavior of the arms, FEWA achieves similar anytime problem-dependent, $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\log{(KT)}),$ and problem-independent, $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{KT})$, regret bounds of near-optimal stochastic algorithms as UCB1 of Auer et al. (2002a). This result substantially improves the prior result of Levine et al. (2017) which needed knowledge of the horizon and decaying parameters to achieve problem-independent bound of only $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(K^{1/3}T^{2/3})$. Finally, we report simulations confirming the theoretical improvements of FEWA.

Learning to control an environment without hand-crafted rewards or expert data remains challenging and is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. We present an unsupervised learning algorithm to train agents to achieve perceptually-specified goals using only a stream of observations and actions. Our agent simultaneously learns a goal-conditioned policy and a goal achievement reward function that measures how similar a state is to the goal state. This dual optimization leads to a co-operative game, giving rise to a learned reward function that reflects similarity in controllable aspects of the environment instead of distance in the space of observations. We demonstrate the efficacy of our agent to learn, in an unsupervised manner, to reach a diverse set of goals on three domains -- Atari, the DeepMind Control Suite and DeepMind Lab.

Variational inference (VI) has become the method of choice for fitting many modern probabilistic models. However, practitioners are faced with a fragmented literature that offers a bewildering array of algorithmic options. First, the variational family. Second, the granularity of the updates e.g. whether the updates are local to each data point and employ message passing or global. Third, the method of optimization (bespoke or blackbox, closed-form or stochastic updates, etc.). This paper presents a new framework, termed Partitioned Variational Inference (PVI), that explicitly acknowledges these algorithmic dimensions of VI, unifies disparate literature, and provides guidance on usage. Crucially, the proposed PVI framework allows us to identify new ways of performing VI that are ideally suited to challenging learning scenarios including federated learning (where distributed computing is leveraged to process non-centralized data) and continual learning (where new data and tasks arrive over time and must be accommodated quickly). We showcase these new capabilities by developing communication-efficient federated training of Bayesian neural networks and continual learning for Gaussian process models with private pseudo-points. The new methods significantly outperform the state-of-the-art, whilst being almost as straightforward to implement as standard VI.

Many modern machine learning approaches require vast amounts of training data to learn new concepts; conversely, human learning often requires few examples--sometimes only one--from which the learner can abstract structural concepts. We present a novel approach to introducing new spatial structures to an AI agent, combining deep learning over qualitative spatial relations with various heuristic search algorithms. The agent extracts spatial relations from a sparse set of noisy examples of block-based structures, and trains convolutional and sequential models of those relation sets. To create novel examples of similar structures, the agent begins placing blocks on a virtual table, uses a CNN to predict the most similar complete example structure after each placement, an LSTM to predict the most likely set of remaining moves needed to complete it, and recommends one using heuristic search. We verify that the agent learned the concept by observing its virtual block-building activities, wherein it ranks each potential subsequent action toward building its learned concept. We empirically assess this approach with human participants' ratings of the block structures. Initial results and qualitative evaluations of structures generated by the trained agent show where it has generalized concepts from the training data, which heuristics perform best within the search space, and how we might improve learning and execution.

Today, I'm excited to share that, for the first time, the same machine learning courses used to train engineers at Amazon are now available to all developers through AWS. We've been using machine learning across Amazon for more than 20 years. With thousands of engineers focused on machine learning across the company, there are very few Amazon retail pages, products, fulfillment technologies, stores which haven't been improved through the use of machine learning in one way or another. Many AWS customers share this enthusiasm, and our mission has been to take machine learning from something which had previously been only available to the largest, most well-funded technology companies, and put it in the hands of every developer. Thanks to services such as Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Polly, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Lex, tens of thousands of developers are already on their way to building more intelligent applications through machine learning.

Recent years have witnessed the rising popularity of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and related fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Many online courses and resources are available even for those without a strong background in the field. Often the student is curious about a specific topic but does not quite know where to begin studying. To answer the question of "what should one learn first," we apply an embedding-based method to learn prerequisite relations for course concepts in the domain of NLP. We introduce LectureBank, a dataset containing 1,352 English lecture files collected from university courses which are each classified according to an existing taxonomy as well as 208 manually-labeled prerequisite relation topics, which is publicly available. The dataset will be useful for educational purposes such as lecture preparation and organization as well as applications such as reading list generation. Additionally, we experiment with neural graph-based networks and non-neural classifiers to learn these prerequisite relations from our dataset.