Media
FlexLogix introduces inference engine
FlexLogix has announced inference-optimized nnMAX clusters to develop the InferX X1 edge inference co-processor for incorporation in SoCs as IP, and in chip form, in Q3. Its performance advantage is claimed to be strong at low batch sizes which are required in edge applications where there is typically only one camera/sensor. InferX X1's performance at small batch sizes is close to data center inference boards and is optimized for large models which need 100s of billions of operations per image. For example, for YOLOv3 real time object recognition, InferX X1 processes 12.7 frames/second of 2 megapixel images at batch size 1. Performance is roughly linear with image size: so frame rate approximately doubles for a 1 megapixel image.
Relational Collaborative Filtering:Modeling Multiple Item Relations for Recommendation
Xin, Xin, He, Xiangnan, Zhang, Yongfeng, Zhang, Yongdong, Jose, Joemon
Existing item-based collaborative filtering (ICF) methods leverage only the relation of collaborative similarity. Nevertheless, there exist multiple relations between items in real-world scenarios. Distinct from the collaborative similarity that implies co-interact patterns from the user perspective, these relations reveal fine-grained knowledge on items from different perspectives of meta-data, functionality, etc. However, how to incorporate multiple item relations is less explored in recommendation research. In this work, we propose Relational Collaborative Filtering (RCF), a general framework to exploit multiple relations between items in recommender system. We find that both the relation type and the relation value are crucial in inferring user preference. To this end, we develop a two-level hierarchical attention mechanism to model user preference. The first-level attention discriminates which types of relations are more important, and the second-level attention considers the specific relation values to estimate the contribution of a historical item in recommending the target item. To make the item embeddings be reflective of the relational structure between items, we further formulate a task to preserve the item relations, and jointly train it with the recommendation task of preference modeling. Empirical results on two real datasets demonstrate the strong performance of RCF. Furthermore, we also conduct qualitative analyses to show the benefits of explanations brought by the modeling of multiple item relations.
A Persona-based Multi-turn Conversation Model in an Adversarial Learning Framework
Olabiyi, Oluwatobi O., Khazane, Anish, Mueller, Erik T.
In this paper, we extend the persona-based sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) neural network conversation model to multi-turn dialogue by modifying the state-of-the-art hredGAN architecture. To achieve this, we introduce an additional input modality into the encoder and decoder of hredGAN to capture other attributes such as speaker identity, location, sub-topics, and other external attributes that might be available from the corpus of human-to-human interactions. The resulting persona hredGAN ($phredGAN$) shows better performance than both the existing persona-based Seq2Seq and hredGAN models when those external attributes are available in a multi-turn dialogue corpus. This superiority is demonstrated on TV drama series with character consistency (such as Big Bang Theory and Friends) and customer service interaction datasets such as Ubuntu dialogue corpus in terms of perplexity, BLEU, ROUGE, and Distinct n-gram scores.
An Adversarial Learning Framework For A Persona-Based Multi-Turn Dialogue Model
Olabiyi, Oluwatobi, Khazane, Anish, Salimov, Alan, Mueller, Erik T.
In this paper, we extend the persona-based sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) neural network conversation model to a multi-turn dialogue scenario by modifying the state-of-the-art hredGAN architecture to simultaneously capture utterance attributes such as speaker identity, dialogue topic, speaker sentiments and so on. The proposed system, phredGAN has a persona-based HRED generator (PHRED) and a conditional discriminator. We also explore two approaches to accomplish the conditional discriminator: (1) phredGAN_a, a system that passes the attribute representation as an additional input into a traditional adversarial discriminator, and (2) phredGAN_d, a dual discriminator system which in addition to the adversarial discriminator, collaboratively predicts the attribute(s) that generated the input utterance. To demonstrate the superior performance of phredGAN over the persona Seq2Seq model, we experiment with two conversational datasets, the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus (UDC) and TV series transcripts from the Big Bang Theory and Friends. Performance comparison is made with respect to a variety of quantitative measures as well as crowd-sourced human evaluation. We also explore the trade-offs from using either variant of phredGAN on datasets with many but weak attribute modalities (such as with Big Bang Theory and Friends) and ones with few but strong attribute modalities (customer-agent interactions in Ubuntu dataset).
Teaching AI, Ethics, Law and Policy
The cyberspace and the development of new technologies, especially intelligent systems using artificial intelligence, present enormous challenges to computer professionals, data scientists, managers and policy makers. There is a need to address professional responsibility, ethical, legal, societal, and policy issues. This paper presents problems and issues relevant to computer professionals and decision makers and suggests a curriculum for a course on ethics, law and policy. Such a course will create awareness of the ethics issues involved in building and using software and artificial intelligence.
Argus: Smartphone-enabled Human Cooperation via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Disaster Situational Awareness
Sadhu, Vidyasagar, Salles-Loustau, Gabriel, Pompili, Dario, Zonouz, Saman, Sritapan, Vincent
Argus exploits a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework to create a 3D mapping of the disaster scene using agents present around the incident zone to facilitate the rescue operations. The agents can be both human bystanders at the disaster scene as well as drones or robots that can assist the humans. The agents are involved in capturing the images of the scene using their smartphones (or on-board cameras in case of drones) as directed by the MARL algorithm. These images are used to build real time a 3D map of the disaster scene. Via both simulations and real experiments, an evaluation of the framework in terms of effectiveness in tracking random dynamicity of the environment is presented.
'Santa Clarita Diet' canceled by Netflix after three seasons
There will be no fourth season for Netflix's dark comedy series Santa Clarita Diet as the streaming giant has opted to cancel the series starring Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant. The news comes almost a month after the March 29 release of the show's third season. Santa Clarita Diet is the latest Netflix series canceled after three seasons. Following Deadline's story examining the trend, fans of the show started a #SaveSantaClaritaDiet Twitter campaign, rallying for a Season 4 renewal. Like with the recently axed Netflix comedy series One Day At a Time, also after three seasons, the cancellation for Santa Clarita Diet comes after a very strong season, which scored 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Generating Music With Artificial Intelligence
I started playing piano when I was five years old. I used to practice for about an hour every day and let me tell you, an hour felt like forever. I didn't stop thought, and I kept on practicing though, because I really liked music. Fast forward a few years and I started doing some really advanced stuff. My hands were literally flying all over the keyboard and I could play with my eyes closed.
Using Context Information to Enhance Simple Question Answering
Li, Lin, Zhang, Mengjing, Chao, Zhaohui, Xiang, Jianwen
With the rapid development of knowledge bases(KBs),question answering(QA)based on KBs has become a hot research issue. In this paper,we propose two frameworks(i.e.,pipeline framework,an end-to-end framework)to focus answering single-relation factoid question. In both of two frameworks,we study the effect of context information on the quality of QA,such as the entity's notable type,out-degree. In the end-to-end framework,we combine char-level encoding and self-attention mechanisms,using weight sharing and multi-task strategies to enhance the accuracy of QA. Experimental results show that context information can get better results of simple QA whether it is the pipeline framework or the end-to-end framework. In addition,we find that the end-to-end framework achieves results competitive with state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy and take much shorter time than them.
GAN-based Generation and Automatic Selection of Explanations for Neural Networks
Mishra, Saumitra, Stoller, Daniel, Benetos, Emmanouil, Sturm, Bob L., Dixon, Simon
One way to interpret trained deep neural networks (DNNs) is by inspecting characteristics that neurons in the model respond to, such as by iteratively optimising the model input (e.g., an image) to maximally activate specific neurons. However, this requires a careful selection of hyper-parameters to generate interpretable examples for each neuron of interest, and current methods rely on a manual, qualitative evaluation of each setting, which is prohibitively slow. We introduce a new metric that uses Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) to encourage similarity between model activations for real and generated data. This provides an efficient way to evaluate a set of generated examples for each setting of hyper-parameters. We also propose a novel GAN-based method for generating explanations that enables an efficient search through the input space and imposes a strong prior favouring realistic outputs. We apply our approach to a classification model trained to predict whether a music audio recording contains singing voice. Our results suggest that this proposed metric successfully selects hyper-parameters leading to interpretable examples, avoiding the need for manual evaluation. Moreover, we see that examples synthesised to maximise or minimise the predicted probability of singing voice presence exhibit vocal or non-vocal characteristics, respectively, suggesting that our approach is able to generate suitable explanations for understanding concepts learned by a neural network.