In this paper, we address a crucial problem in fashion e-commerce (with respect to customer experience, as well as revenue): color variants identification, i.e., identifying fashion products that match exactly in their design (or style), but only to differ in their color. We propose a generic framework, that leverages deep visual Representation Learning at its heart, to address this problem for our fashion e-commerce platform. Our framework could be trained with supervisory signals in the form of triplets, that are obtained manually. However, it is infeasible to obtain manual annotations for the entire huge collection of data usually present in fashion e-commerce platforms, such as ours, while capturing all the difficult corner cases. But, to our rescue, interestingly we observed that this crucial problem in fashion e-commerce could also be solved by simple color jitter based image augmentation, that recently became widely popular in the contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) literature, that seeks to learn visual representations without using manual labels. This naturally led to a question in our mind: Could we leverage SSL in our use-case, and still obtain comparable performance to our supervised framework? The answer is, Yes! because, color variant fashion objects are nothing but manifestations of a style, in different colors, and a model trained to be invariant to the color (with, or without supervision), should be able to recognize this! This is what the paper further demonstrates, both qualitatively, and quantitatively, while evaluating a couple of state-of-the-art SSL techniques, and also proposing a novel method.

Inspired by the recent success of self-supervised methods applied on images, self-supervised learning on graph structured data has seen rapid growth especially centered on augmentation-based contrastive methods. However, we argue that without carefully designed augmentation techniques, augmentations on graphs may behave arbitrarily in that the underlying semantics of graphs can drastically change. As a consequence, the performance of existing augmentation-based methods is highly dependent on the choice of augmentation scheme, i.e., hyperparameters associated with augmentations. In this paper, we propose a novel augmentation-free self-supervised learning framework for graphs, named AFGRL. Specifically, we generate an alternative view of a graph by discovering nodes that share the local structural information and the global semantics with the graph. Extensive experiments towards various node-level tasks, i.e., node classification, clustering, and similarity search on various real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of AFGRL. The source code for AFGRL is available at https://github.com/Namkyeong/AFGRL.

While visual imitation learning offers one of the most effective ways of learning from visual demonstrations, generalizing from them requires either hundreds of diverse demonstrations, task specific priors, or large, hard-to-train parametric models. One reason such complexities arise is because standard visual imitation frameworks try to solve two coupled problems at once: learning a succinct but good representation from the diverse visual data, while simultaneously learning to associate the demonstrated actions with such representations. Such joint learning causes an interdependence between these two problems, which often results in needing large amounts of demonstrations for learning. To address this challenge, we instead propose to decouple representation learning from behavior learning for visual imitation. First, we learn a visual representation encoder from offline data using standard supervised and self-supervised learning methods. Once the representations are trained, we use non-parametric Locally Weighted Regression to predict the actions. We experimentally show that this simple decoupling improves the performance of visual imitation models on both offline demonstration datasets and real-robot door opening compared to prior work in visual imitation. All of our generated data, code, and robot videos are publicly available at https://jyopari.github.io/VINN/.

Predicting molecular properties remains a challenging task with numerous potential applications, notably in drug discovery. Recently, the development of deep learning, combined with rising amounts of data, has provided powerful tools to build predictive models. Since molecules can be encoded as graphs, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a popular choice of architecture to tackle this task. Training GNNs to predict molecular properties however faces the challenge of collecting annotated data which is a costly and time consuming process. On the other hand, it is easy to access large databases of molecules without annotations.

BigML's upcoming release on Wednesday, December 15, 2021, will be presenting a new set of Image Processing resources to the BigML platform. In this post, we show you how to build a simple image classifier on the BigML Dashboard. Image classification is a supervised learning technique for images. Image classification models are trained to identify various classes of images and have a tremendous amount of applications as touched on in our prior posts. As such, BigML introduces image data support with the latest Image Processing release.

Tactics analyze the current proof state (goal and assumptions) and apply non-trivial proof transformations. Formalized proofs take advantage of different levels of automation which are in increasing order of generality: specialized rules, theory-based strategies and general purpose strategies. Thanks to progress in proof automation, developers can delegate more and more complicated proof obligations to general purpose strategies. Those are implemented by automated theorem provers (ATPs) such as E prover [32]. Communication between an ITP and ATPs is made possible by a "hammer" system [4,14]. It acts as an interface by performing premise selection, translation and proof reconstruction. Yet, ATPs are not flawless and more precise user-guidance, achieved by applying a particular sequence of specialized rules, is almost always necessary to develop a mathematical theory.

Whether you are an algorithm developer in a growing startup company, a data scientist in a university research lab, or a kaggle hobbyist, there may come a point in time when the training resources that you have onsite no longer meet your training demands. In this post we target development teams that are (finally) ready to move their machine learning (ML) workloads to the cloud. We will discuss some of the important decisions that need to made during this big transition. Naturally, any attempt to encompass all of the steps of such an endeavor is doomed to fail. Machine learning projects come in many shapes and forms and as their complexity increases so does the undertaking of making such a significant change as migrating to the cloud. In this post we will highlight what we believe to be some of the most important considerations that are common to most typical deep learning projects.

While neural language models often perform surprisingly well on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, their strengths and limitations remain poorly understood. Controlled synthetic tasks are thus an increasingly important resource for diagnosing model behavior. In this work we focus on story understanding, a core competency for NLU systems. However, the main synthetic resource for story understanding, the bAbI benchmark, lacks such a systematic mechanism for controllable task generation. We develop Dyna-bAbI, a dynamic framework providing fine-grained control over task generation in bAbI. We demonstrate our ideas by constructing three new tasks requiring compositional generalization, an important evaluation setting absent from the original benchmark. We tested both special-purpose models developed for bAbI as well as state-of-the-art pre-trained methods, and found that while both approaches solve the original tasks (>99% accuracy), neither approach succeeded in the compositional generalization setting, indicating the limitations of the original training data. We explored ways to augment the original data, and found that though diversifying training data was far more useful than simply increasing dataset size, it was still insufficient for driving robust compositional generalization (with <70% accuracy for complex compositions). Our results underscore the importance of highly controllable task generators for creating robust NLU systems through a virtuous cycle of model and data development.

The exponential number of research and publications have introduced many terms and concepts in the domain of machine learning, yet many have degenerated to merely buzzwords without many people fully understanding their differences. The most common, and perhaps THE type that we refer to when talking about machine learning is supervised learning. In simple words, supervised learning provides a set of input-output pairs such that we can learn an intermediate system that maps inputs to correct outputs. A naive example of supervised learning is determining the class (i.e., dogs/cats, etc) of an image based on a dataset of images and their corresponding classes, which we will refer to as their labels. With the given input-label pair, the current popular approach will be to directly train a deep neural network (i.e., a convolutional neural network) to output a label prediction from the given image, compute a differentiable loss between the prediction and the actual correct answers, and backpropagate through the network to update weights to optimise the predictions.

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. Machine learning models can perform wonderful things--if they have enough training data. Unfortunately, for many applications, access to quality data remains a barrier. One solution to this problem is "data augmentation," a technique that generates new training examples from existing ones. Data augmentation is a low-cost and effective method to improve the performance and accuracy of machine learning models in data-constrained environments.