Deep Learning
'It will change everything': DeepMind's AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures
A protein's function is determined by its 3D shape.Credit: DeepMind An artificial intelligence (AI) network developed by Google AI offshoot DeepMind has made a gargantuan leap in solving one of biology's grandest challenges -- determining a protein's 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence. DeepMind's program, called AlphaFold, outperformed around 100 other teams in a biennial protein-structure prediction challenge called CASP, short for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction. The results were announced on 30 November, at the start of the conference -- held virtually this year -- that takes stock of the exercise. "This is a big deal," says John Moult, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, who co-founded CASP in 1994 to improve computational methods for accurately predicting protein structures. "In some sense the problem is solved."
A Survey on Principles, Models and Methods for Learning from Irregularly Sampled Time Series: From Discretization to Attention and Invariance
Shukla, Satya Narayan, Marlin, Benjamin M.
Irregularly sampled time series data arise naturally in many application domains including biology, ecology, climate science, astronomy, and health. Such data represent fundamental challenges to many classical models from machine learning and statistics due to the presence of non-uniform intervals between observations. However, there has been significant progress within the machine learning community over the last decade on developing specialized models and architectures for learning from irregularly sampled univariate and multivariate time series data. In this survey, we first describe several axes along which approaches differ including what data representations they are based on, what modeling primitives they leverage to deal with the fundamental problem of irregular sampling, and what inference tasks they are designed to perform. We then survey the recent literature organized primarily along the axis of modeling primitives. We describe approaches based on temporal discretization, interpolation, recurrence, attention, and structural invariance. We discuss similarities and differences between approaches and highlight primary strengths and weaknesses.
Towards a Unified Framework for Emotion Analysis
Buechel, Sven, Modersohn, Luise, Hahn, Udo
We present EmoCoder, a modular encoder-decoder architecture that generalizes emotion analysis over different tasks (sentence-level, word-level, label-to-label mapping), domains (natural languages and their registers), and label formats (e.g., polarity classes, basic emotions, and affective dimensions). Experiments on 14 datasets indicate that EmoCoder learns an interpretable language-independent representation of emotions, allows seamless absorption of state-of-the-art models, and maintains strong prediction quality, even when tested on unseen combinations of domains and label formats.
Applied Machine Learning for Games: A Graduate School Course
Zeng, Yilei, Shah, Aayush, Thai, Jameson, Zyda, Michael
The game industry is moving into an era where old-style game engines are being replaced by re-engineered systems with embedded machine learning technologies for the operation, analysis and understanding of game play. In this paper, we describe our machine learning course designed for graduate students interested in applying recent advances of deep learning and reinforcement learning towards gaming. This course serves as a bridge to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among graduate schools and does not require prior experience designing or building games. Graduate students enrolled in this course apply different fields of machine learning techniques such as computer vision, natural language processing, computer graphics, human computer interaction, robotics and data analysis to solve open challenges in gaming. Student projects cover use-cases such as training AI-bots in gaming benchmark environments and competitions, understanding human decision patterns in gaming, and creating intelligent non-playable characters or environments to foster engaging gameplay. Projects demos can help students open doors for an industry career, aim for publications, or lay the foundations of a future product. Our students gained hands-on experience in applying state of the art machine learning techniques to solve real-life problems in gaming.
Toward Accurate Platform-Aware Performance Modeling for Deep Neural Networks
Wang, Chuan-Chi, Liao, Ying-Chiao, Kao, Ming-Chang, Liang, Wen-Yew, Hung, Shih-Hao
In this paper, we provide a fine-grain machine learning-based method, PerfNetV2, which improves the accuracy of our previous work for modeling the neural network performance on a variety of GPU accelerators. Given an application, the proposed method can be used to predict the inference time and training time of the convolutional neural networks used in the application, which enables the system developer to optimize the performance by choosing the neural networks and/or incorporating the hardware accelerators to deliver satisfactory results in time. Furthermore, the proposed method is capable of predicting the performance of an unseen or non-existing device, e.g. a new GPU which has a higher operating frequency with less processor cores, but more memory capacity. This allows a system developer to quickly search the hardware design space and/or fine-tune the system configuration. Compared to the previous works, PerfNetV2 delivers more accurate results by modeling detailed host-accelerator interactions in executing the full neural networks and improving the architecture of the machine learning model used in the predictor. Our case studies show that PerfNetV2 yields a mean absolute percentage error within 13.1% on LeNet, AlexNet, and VGG16 on NVIDIA GTX-1080Ti, while the error rate on a previous work published in ICBD 2018 could be as large as 200%.
Extreme Model Compression for On-device Natural Language Understanding
Sathyendra, Kanthashree Mysore, Choudhary, Samridhi, Nicolich-Henkin, Leah
In this paper, we propose and experiment with techniques for extreme compression of neural natural language understanding (NLU) models, making them suitable for execution on resource-constrained devices. We propose a task-aware, end-to-end compression approach that performs word-embedding compression jointly with NLU task learning. We show our results on a large-scale, commercial NLU system trained on a varied set of intents with huge vocabulary sizes. Our approach outperforms a range of baselines and achieves a compression rate of 97.4% with less than 3.7% degradation in predictive performance. Our analysis indicates that the signal from the downstream task is important for effective compression with minimal degradation in performance.
Dynamic Image for 3D MRI Image Alzheimer's Disease Classification
Xing, Xin, Liang, Gongbo, Blanton, Hunter, Rafique, Muhammad Usman, Wang, Chris, Lin, Ai-Ling, Jacobs, Nathan
We propose to apply a 2D CNN architecture to 3D MRI image Alzheimer's disease classification. Training a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) is time-consuming and computationally expensive. We make use of approximate rank pooling to transform the 3D MRI image volume into a 2D image to use as input to a 2D CNN. We show our proposed CNN model achieves $9.5\%$ better Alzheimer's disease classification accuracy than the baseline 3D models. We also show that our method allows for efficient training, requiring only 20% of the training time compared to 3D CNN models. The code is available online: https://github.com/UkyVision/alzheimer-project.
Towards Auditability for Fairness in Deep Learning
Ngong, Ivoline C., Maughan, Krystal, Near, Joseph P.
Group fairness metrics can detect when a deep learning model behaves differently for advantaged and disadvantaged groups, but even models that score well on these metrics can make blatantly unfair predictions. We present smooth prediction sensitivity, an efficiently computed measure of individual fairness for deep learning models that is inspired by ideas from interpretability in deep learning. smooth prediction sensitivity allows individual predictions to be audited for fairness. We present preliminary experimental results suggesting that smooth prediction sensitivity can help distinguish between fair and unfair predictions, and that it may be helpful in detecting blatantly unfair predictions from "group-fair" models.
TimeSHAP: Explaining Recurrent Models through Sequence Perturbations
Bento, João, Saleiro, Pedro, Cruz, André F., Figueiredo, Mário A. T., Bizarro, Pedro
Recurrent neural networks are a standard building block in numerous machine learning domains, from natural language processing to time-series classification. While their application has grown ubiquitous, understanding of their inner workings is still lacking. In practice, the complex decision-making in these models is seen as a black-box, creating a tension between accuracy and interpretability. Moreover, the ability to understand the reasoning process of a model is important in order to debug it and, even more so, to build trust in its decisions. Although considerable research effort has been guided towards explaining black-box models in recent years, recurrent models have received relatively little attention. Any method that aims to explain decisions from a sequence of instances should assess, not only feature importance, but also event importance, an ability that is missing from state-of-the-art explainers. In this work, we contribute to filling these gaps by presenting TimeSHAP, a model-agnostic recurrent explainer that leverages KernelSHAP's sound theoretical footing and strong empirical results. As the input sequence may be arbitrarily long, we further propose a pruning method that is shown to dramatically improve its efficiency in practice.