Deep Learning
Deep learning frameworks: PyTorch vs. TensorFlow
Not every regression or classification problem needs to be solved with deep learning. For that matter, not every regression or classification problem needs to be solved with machine learning. After all, many data sets can be modeled analytically or with simple statistical procedures. On the other hand, there are cases where deep learning or deep transfer learning can help you train a model that is more accurate than you could create any other way. For these cases, PyTorch and TensorFlow can be quite effective, especially if there is already a trained model similar to what you need in the framework's model library.
The best machine learning and deep learning libraries
If you're starting a new machine learning or deep learning project, you may be confused about which framework to choose. As we'll discuss, there are several good options for both kinds of projects. There is a difference between a machine learning framework and a deep learning framework. Essentially, a machine learning framework covers a variety of learning methods for classification, regression, clustering, anomaly detection, and data preparation, and may or may not include neural network methods. A deep learning or deep neural network framework covers a variety of neural network topologies with many hidden layers.
Deep-Gap: A deep learning framework for forecasting crowdsourcing supply-demand gap based on imaging time series and residual learning
Said, Ahmed Ben, Erradi, Abdelkarim
Mobile crowdsourcing has become easier thanks to the widespread of smartphones capable of seamlessly collecting and pushing the desired data to cloud services. However, the success of mobile crowdsourcing relies on balancing the supply and demand by first accurately forecasting spatially and temporally the supply-demand gap, and then providing efficient incentives to encourage participant movements to maintain the desired balance. In this paper, we propose Deep-Gap, a deep learning approach based on residual learning to predict the gap between mobile crowdsourced service supply and demand at a given time and space. The prediction can drive the incentive model to achieve a geographically balanced service coverage in order to avoid the case where some areas are over-supplied while other areas are under-supplied. This allows anticipating the supply-demand gap and redirecting crowdsourced service providers towards target areas. Deep-Gap relies on historical supply-demand time series data as well as available external data such as weather conditions and day type (e.g., weekday, weekend, holiday). First, we roll and encode the time series of supply-demand as images using the Gramian Angular Summation Field (GASF), Gramian Angular Difference Field (GADF) and the Recurrence Plot (REC). These images are then used to train deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to extract the low and high-level features and forecast the crowdsourced services gap. We conduct comprehensive comparative study by establishing two supply-demand gap forecasting scenarios: with and without external data. Compared to state-of-art approaches, Deep-Gap achieves the lowest forecasting errors in both scenarios.
UrbanRhythm: Revealing Urban Dynamics Hidden in Mobility Data
Song, Sirui, Xia, Tong, Jin, Depeng, Hui, Pan, Li, Yong
Understanding urban dynamics, i.e., how the types and intensity of urban residents' activities in the city change along with time, is of urgent demand for building an efficient and livable city. Nonetheless, this is challenging due to the expanding urban population and the complicated spatial distribution of residents. In this paper, to reveal urban dynamics, we propose a novel system UrbanRhythm to reveal the urban dynamics hidden in human mobility data. UrbanRhythm addresses three questions: 1) What mobility feature should be used to present residents' high-dimensional activities in the city? 2) What are basic components of urban dynamics? 3) What are the long-term periodicity and short-term regularity of urban dynamics? In UrbanRhythm, we extract staying, leaving, arriving three attributes of mobility and use a image processing method Saak transform to calculate the mobility distribution feature. For the second question, several city states are identified by hierarchy clustering as the basic components of urban dynamics, such as sleeping states and working states. We further characterize the urban dynamics as the transform of city states along time axis. For the third question, we directly observe the long-term periodicity of urban dynamics from visualization. Then for the short-term regularity, we design a novel motif analysis method to discovery motifs as well as their hierarchy relationships. We evaluate our proposed system on two real-life datesets and validate the results according to App usage records. This study sheds light on urban dynamics hidden in human mobility and can further pave the way for more complicated mobility behavior modeling and deeper urban understanding.
Enhanced Convolutional Neural Tangent Kernels
Li, Zhiyuan, Wang, Ruosong, Yu, Dingli, Du, Simon S., Hu, Wei, Salakhutdinov, Ruslan, Arora, Sanjeev
Recent research shows that for training with $\ell_2$ loss, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) whose width (number of channels in convolutional layers) goes to infinity correspond to regression with respect to the CNN Gaussian Process kernel (CNN-GP) if only the last layer is trained, and correspond to regression with respect to the Convolutional Neural Tangent Kernel (CNTK) if all layers are trained. An exact algorithm to compute CNTK (Arora et al., 2019) yielded the finding that classification accuracy of CNTK on CIFAR-10 is within 6-7% of that of that of the corresponding CNN architecture (best figure being around 78%) which is interesting performance for a fixed kernel. Here we show how to significantly enhance the performance of these kernels using two ideas. (1) Modifying the kernel using a new operation called Local Average Pooling (LAP) which preserves efficient computability of the kernel and inherits the spirit of standard data augmentation using pixel shifts. Earlier papers were unable to incorporate naive data augmentation because of the quadratic training cost of kernel regression. This idea is inspired by Global Average Pooling (GAP), which we show for CNN-GP and CNTK is equivalent to full translation data augmentation. (2) Representing the input image using a pre-processing technique proposed by Coates et al. (2011), which uses a single convolutional layer composed of random image patches. On CIFAR-10, the resulting kernel, CNN-GP with LAP and horizontal flip data augmentation, achieves 89% accuracy, matching the performance of AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al., 2012). Note that this is the best such result we know of for a classifier that is not a trained neural network. Similar improvements are obtained for Fashion-MNIST.
A Stealthy Hardware Trojan Exploiting the Architectural Vulnerability of Deep Learning Architectures: Input Interception Attack (IIA)
Odetola, Tolulope A., Mohammed, Hawzhin Raoof, Hasan, Syed Rafay
Deep learning architectures (DLA) have shown impressive performance in computer vision, natural language processing and so on. Many DLA make use of cloud computing to achieve classification due to the high computation and memory requirements. Privacy and latency concerns resulting from cloud computing has inspired the deployment of DLA on embedded hardware accelerators. To achieve short time-to-market and have access to global experts, state-of-the-art techniques of DLA deployment on hardware accelerators are outsourced to untrusted third parties. This outsourcing raises security concerns as hardware Trojans can be inserted into the hardware design of the mapped DLA of the hardware accelerator. We argue that existing hardware Trojan attacks highlighted in literature have no qualitative means how definite they are of the triggering of the Trojan. Also, most inserted Trojans show a obvious spike in the number of hardware resources utilized on the accelerator at the time of triggering the Trojan or when the payload is active. In this paper, we propose a hardware Trojan attack called Input Interception Attack (IIA). In this attack we make use of the statistical properties of layer-by-layer output to make sure that asides from being stealthy, our IIA is able to trigger with some measure of definiteness. This IIA attack is tested on DLA used to classify MNIST and Cifar-10 data sets. The attacked design utilizes approximately up to 2% more LUTs respectively compared to the un-compromised designs. This paper also discusses potential defensive mechanisms that could be used to combat such hardware Trojans based attack in hardware accelerators for DLA.
Dynamic Ensemble Modeling Approach to Nonstationary Neural Decoding in Brain-Computer Interfaces
Qi, Yu, Liu, Bin, Wang, Yueming, Pan, Gang
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have enabled prosthetic device control by decoding motor movements from neural activities. Neural signals recorded from cortex exhibit nonstationary property due to abrupt noises and neuroplastic changes in brain activities during motor control. Current state-of-the-art neural signal decoders such as Kalman filter assume fixed relationship between neural activities and motor movements, thus will fail if this assumption is not satisfied. We propose a dynamic ensemble modeling (DyEnsemble) approach that is capable of adapting to changes in neural signals by employing a proper combination of decoding functions. The DyEnsemble method firstly learns a set of diverse candidate models. Then, it dynamically selects and combines these models online according to Bayesian updating mechanism. Our method can mitigate the effect of noises and cope with different task behaviors by automatic model switching, thus gives more accurate predictions. Experiments with neural data demonstrate that the DyEnsemble method outperforms Kalman filters remarkably, and its advantage is more obvious with noisy signals.
On Modelling Label Uncertainty in Deep Neural Networks: Automatic Estimation of Intra-observer Variability in 2D Echocardiography Quality Assessment
Liao, Zhibin, Girgis, Hany, Abdi, Amir, Vaseli, Hooman, Hetherington, Jorden, Rohling, Robert, Gin, Ken, Tsang, Teresa, Abolmaesumi, Purang
--Uncertainty of labels in clinical data resulting from intra-observer variability can have direct impact on the reliability of assessments made by deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a method for modelling such uncertainty in the context of 2D echocardiography (echo), which is a routine procedure for detecting cardiovascular disease at point-of-care. Echo imaging quality and acquisition time is highly dependent on the operator's experience level. Recent developments have shown the possibility of automating echo image quality quantification by mapping an expert's assessment of quality to the echo image via deep learning techniques. Nevertheless, the observer variability in the expert's assessment can impact the quality quantification accuracy. Here, we aim to model the intra-observer variability in echo quality assessment as an aleatoric uncertainty modelling regression problem with the introduction of a novel method that handles the regression problem with categorical labels. A key feature of our design is that only a single forward pass is sufficient to estimate the level of uncertainty for the network output. Compared to the 0 .11 The simplicity of the proposed approach means that it could be generalized to other applications of deep learning in medical imaging, where there is often uncertainty in clinical labels. Z. Liao and H. Girgis have contributed equally to this work. Abolmaesumi have contributed equally to the manuscript (emails: t.tsang@ubc.ca, Z. Liao, A. Abdi, H. V aseli, and J. Hetherington are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, V ancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada. H. Girgis, T. Tsang, and K. Gin are with V ancouver General Hospital Echocardiography Laboratory, Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, The University of British Columbia, V ancouver, BC V5Z 1M9, Canada. R. Rohling is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of British Columbia, V ancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada T. Tsang is the Director of the V ancouver General Hospital and University of British Columbia Echocardiography Laboratories, and Principal Investigator of the CIHR-NSERC grant supporting this work. Abolmaesumi is Co-Principal Investigator for the grant supporting this work and is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of British Columbia, V ancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada.
Challenging On Car Racing Problem from OpenAI gym
This project challenges the car racing problem from OpenAI gym environment. The problem is very challenging since it requires computer to finish the continuous control task by learning from pixels. To tackle this challenging problem, we explored two approaches including evolutionary algorithm based genetic multi-layer perceptron and double deep Q-learning network. The result shows that the genetic multi-layer perceptron can converge fast but when training many episodes, double deep Q-learning can get better score. We analyze the result and draw a conclusion that for limited hardware resources, using genetic multi-layer perceptron sometimes can be more efficient.
Design and Challenges of Cloze-Style Reading Comprehension Tasks on Multiparty Dialogue
Li, Changmao, Liu, Tianhao, Choi, Jinho
This paper analyzes challenges in cloze-style reading comprehension on multiparty dialogue and suggests two new tasks for more comprehensive predictions of personal entities in daily conversations. We first demonstrate that there are substantial limitations to the evaluation methods of previous work, namely that randomized assignment of samples to training and test data substantially decreases the complexity of cloze-style reading comprehension. According to our analysis, replacing the random data split with a chronological data split reduces test accuracy on previous single-variable passage completion task from 72\% to 34\%, that leaves much more room to improve. Our proposed tasks extend the previous single-variable passage completion task by replacing more character mentions with variables. Several deep learning models are developed to validate these three tasks. A thorough error analysis is provided to understand the challenges and guide the future direction of this research.