Google has recently open-sourced its framework for machine learning and neural networks called Tensorflow. In this session,you know how to choose the right neural network for your problem and how to make it behave. Familiarity with differential equations is no longer required. Instead, a couple of lines of Tensorflow Python, and a bag of "tricks of the trade" will do the job. No previous Python knowledge required.

Ever fantasied about having your own personal assistant to answer any questions you can ask, or have conversations with? Well, thanks to Machine Learning and Deep Neural Networks, this is not so far from happening. Think of the amazing capabilities exhibited by Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa. Don't get too excited, in this next series of posts we are not going to create an omnipotent Artificial Intelligence, rather we will create a simple chatbot that given some input information and a question about such information, responds to yes/no questions regarding what it has been told. It is nowhere near to Siri's or Alexa's capabilities, but it illustrates very well how even using very simple deep neural network structures, amazing results can be obtained.

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been the dominant optimization method for training deep neural networks due to its many desirable properties. One of the more remarkable and least understood quality of SGD is that it generalizes relatively well on unseen data even when the neural network has millions of parameters. In this work, we show that SGD is an extreme case of deep gradient boosting (DGB) and as such is intrinsically regularized. The key idea of DGB is that back-propagated gradients calculated using the chain rule can be viewed as pseudo-residual targets. Thus at each layer the weight update is calculated by solving the corresponding gradient boosting problem. We hypothesize that some learning tasks can benefit from a more lax regularization requirement and this approach provides a way to control that. We tested this hypothesis on a number of benchmark data sets and show that indeed in a subset of cases DGB outperforms SGD and under-performs on tasks that are more prone to over-fitting, such as image recognition.

We propose a framework for interactive and explainable machine learning that enables users to (1) understand machine learning models; (2) diagnose model limitations using different explainable AI methods; as well as (3) refine and optimize the models. Our framework combines an iterative XAI pipeline with eight global monitoring and steering mechanisms, including quality monitoring, provenance tracking, model comparison, and trust building. To operationalize the framework, we present explAIner, a visual analytics system for interactive and explainable machine learning that instantiates all phases of the suggested pipeline within the commonly used TensorBoard environment. We performed a user-study with nine participants across different expertise levels to examine their perception of our workflow and to collect suggestions to fill the gap between our system and framework. The evaluation confirms that our tightly integrated system leads to an informed machine learning process while disclosing opportunities for further extensions.

With recent advances in deep learning, neuroimaging studies increasingly rely on convolutional networks (ConvNets) to predict diagnosis based on MR images. To gain a better understanding of how a disease impacts the brain, the studies visualize the salience maps of the ConvNet highlighting voxels within the brain majorly contributing to the prediction. However, these salience maps are generally confounded, i.e., some salient regions are more predictive of confounding variables (such as age) than the diagnosis. To avoid such misinterpretation, we propose in this paper an approach that aims to visualize confounder-free saliency maps that only highlight voxels predictive of the diagnosis. The approach incorporates univariate statistical tests to identify confounding effects within the intermediate features learned by ConvNet. The influence from the subset of confounded features is then removed by a novel partial back-propagation procedure. We use this two-step approach to visualize confounder-free saliency maps extracted from synthetic and two real datasets. These experiments reveal the potential of our visualization in producing unbiased model-interpretation.

Logistic regression (LR) is widely used in clinical prediction because it is simple to deploy and easy to interpret. Nevertheless, being a linear model, LR has limited expressive capability and often has unsatisfactory performance. Generalized additive models (GAMs) extend the linear model with transformations of input features, though feature interaction is not allowed for all GAM variants. In this paper, we propose a factored generalized additive model (F-GAM) to preserve the model interpretability for targeted features while allowing a rich model for interaction with features fixed within the individual. We evaluate F-GAM on prediction of two targets, postoperative acute kidney injury and acute respiratory failure, from a single-center database. We find superior model performance of F-GAM in terms of AUPRC and AUROC compared to several other GAM implementations, random forests, support vector machine, and a deep neural network. We find that the model interpretability is good with results with high face validity.

Many real-world datasets are labeled with natural orders, i.e., ordinal labels. Ordinal regression is a method to predict ordinal labels that finds a wide range of applications in data-rich science domains, such as medical, social and economic sciences. Most existing approaches work well for a single ordinal regression task. However, they ignore the task relatedness when there are multiple related tasks. Multi-task learning (MTL) provides a framework to encode task relatedness, to bridge data from all tasks, and to simultaneously learn multiple related tasks to improve the generalization performance. Even though MTL methods have been extensively studied, there is barely existing work investigating MTL for data with ordinal labels. We tackle multiple ordinal regression problems via sparse and deep multi-task approaches, i.e., two regularized multi-task ordinal regression (RMTOR) models for small datasets and two deep neural networks based multi-task ordinal regression (DMTOR) models for large-scale datasets. The performance of the proposed multi-task ordinal regression models (MTOR) is demonstrated on three real-world medical datasets for multi-stage disease diagnosis. Our experimental results indicate that our proposed MTOR models markedly improve the prediction performance comparing with single-task learning (STL) ordinal regression models.

This paper introduces CloudLSTM, a new branch of recurrent neural network models tailored to forecasting over data streams generated by geospatial point-cloud sources. We design a Dynamic Convolution (D-Conv) operator as the core component of CloudLSTMs, which allows performing convolution operations directly over point-clouds and extracts local spatial features from sets of neighboring points that surround different elements of the input. This maintains the permutation invariance of sequence-to-sequence learning frameworks, while enabling learnable neighboring correlations at each time step -- an important aspect in spatiotemporal predictive learning. The D-Conv operator resolves the grid-structural data requirements of existing spatiotemporal forecasting models (e.g. ConvLSTM) and can be easily plugged into traditional LSTM architectures with sequence-to-sequence learning and attention mechanisms. As a case study, we perform antenna-level forecasting of the data traffic generated by mobile services, demonstrating that the proposed CloudLSTM achieves state-of-the-art performance with measurement datasets collected in operational metropolitan-scale mobile network deployments.

In this letter, as a proof of concept, we propose a deep learning-based approach to attack the chaos-based image encryption algorithm in \cite{guan2005chaos}. The proposed method first projects the chaos-based encrypted images into the low-dimensional feature space, where essential information of plain images has been largely preserved. With the low-dimensional features, a deconvolutional generator is utilized to regenerate perceptually similar decrypted images to approximate the plain images in the high-dimensional space. Compared with conventional image encryption attack algorithms, the proposed method does not require to manually analyze and infer keys in a time-consuming way. Instead, we directly attack the chaos-based encryption algorithms in a key-independent manner. Moreover, the proposed method can be trained end-to-end. Given the chaos-based encrypted images, a well-trained decryption model is able to automatically reconstruct plain images with high fidelity. In the experiments, we successfully attack the chaos-based algorithm \cite{guan2005chaos} and the decrypted images are visually similar to their ground truth plain images. Experimental results on both static-key and dynamic-key scenarios verify the efficacy of the proposed method.

The sample inefficiency of standard deep reinforcement learning methods precludes their application to many real-world problems. Methods which leverage human demonstrations require fewer samples but have been researched less. As demonstrated in the computer vision and natural language processing communities, large-scale datasets have the capacity to facilitate research by serving as an experimental and benchmarking platform for new methods. However, existing datasets compatible with reinforcement learning simulators do not have sufficient scale, structure, and quality to enable the further development and evaluation of methods focused on using human examples. Therefore, we introduce a comprehensive, large-scale, simulator-paired dataset of human demonstrations: MineRL. The dataset consists of over 60 million automatically annotated state-action pairs across a variety of related tasks in Minecraft, a dynamic, 3D, open-world environment. We present a novel data collection scheme which allows for the ongoing introduction of new tasks and the gathering of complete state information suitable for a variety of methods. We demonstrate the hierarchality, diversity, and scale of the MineRL dataset. Further, we show the difficulty of the Minecraft domain along with the potential of MineRL in developing techniques to solve key research challenges within it.