One of the biggest news subjects in the past few years has been artificial intelligence. We have read about how Google's DeepMind beat the world's best player at Go, which is thought of as the most complex game humans have created; witnessed how IBM's Watson beat humans in a debate; and taken part in a wide-ranging discussion of how A.I. applications will replace most of today's human jobs in the years ahead. Way back in 1983, I identified A.I. as one of 20 exponential technologies that would increasingly drive economic growth for decades to come. Early rule-based A.I. applications were used by financial institutions for loan applications, but once the exponential growth of processing power reached an A.I. tipping point, and we all started using the Internet and social media, A.I. had enough power and data (the fuel of A.I.) to enable smartphones, chatbots, autonomous vehicles and far more. As I advise the leadership of many leading companies, governments and institutions around the world, I have found we all have different definitions of and understandings about A.I., machine learning and other related topics.

Acceleration of machine learning research in healthcare is challenged by lack of large annotated and balanced datasets. Furthermore, dealing with measurement inaccuracies and exploiting unsupervised data are considered to be central to improving existing solutions. In particular, a primary objective in predictive modeling is to generalize well to both unseen variations within the observed classes, and unseen classes. In this work, we consider such a challenging problem in machine learning driven diagnosis: detecting a gamut of cardiovascular conditions (e.g. infarction, dysrhythmia etc.) from limited channel ECG measurements. Though deep neural networks have achieved unprecedented success in predictive modeling, they rely solely on discriminative models that can generalize poorly to unseen classes. We argue that unsupervised learning can be utilized to construct effective latent spaces that facilitate better generalization. This work extensively compares the generalization of our proposed approach against a state-of-the-art deep learning solution. Our results show significant improvements in F1-scores.

This paper addresses a challenging problem - how to reduce energy consumption without incurring performance drop when deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) at the inference stage. In order to alleviate the computation and storage burdens, we propose a novel dataflow-based joint quantization approach with the hypothesis that a fewer number of quantization operations would incur less information loss and thus improve the final performance. It first introduces a quantization scheme with efficient bit-shifting and rounding operations to represent network parameters and activations in low precision. Then it restructures the network architectures to form unified modules for optimization on the quantized model. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and KITTI validate the effectiveness of our model, demonstrating that state-of-the-art results for various tasks can be achieved by this quantized model. Besides, we designed and synthesized an RTL model to measure the hardware costs among various quantization methods. For each quantization operation, it reduces area cost by about 15 times and energy consumption by about 9 times, compared to a strong baseline.

In this paper, we propose a method for clustering image-caption pairs by simultaneously learning image representations and text representations that are constrained to exhibit similar distributions. These image-caption pairs arise frequently in high-value applications where structured training data is expensive to produce but free-text descriptions are common. MultiDEC initializes parameters with stacked autoencoders, then iteratively minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the distribution of the images (and text) to that of a combined joint target distribution. We regularize by penalizing non-uniform distributions across clusters. The representations that minimize this objective produce clusters that outperform both single-view and multi-view techniques on large benchmark image-caption datasets.

As sound event classification moves towards larger datasets, issues of label noise become inevitable. Web sites can supply large volumes of user-contributed audio and metadata, but inferring labels from this metadata introduces errors due to unreliable inputs, and limitations in the mapping. There is, however, little research into the impact of these errors. To foster the investigation of label noise in sound event classification we present FSDnoisy18k, a dataset containing 42.5 hours of audio across 20 sound classes, including a small amount of manually-labeled data and a larger quantity of real-world noisy data. We characterize the label noise empirically, and provide a CNN baseline system. Experiments suggest that training with large amounts of noisy data can outperform training with smaller amounts of carefully-labeled data. We also show that noise-robust loss functions can be effective in improving performance in presence of corrupted labels.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have revolutionized numerous applications, but the demand for ever more performance remains unabated. Scaling DNN computations to larger clusters is generally done by distributing tasks in batch mode using methods such as distributed synchronous SGD. Among the issues with this approach is that to make the distributed cluster work with high utilization, the workload distributed to each node must be large, which implies nontrivial growth in the SGD mini-batch size. In this paper, we propose a framework called FPDeep, which uses a hybrid of model and layer parallelism to configure distributed reconfigurable clusters to train DNNs. This approach has numerous benefits. First, the design does not suffer from batch size growth. Second, novel workload and weight partitioning leads to balanced loads of both among nodes. And third, the entire system is a fine-grained pipeline. This leads to high parallelism and utilization and also minimizes the time features need to be cached while waiting for back-propagation. As a result, storage demand is reduced to the point where only on-chip memory is used for the convolution layers. We evaluate FPDeep with the Alexnet, VGG-16, and VGG-19 benchmarks. Experimental results show that FPDeep has good scalability to a large number of FPGAs, with the limiting factor being the FPGA-to-FPGA bandwidth. With 6 transceivers per FPGA, FPDeep shows linearity up to 83 FPGAs. Energy efficiency is evaluated with respect to GOPs/J. FPDeep provides, on average, 6.36x higher energy efficiency than comparable GPU servers.

Memory-augmented neural networks consisting of a neural controller and an external memory have shown potentials in long-term sequential learning. Current RAM-like memory models maintain memory accessing every timesteps, thus they do not effectively leverage the short-term memory held in the controller. We hypothesize that this scheme of writing is suboptimal in memory utilization and introduces redundant computation. To validate our hypothesis, we derive a theoretical bound on the amount of information stored in a RAM-like system and formulate an optimization problem that maximizes the bound. The proposed solution dubbed Uniform Writing is proved to be optimal under the assumption of equal timestep contributions. To relax this assumption, we introduce modifications to the original solution, resulting in a solution termed Cached Uniform Writing. This method aims to balance between maximizing memorization and forgetting via overwriting mechanisms. Through an extensive set of experiments, we empirically demonstrate the advantages of our solutions over other recurrent architectures, claiming the state-of-the-arts in various sequential modeling tasks.

The navigation problem is classically approached in two steps: an exploration step, where map-information about the environment is gathered; and an exploitation step, where this information is used to navigate efficiently. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms, alternatively, approach the problem of navigation in an end-to-end fashion. Inspired by the classical approach, we ask whether DRL algorithms are able to inherently explore, gather and exploit map-information over the course of navigation. We build upon Mirowski et al. [2017] work and introduce a systematic suite of experiments that vary three parameters: the agent's starting location, the agent's target location, and the maze structure. We choose evaluation metrics that explicitly measure the algorithm's ability to gather and exploit map-information. Our experiments show that when trained and tested on the same maps, the algorithm successfully gathers and exploits map-information. However, when trained and tested on different sets of maps, the algorithm fails to transfer the ability to gather and exploit map-information to unseen maps. Furthermore, we find that when the goal location is randomized and the map is kept static, the algorithm is able to gather and exploit map-information but the exploitation is far from optimal. We open-source our experimental suite in the hopes that it serves as a framework for the comparison of future algorithms and leads to the discovery of robust alternatives to classical navigation methods.

Almost six months ago (May 28th 2018) I posted the "AI winter is well on its way" post that went viral. The post amassed nearly a quarter million views and got picked up in Bloomberg, Forbes, Politico, Venturebeat, BBC, Datascience Podcast and numerous other smaller media outlets and blogs [1, 2, 3, 4, ...], triggered violent debate on Hacker news and Reddit. I could not have anticipated this post to be so successful and hence I realized I touched on a very sensitive subject. One can agree with my claims or not, but the sheer popularity of the post almost itself serves as a proof that something is going on behind the scenes and people are actually curious and doubtful if there is anything solid behind the AI hype. Since the post made a prediction, that the AI hype is cracking (particularly in the space of autonomous vehicles) and as a result we will have another "AI winter" episode, I decided to periodically go over those claims, see what has changed and bring some new evidence.

When analyzing a speech recording, the factors of variation include the speaker's