This video has been produced by the Tesseract Academy (http://tesseract.academy), a company whose mission is to educate decision makers in deep technical topics such as data science, AI, and blockchain.

Deep reinforcement learning(DRL) has been categorized many times as the future of artificial intelligence(AI). Some of the most important AI breakthroughs of the last few years such as DeepMind's AlphaGo or OpenAI's Dota Five have been based on DRL applications. Despite its importance, the implementation of DRL models remains an incredibly challenging exercise and, for the most part, we have very little ideas about the pieces that make an efficient DRL solution. Earlier this week, DeepMind open sourced TRFL(pronounced truffle, of course), a framework that compiles a series of useful building blocks of DRL models. Most of the current wave of DRL methods have had their origin in the academic environments and they haven't been tested in real world implementations.

Which authors of this paper are endorsers? Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. With all the hype about SpotMini recently, it's a good time to take a look back at another quadruped that Boston Dynamics helped develop. This system is the first of its kind that can automatically keep a cluttered room neat and tidy at a practical level, something that has been difficult to achieve using conventional robot system.

Efficient and precise classification of histological cell nuclei is of utmost importance due to its potential applications in the field of medical image analysis. It would facilitate the medical practitioners to better understand and explore various factors for cancer treatment. The classification of histological cell nuclei is a challenging task due to the cellular heterogeneity. This paper proposes an efficient Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architecture for classification of histological routine colon cancer nuclei named as RCCNet. The main objective of this network is to keep the CNN model as simple as possible. The proposed RCCNet model consists of only 1,512,868 learnable parameters which are significantly less compared to the popular CNN models such as AlexNet, CIFARVGG, GoogLeNet, and WRN. The experiments are conducted over publicly available routine colon cancer histological dataset "CRCHistoPhenotypes". The results of the proposed RCCNet model are compared with five state-of-the-art CNN models in terms of the accuracy, weighted average F1 score and training time. The proposed method has achieved a classification accuracy of 80.61% and 0.7887 weighted average F1 score. The proposed RCCNet is more efficient and generalized terms of the training time and data over-fitting, respectively.

Multimodal search-based dialogue is a challenging new task: It extends visually grounded question answering systems into multi-turn conversations with access to an external database. We address this new challenge by learning a neural response generation system from the recently released Multimodal Dialogue (MMD) dataset (Saha et al., 2017). We introduce a knowledge-grounded multimodal conversational model where an encoded knowledge base (KB) representation is appended to the decoder input. Our model substantially outperforms strong baselines in terms of text-based similarity measures (over 9 BLEU points, 3 of which are solely due to the use of additional information from the KB.

The rising use of deep learning and other big-data algorithms has led to an increasing demand for hardware platforms that are computationally powerful, yet energy-efficient. Due to the amount of data parallelism in these algorithms, high-performance 3D manycore platforms that incorporate both CPUs and GPUs present a promising direction. However, as systems use heterogeneity (e.g., a combination of CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators) to improve performance and efficiency, it becomes more pertinent to address the distinct and likely conflicting communication requirements (e.g., CPU memory access latency or GPU network throughput) that arise from such heterogeneity. Unfortunately, it is difficult to quickly explore the hardware design space and choose appropriate tradeoffs between these heterogeneous requirements. To address these challenges, we propose the design of a 3D Network-on-Chip (NoC) for heterogeneous manycore platforms that considers the appropriate design objectives for a 3D heterogeneous system and explores various tradeoffs using an efficient ML-based multi-objective optimization technique. The proposed design space exploration considers the various requirements of its heterogeneous components and generates a set of 3D NoC architectures that efficiently trades off these design objectives. Our findings show that by jointly considering these requirements (latency, throughput, temperature, and energy), we can achieve 9.6% better Energy-Delay Product on average at nearly iso-temperature conditions when compared to a thermally-optimized design for 3D heterogeneous NoCs. More importantly, our results suggest that our 3D NoCs optimized for a few applications can be generalized for unknown applications as well. Our results show that these generalized 3D NoCs only incur a 1.8% (36-tile system) and 1.1% (64-tile system) average performance loss compared to application-specific NoCs.

Sleep disorders are implicated in a growing number of health problems. In this paper, we present a signal-processing/machine learning approach to detecting arousals in the multi-channel polysomnographic recordings of the Physionet/CinC Challenge2018 dataset. Methods: Our network architecture consists of two components. Inputs were presented to a Scattering Transform (ST) representation layer which fed a recurrent neural network for sequence learning using three layers of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The STs were calculated for each signal with downsampling parameters chosen to give approximately 1 s time resolution, resulting in an eighteen-fold data reduction. The LSTM layers then operated at this downsampled rate. Results: The proposed approach detected arousal regions on the 10% random sample of the hidden test set with an AUROC of 88.0% and an AUPRC of 42.1%.

Previous approaches using deep learning algorithms to classify glaucomatous damage on fundus photographs have been limited by the requirement for human labeling of a reference training set. We propose a new approach using spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SDOCT) data to train a deep learning algorithm to quantify glaucomatous structural damage on optic disc photographs. The dataset included 32,820 pairs of optic disc photos and SDOCT retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) scans from 2,312 eyes of 1,198 subjects. A deep learning convolutional neural network was trained to assess optic disc photographs and predict SDOCT average RNFL thickness. The performance of the algorithm was evaluated in an independent test sample. The mean prediction of average RNFL thickness from all 6,292 optic disc photos in the test set was 83.3$\pm$14.5 $\mu$m, whereas the mean average RNFL thickness from all corresponding SDOCT scans was 82.5$\pm$16.8 $\mu$m (P = 0.164). There was a very strong correlation between predicted and observed RNFL thickness values (r = 0.832; P<0.001), with mean absolute error of the predictions of 7.39 $\mu$m. The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves for discriminating glaucoma from healthy eyes with the deep learning predictions and actual SDOCT measurements were 0.944 (95$\%$ CI: 0.912- 0.966) and 0.940 (95$\%$ CI: 0.902 - 0.966), respectively (P = 0.724). In conclusion, we introduced a novel deep learning approach to assess optic disc photographs and provide quantitative information about the amount of neural damage. This approach could potentially be used to diagnose and stage glaucomatous damage from optic disc photographs.

It's used internally and to me it's the perfect thickness of abstraction for DL research if you use TF. I write a lot of custom layers and while there are a few TF quirks you have to know, Sonnet has much less mental overhead than the TF.layers lib and is way more "hackable." I tried out all the other topper libs pretty extensively and Sonnet really stood out. The main issue with external adoption, is, well, that there is none _ . I tried looking up a DCGAN example in Sonnet and couldn't find an open source one...there are lots internally, though.