This is the first in a multi-part series of posts about our experiments with making neural networks that learn not only via gradient descent, but also by the accumulation of information in their hidden states. The eventual goal that this move towards is to train networks to share information with each-other, so that a population of neural networks could continue to learn and improve even if the weight updates were shut off or the individual networks were swapped out. This touches on a number of distinct topics along the way, so rather than make one big confused mess, I'm going to try to separate them into individual, modular posts. The first step in all of this is to think about how to represent the overall problem I'm asking the networks to solve. The usual situation is that I have some fixed data set or context, a fixed goal given that data set, and then I chop it up into statistically stationary and uniform minibatches of individual examples.

Packaging in Python has a bit of a reputation for being a bumpy ride. This is mostly a confused side effect of Python's versatility. Once you understand the natural boundaries between each packaging solution, you begin to realize that the varied landscape is a small price Python programmers pay for using the most balanced, flexible language available. Tomas is blogging an algorithm / data structure a day. Find fix broken code fast!

This article was posted by Arpan Gupta (Indian Institute of Technology). Let's learn from a precise demo on Fitting Logistic Regression on Titanic Data Set for Machine Learning Description:On April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg, killing 1502 out of 2224 passengers and crew. This tragedy has led to better safety regulations for ships. To see the algorithms, click here.

A Discriminative Deep Forest (DisDF) as a metric learning algorithm is proposed in the paper. It is based on the Deep Forest or gcForest proposed by Zhou and Feng and can be viewed as a gcForest modification. The case of the fully supervised learning is studied when the class labels of individual training examples are known. The main idea underlying the algorithm is to assign weights to decision trees in random forest in order to reduce distances between objects from the same class and to increase them between objects from different classes. The weights are training parameters. A specific objective function which combines Euclidean and Manhattan distances and simplifies the optimization problem for training the DisDF is proposed. The numerical experiments illustrate the proposed distance metric algorithm.

Background-Foreground classification is a fundamental well-studied problem in computer vision. Due to the pixel-wise nature of modeling and processing in the algorithm, it is usually difficult to satisfy real-time constraints. There is a trade-off between the speed (because of model complexity) and accuracy. Inspired by the rejection cascade of Viola-Jones classifier, we decompose the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) into an adaptive cascade of classifiers. This way we achieve a good improvement in speed without compensating for accuracy. In the training phase, we learn multiple KDEs for different durations to be used as strong prior distribution and detect probable oscillating pixels which usually results in misclassifications. We propose a confidence measure for the classifier based on temporal consistency and the prior distribution. The confidence measure thus derived is used to adapt the learning rate and the thresholds of the model, to improve accuracy. The confidence measure is also employed to perform temporal and spatial sampling in a principled way. We demonstrate a speed-up factor of 5x to 10x and 17 percent average improvement in accuracy over several standard videos.

We define a second-order neural network stochastic gradient training algorithm whose block-diagonal structure effectively amounts to normalizing the unit activations. Investigating why this algorithm lacks in robustness then reveals two interesting insights. The first insight suggests a new way to scale the stepsizes, clarifying popular algorithms such as RMSProp as well as old neural network tricks such as fanin stepsize scaling. The second insight stresses the practical importance of dealing with fast changes of the curvature of the cost.

Topic models for text corpora comprise a popular family of methods that have inspired many extensions to encode properties such as sparsity, interactions with covariates, and the gradual evolution of topics. In this paper, we combine certain motivating ideas behind variations on topic models with modern techniques for variational inference to produce a flexible framework for topic modeling that allows for rapid exploration of different models. We first discuss how our framework relates to existing models, and then demonstrate that it achieves strong performance, with the introduction of sparsity controlling the trade off between perplexity and topic coherence. We have released our code and preprocessing scripts to support easy future comparisons and exploration.

We study implicit regularization when optimizing an underdetermined quadratic objective over a matrix $X$ with gradient descent on a factorization of $X$. We conjecture and provide empirical and theoretical evidence that with small enough step sizes and initialization close enough to the origin, gradient descent on a full dimensional factorization converges to the minimum nuclear norm solution.

The majority of medical documents and electronic health records (EHRs) are in text format that poses a challenge for data processing and finding relevant documents. Looking for ways to automatically retrieve the enormous amount of health and medical knowledge has always been an intriguing topic. Powerful methods have been developed in recent years to make the text processing automatic. One of the popular approaches to retrieve information based on discovering the themes in health & medical corpora is topic modeling, however, this approach still needs new perspectives. In this research we describe fuzzy latent semantic analysis (FLSA), a novel approach in topic modeling using fuzzy perspective. FLSA can handle health & medical corpora redundancy issue and provides a new method to estimate the number of topics. The quantitative evaluations show that FLSA produces superior performance and features to latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), the most popular topic model.

Despite the wide use of machine learning in adversarial settings including computer security, recent studies have demonstrated vulnerabilities to evasion attacks---carefully crafted adversarial samples that closely resemble legitimate instances, but cause misclassification. In this paper, we examine the adequacy of the leading approach to generating adversarial samples---the gradient descent approach. In particular (1) we perform extensive experiments on three datasets, MNIST, USPS and Spambase, in order to analyse the effectiveness of the gradient-descent method against non-linear support vector machines, and conclude that carefully reduced kernel smoothness can significantly increase robustness to the attack; (2) we demonstrate that separated inter-class support vectors lead to more secure models, and propose a quantity similar to margin that can efficiently predict potential susceptibility to gradient-descent attacks, before the attack is launched; and (3) we design a new adversarial sample construction algorithm based on optimising the multiplicative ratio of class decision functions.