Systems & Languages

According to VentureBeat, AI researchers at Uber have recently posted a paper to Arxiv outlining a new platform intended to assist in the creation of distributed AI models. The platform is called Fiber, and it can be used to drive both reinforcement learning tasks and population-based learning. Fiber is designed to make large-scale parallel computation more accessible to non-experts, letting them take advantage of the power of distributed AI algorithms and models. Fiber has recently been made open-source on GitHub, and it's compatible with Python 3.6 or above, with Kubernetes running on a Linux system and running in a cloud environment. According to the team of researchers, the platform is capable of easily scaling up to hundreds or thousands of individual machines.

Today machines with artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming more prevalent in society. Across many fields, AI has taken over numerous tasks that humans used to do earlier. As the reference is to human intelligence, artificial intelligence is being modified into what humans can do. However, the technology has not yet matched the level of utmost wisdom possessed by humans and it seems like it is not going to achieve the milestone any time sooner. To replace human beings at most jobs, machines need to exhibit what we intuitively call "common sense".

A preprint paper coauthored by Uber AI scientists and Jeff Clune, a research team leader at San Francisco startup OpenAI, describes Fiber, an AI development and distributed training platform for methods including reinforcement learning (which spurs AI agents to complete goals via rewards) and population-based learning. The team says that Fiber expands the accessibility of large-scale parallel computation without the need for specialized hardware or equipment, enabling non-experts to reap the benefits of genetic algorithms in which populations of agents evolve rather than individual members. Fiber -- which was developed to power large-scale parallel scientific computation projects like POET -- is available in open source as of this week, on Github. It supports Linux systems running Python 3.6 and up and Kubernetes running on public cloud environments like Google Cloud, and the research team says that it can scale to hundreds or even thousands of machines. As the researchers point out, increasing computation underlies many recent advances in machine learning, with more and more algorithms relying on distributed training for processing an enormous amount of data.

Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

Self-quarantined employees are forcing organizations to allow access to critical data remotely. Coronavirus is presenting organizations with a unique opportunity to adopt modern security protocols and enable an efficient remote workforce. Fear of Coronavirus infections has resulted in organizations ruling out large meetings. Healthy individuals are in home-quarantine for weeks at a time, even though they are not necessarily thought to carry the virus. This large number of individuals complying with house arrest is putting a strain on many organizations that have not shifted their working styles to accommodate large-scale remote workers.

Inattentional blindness is the psychological phenomenon that causes one to miss things in plain sight. It is a consequence of the selective attention in perception that lets us remain focused on important parts of our world without distraction from irrelevant details. Motivated by selective attention, we study the properties of artificial agents that perceive the world through the lens of a self-attention bottleneck. By constraining access to only a small fraction of the visual input, we show that their policies are directly interpretable in pixel space. We find neuroevolution ideal for training self-attention architectures for vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, allowing us to incorporate modules that can include discrete, non-differentiable operations which are useful for our agent.

Recently, Neural Architecture Search has achieved great success in large-scale image classification. In contrast, there have been limited works focusing on architecture search for object detection, mainly because the costly ImageNet pretraining is always required for detectors. Training from scratch, as a substitute, demands more epochs to converge and brings no computation saving. To overcome this obstacle, we introduce a practical neural architecture transformation search(NATS) algorithm for object detection in this paper. Instead of searching and constructing an entire network, NATS explores the architecture space on the base of existing network and reusing its weights.

In this paper, we propose a novel Bayesian group regularization method based on the spike and slab Lasso priors for jointly estimating multiple graphical models. The proposed method can be used to estimate the common sparsity structure underlying the graphical models while capturing potential heterogeneity of the precision matrices corresponding to those models. Our theoretical results show that the proposed method enjoys the optimal rate of convergence in $\ell_\infty$ norm for estimation consistency and has a strong structure recovery guarantee even when the signal strengths over different graphs are heterogeneous. Through simulation studies and an application to the capital bike-sharing network data, we demonstrate the competitive performance of our method compared to existing alternatives. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

As deep learning applications continue to become more diverse, an interesting question arises: Can general problem solving arise from jointly learning several such diverse tasks? To approach this question, deep multi-task learning is extended in this paper to the setting where there is no obvious overlap between task architectures. The idea is that any set of (architecture,task) pairs can be decomposed into a set of potentially related subproblems, whose sharing is optimized by an efficient stochastic algorithm. The approach is first validated in a classic synthetic multi-task learning benchmark, and then applied to sharing across disparate architectures for vision, NLP, and genomics tasks. It discovers regularities across these domains, encodes them into sharable modules, and combines these modules systematically to improve performance in the individual tasks.

We consider the problem of estimating the difference between two functional undirected graphical models with shared structures. In many applications, data are naturally regarded as high-dimensional random function vectors rather than multivariate scalars. For example, electroencephalography (EEG) data are more appropriately treated as functions of time. In these problems, not only can the number of functions measured per sample be large, but each function is itself an infinite dimensional object, making estimation of model parameters challenging. We develop a method that directly estimates the difference of graphs, avoiding separate estimation of each graph, and show it is consistent in certain high-dimensional settings.