Deep learning is a form of machine learning that enables computers to learn from experience and understand the world in terms of a hierarchy of concepts. Because the computer gathers knowledge from experience, there is no need for a human computer operator to formally specify all the knowledge that the computer needs. The hierarchy of concepts allows the computer to learn complicated concepts by building them out of simpler ones; a graph of these hierarchies would be many layers deep. This book introduces a broad range of topics in deep learning. The text offers mathematical and conceptual background, covering relevant concepts in linear algebra, probability theory and information theory, numerical computation, and machine learning. It describes deep learning techniques used by practitioners in industry, including deep feedforward networks, regularization, optimization algorithms, convolutional networks, sequence modeling, and practical methodology; and it surveys such applications as natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, online recommendation systems, bioinformatics, and videogames. Finally, the book offers research perspectives, covering such theoretical topics as linear factor models, autoencoders, representation learning, structured probabilistic models, Monte Carlo methods, the partition function, approximate inference, and deep generative models. Deep Learning can be used by undergraduate or graduate students planning careers in either industry or research, and by software engineers who want to begin using deep learning in their products or platforms. A website offers supplementary material for both readers and instructors.

Deep Learning

Feature pyramids are a basic component in recognition systems for detecting objects at different scales. But pyramid representations have been avoided in recent object detectors that are based on deep convolutional networks, partially because they are slow to compute and memory intensive. In this paper, we exploit the inherent multi-scale, pyramidal hierarchy of deep convolutional networks to construct feature pyramids with marginal extra cost. A top-down architecture with lateral connections is developed for building high-level semantic feature maps at all scales. This architecture, called a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), shows significant improvement as a generic feature extractor in several applications. Using a basic Faster R-CNN system, our method achieves state-of-the-art single-model results on the COCO detection benchmark without bells and whistles, surpassing all existing single-model entries including those from the COCO 2016 challenge winners. In addition, our method can run at 5 FPS on a GPU and thus is a practical and accurate solution to multi-scale object detection. Code will be made publicly available.

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Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

TensorFlow is a machine learning system that operates at large scale and in heterogeneous environments. Tensor-Flow uses dataflow graphs to represent computation, shared state, and the operations that mutate that state. It maps the nodes of a dataflow graph across many machines in a cluster, and within a machine across multiple computational devices, including multicore CPUs, general-purpose GPUs, and custom-designed ASICs known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). This architecture gives flexibility to the application developer: whereas in previous "parameter server" designs the management of shared state is built into the system, TensorFlow enables developers to experiment with novel optimizations and training algorithms. TensorFlow supports a variety of applications, with a focus on training and inference on deep neural networks. Several Google services use TensorFlow in production, we have released it as an open-source project, and it has become widely used for machine learning research. In this paper, we describe the TensorFlow dataflow model and demonstrate the compelling performance that TensorFlow achieves for several real-world applications.

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TensorFlow: a system for large-scale machine learning

Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

We address the problem of learning fine-grained cross-modal representations. We propose an instance-based deep metric learning approach in joint visual and textual space. On top of that, we derive a metric rescaling approach that solves a very common problem in the generalized zero-shot learning setting, i.e., classifying test images from unseen classes as one of the classes seen during training. We evaluate our approach on two fine-grained zero-shot learning datasets: CUB and FLOWERS. We find that on the generalized zero-shot classification task the proposed approach consistently outperforms the existing approaches on both datasets. We demonstrate that the proposed approach, notwithstanding its simplicity of implementation and training, is superior to all the recent state-of-the-art methods of which we are aware that use the same evaluation framework.

Fine-grained zero-shot recognition with metric rescaling.

Entropy is ubiquitous in machine learning, but it is in general intractable to compute the entropy of the distribution of an arbitrary continuous random variable. In this paper, we propose the amortized residual denoising autoencoder (AR-DAE) to approximate the gradient of the log density function, which can be used to estimate the gradient of entropy. Amortization allows us to significantly reduce the error of the gradient approximator by approaching asymptotic optimality of a regular DAE, in which case the estimation is in theory unbiased. We conduct theoretical and experimental analyses on the approximation error of the proposed method, as well as extensive studies on heuristics to ensure its robustness. Finally, using the proposed gradient approximator to estimate the gradient of entropy, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on density estimation with variational autoencoders and continuous control with soft actor-critic.

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AR-DAE: Towards Unbiased Neural Entropy Gradient Estimation

This compendium gathers all the accepted extended abstracts from the Third International Conference on Medical Imaging with Deep Learning (MIDL 2020), held in Montreal, Canada, 6-9 July 2020. Note that only accepted extended abstracts are listed here, the Proceedings of the MIDL 2020 Full Paper Track are published in the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR).

Medical Imaging with Deep Learning: MIDL 2020 - Short Paper Track.

It would be desirable for a reinforcement learning (RL) based agent to learn behaviour by merely watching a demonstration. However, defining rewards that facilitate this goal within the RL paradigm remains a challenge. Here we address this problem with Siamese networks, trained to compute distances between observed behaviours and an agent's behaviours. We use an RNN-based comparator model to learn such distances in space and time between motion clips while training an RL policy to minimize this distance. Through experimentation, we have also found that the inclusion of multi-task data and an additional image encoding loss helps enforce temporal consistency and improve policy learning. These two components appear to balance reward for matching a specific instance of a behaviour versus that behaviour in general. Furthermore, we focus here on a particularly challenging form of this problem where only a single demonstration is provided for a given task -- the one-shot learning setting. We demonstrate our approach on humanoid, dog and raptor agents in 2D and a 3D quadruped and humanoid. In these environments, we show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art, GAIfO (i.e. GAIL without access to actions) and TCNs.

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Visual Imitation with Reinforcement Learning using Recurrent Siamese Networks

Geospatial Information Systems are used by researchers and Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (HADR) practitioners to support a wide variety of important applications. However, collaboration between these actors is difﬁcult due to the heterogeneous nature of geospatial data modalities (e.g., multi-spectral images of various resolutions, timeseries, weather data) and diversity of tasks (e.g., regression of human activity indicators or detecting forest ﬁres). In this work, we present a roadmap towards the construction of a general-purpose neural architecture (GPNA) with a geospatial inductive bias, pre-trained on large amounts of unlabelled earth observation data in a self-supervised manner. We envision how such a model may facilitate cooperation between members of the community. We show preliminary results on the ﬁrst step of the roadmap, where we instantiate an architecture that can process a wide variety of geospatial data modalities and demonstrate that it can achieve competitive performance with domain-speciﬁc architectures on tasks relating to the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Chris Pal

Papers

Fine-grained zero-shot recognition with metric rescaling.

AR-DAE: Towards Unbiased Neural Entropy Gradient Estimation

Medical Imaging with Deep Learning: MIDL 2020 - Short Paper Track.

Visual Imitation with Reinforcement Learning using Recurrent Siamese Networks

A General Purpose Neural Architecture for Geospatial Systems