We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed Inception that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. By a carefully crafted design, we increased the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC14 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection.

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Going deeper with convolutions

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

There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

We describe latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a generative probabilistic model for collections of discrete data such as text corpora. LDA is a three-level hierarchical Bayesian model, in which each item of a collection is modeled as a finite mixture over an underlying set of topics. Each topic is, in turn, modeled as an infinite mixture over an underlying set of topic probabilities. In the context of text modeling, the topic probabilities provide an explicit representation of a document. We present efficient approximate inference techniques based on variational methods and an EM algorithm for empirical Bayes parameter estimation. We report results in document modeling, text classification, and collaborative filtering, comparing to a mixture of unigrams model and the probabilistic LSI model.

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Latent dirichlet allocation

We propose a generative model for text and other collections of discrete data that generalizes or improves on several previous models including naive Bayes/unigram, mixture of unigrams [6], and Hof-mann's aspect model, also known as probabilistic latent semantic indexing (pLSI) [3]. In the context of text modeling, our model posits that each document is generated as a mixture of topics, where the continuous-valued mixture proportions are distributed as a latent Dirichlet random variable. Inference and learning are carried out efficiently via variational algorithms. We present empirical results on applications of this model to problems in text modeling, collaborative filtering, and text classification.

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Latent Dirichlet Allocation

A family of probabilistic time series models is developed to analyze the time evolution of topics in large document collections. The approach is to use state space models on the natural parameters of the multinomial distributions that represent the topics. Variational approximations based on Kalman filters and nonparametric wavelet regression are developed to carry out approximate posterior inference over the latent topics. In addition to giving quantitative, predictive models of a sequential corpus, dynamic topic models provide a qualitative window into the contents of a large document collection. The models are demonstrated by analyzing the OCR'ed archives of the journal Science from 1880 through 2000.

Dynamic topic models

We develop stochastic variational inference, a scalable algorithm for approximating posterior distributions. We develop this technique for a large class of probabilistic models and we demonstrate it with two probabilistic topic models, latent Dirichlet allocation and the hierarchical Dirichlet process topic model. Using stochastic variational inference, we analyze several large collections of documents: 300K articles from Nature, 1.8M articles from The New York Times, and 3.8M articles from Wikipedia. Stochastic inference can easily handle data sets of this size and outperforms traditional variational inference, which can only handle a smaller subset. (We also show that the Bayesian nonparametric topic model outperforms its parametric counterpart.) Stochastic variational inference lets us apply complex Bayesian models to massive data sets.

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Stochastic variational inference

Probabilistic topic models are a popular tool for the unsupervised analysis of text, providing both a predictive model of future text and a latent topic representation of the corpus. Practitioners typically assume that the latent space is semantically meaningful. It is used to check models, summarize the corpus, and guide exploration of its contents. However, whether the latent space is interpretable is in need of quantitative evaluation. In this paper, we present new quantitative methods for measuring semantic meaning in inferred topics. We back these measures with large-scale user studies, showing that they capture aspects of the model that are undetected by previous measures of model quality based on held-out likelihood. Surprisingly, topic models which perform better on held-out likelihood may infer less semantically meaningful topics.

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Reading Tea Leaves: How Humans Interpret Topic Models

Consider data consisting of pairwise measurements, such as presence or absence of links between pairs of objects. These data arise, for instance, in the analysis of protein interactions and gene regulatory networks, collections of author-recipient email, and social networks. Analyzing pairwise measurements with probabilistic models requires special assumptions, since the usual independence or exchangeability assumptions no longer hold. Here we introduce a class of variance allocation models for pairwise measurements: mixed membership stochastic blockmodels. These models combine global parameters that instantiate dense patches of connectivity (blockmodel) with local parameters that instantiate node-specific variability in the connections (mixed membership). We develop a general variational inference algorithm for fast approximate posterior inference. We demonstrate the advantages of mixed membership stochastic blockmodels with applications to social networks and protein interaction networks.

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Mixed Membership Stochastic Blockmodels

We present a new approach for modeling multi-modal data sets, focusing on the specific case of segmented images with associated text. Learning the joint distribution of image regions and words has many applications. We consider in detail predicting words associated with whole images (auto-annotation) and corresponding to particular image regions (region naming). Auto-annotation might help organize and access large collections of images. Region naming is a model of object recognition as a process of translating image regions to words, much as one might translate from one language to another. Learning the relationships between image regions and semantic correlates (words) is an interesting example of multi-modal data mining, particularly because it is typically hard to apply data mining techniques to collections of images. We develop a number of models for the joint distribution of image regions and words, including several which explicitly learn the correspondence between regions and words. We study multi-modal and correspondence extensions to Hofmann's hierarchical clustering/aspect model, a translation model adapted from statistical machine translation (Brown et al.), and a multi-modal extension to mixture of latent Dirichlet allocation (MoM-LDA). All models are assessed using a large collection of annotated images of real scenes. We study in depth the difficult problem of measuring performance. For the annotation task, we look at prediction performance on held out data. We present three alternative measures, oriented toward different types of task. Measuring the performance of correspondence methods is harder, because one must determine whether a word has been placed on the right region of an image. We can use annotation performance as a proxy measure, but accurate measurement requires hand labeled data, and thus must occur on a smaller scale. We show results using both an annotation proxy, and manually labeled data.

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David M. Blei

Papers

Dynamic topic models

Stochastic variational inference

Reading Tea Leaves: How Humans Interpret Topic Models

Mixed Membership Stochastic Blockmodels

Matching words and pictures