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

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Convex Analysisの二,三の進展について

“Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks”の学習報告

Statistical Analysis with Missing Data

An overview of the self-organizing map algorithm, on which the papers in this issue are based, is presented in this article.

The Self-Organizing Map

Federated Learning (FL) enables the training of Deep Learning models without centrally collecting possibly sensitive raw data. This paves the way for stronger privacy guarantees when building predictive models. The most used algorithms for FL are parameter-averaging based schemes (e.g., Federated Averaging) that, however, have well known limits: (i) Clients must implement the same model architecture; (ii) Transmitting model weights and model updates implies high communication cost, which scales up with the number of model parameters; (iii) In presence of non-IID data distributions, parameter-averaging aggregation schemes perform poorly due to client model drifts. Federated adaptations of regular Knowledge Distillation (KD) can solve and/or mitigate the weaknesses of parameter-averaging FL algorithms while possibly introducing other trade-offs. In this article, we provide a review of KD-based algorithms tailored for specific FL issues.

Knowledge Distillation for Federated Learning: a Practical Guide

The field of Continual Learning (CL) seeks to develop algorithms that accumulate knowledge and skills over time through interaction with non-stationary environments and data distributions. Measuring progress in CL can be difficult because a plethora of evaluation procedures (ettings) and algorithmic solutions (methods) have emerged, each with their own potentially disjoint set of assumptions about the CL problem. In this work, we view each setting as a set of assumptions. We then create a tree-shaped hierarchy of the research settings in CL, in which more general settings become the parents of those with more restrictive assumptions. This makes it possible to use inheritance to share and reuse research, as developing a method for a given setting also makes it directly applicable onto any of its children. We instantiate this idea as a publicly available software framework called Sequoia, which features a variety of settings from both the Continual Supervised Learning (CSL) and Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) domains. Sequoia also includes a growing suite of methods which are easy to extend and customize, in addition to more specialized methods from third-party libraries. We hope that this new paradigm and its first implementation can serve as a foundation for the unification and acceleration of research in CL. You can help us grow the tree by visiting this http URL.

Sequoia: A Software Framework to Unify Continual Learning Research

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Chaotic Continual Learning

A method and system for generating problem resolution flowcharts, whereby users do not author flowcharts directly but instead author a dependency matrix of questions and answers related by state or underlying problem cause. After creation of a matrix of questions and answers, a corresponding flowchart is then calculated based on the information in the dependency matrix, and also based on the likelihood of the various problems and their causes. The probabilities of problems and their causes may be estimated or may be calculated from historical data accumulated by use of the flow chart, or some combination of the two. These probabilities are incorporated into the answer cells of the dependency matrix. The resulting flowchart is tested and evaluated, and the results of testing and evaluation are used to make modifications in the matrix of questions and answers. The flowchart is then made available for execution by a problem determination engine, usable by staff at a help center or directly as self-help to a customer over a network. Experience from use of the problem determination engine is accumulated for use in further refinements of the dependency matrix and its probabilities.

Method and apparatus for authoring and optimizing flowcharts

Many natural systems, especially biological ones, exhibit complex multivariate nonlinear dynamical behaviors that can be hard to capture by linear autoregressive models. On the other hand, generic nonlinear models such as deep recurrent neural networks often require large amounts of training data, not always available in domains such as brain imaging; also, they often lack interpretability. Domain knowledge about the types of dynamics typically observed in such systems, such as a certain type of dynamical systems models, could complement purely data-driven techniques by providing a good prior. In this work, we consider a class of ordinary differential equation (ODE) models known as van der Pol (VDP) oscil lators and evaluate their ability to capture a low-dimensional representation of neural activity measured by different brain imaging modalities, such as calcium imaging (CaI) and fMRI, in different living organisms: larval zebrafish, rat, and human. We develop a novel and efficient approach to the nontrivial problem of parameters estimation for a network of coupled dynamical systems from multivariate data and demonstrate that the resulting VDP models are both accurate and interpretable, as VDP's coupling matrix reveals anatomically meaningful excitatory and inhibitory interactions across different brain subsystems. VDP outperforms linear autoregressive models (VAR) in terms of both the data fit accuracy and the quality of insight provided by the coupling matrices and often tends to generalize better to unseen data when predicting future brain activity, being comparable to and sometimes better than the recurrent neural networks (LSTMs). Finally, we demonstrate that our (generative) VDP model can also serve as a data-augmentation tool leading to marked improvements in predictive accuracy of recurrent neural networks. Thus, our work contributes to both basic and applied dimensions of neuroimaging: gaining scientific insights and improving brain-based predictive models, an area of potentially high practical importance in clinical diagnosis and neurotechnology.

Irina Rish

Papers

Knowledge Distillation for Federated Learning: a Practical Guide

Sequoia: A Software Framework to Unify Continual Learning Research

Chaotic Continual Learning

Method and apparatus for authoring and optimizing flowcharts

Learning Brain Dynamics With Coupled Low-Dimensional Nonlinear Oscillators and Deep Recurrent Networks.