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

We organized a competition on Autonomous Lifelong Machine Learning with Drift that was part of the competition program of NeurIPS 2018. This data driven competition asked participants to develop computer programs capable of solving supervised learning problems where the i.i.d. assumption did not hold. Large data sets were arranged in a lifelong learning and evaluation scenario and CodaLab was used as the challenge platform. The challenge attracted more than 300 participants in its two month duration. This chapter describes the design of the challenge and summarizes its main results.

AutoML @ NeurIPS 2018 Challenge: Design and Results

We present the design and beta tests of a new machine learning challenge called AutoCV (for Automated Computer Vision), which is the first event in a series of challenges we are planning on the theme of Automated Deep Learning. We target applications for which Deep Learning methods have had great success in the past few years, with the aim of pushing the state of the art in fully automated methods to design the architecture of neural networks and train them without any human intervention. The tasks are restricted to multi-label image classification problems, from domains including medical, areal, people, object, and handwriting imaging. Thus the type of images will vary a lot in scales, textures, and structure. Raw data are provided (no features extracted), but all datasets are formatted in a uniform tensor manner (although images may have fixed or variable sizes within a dataset). The participants's code will be blind tested on a challenge platform in a controlled manner, with restrictions on training and test time and memory limitations. The challenge is part of the official selection of IJCNN 2019.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02265053/document

AutoCV Challenge Design and Baseline Results

Dealing with incomplete information is a well studied problem in the context of machine learning and computational intelligence. However, in the context of computer vision, the problem has only been studied in specific scenarios (e.g., certain types of occlusions in specific types of images), although it is common to have incomplete information in visual data. This chapter describes the design of an academic competition focusing on inpainting of images and video sequences that was part of the competition program of WCCI2018 and had a satellite event collocated with ECCV2018. The ChaLearn Looking at People Inpainting Challenge aimed at advancing the state of the art on visual inpainting by promoting the development of methods for recovering missing and occluded information from images and video. Three tracks were proposed in which visual inpainting might be helpful but still challenging: human body pose estimation, text overlays removal and fingerprint denoising. This chapter describes the design of the challenge, which includes the release of three novel datasets, and the description of evaluation metrics, baselines and evaluation protocol. The results of the challenge are analyzed and discussed in detail and conclusions derived from this event are outlined.

ChaLearn Looking at People: Inpainting and denoising challenges

The AutoSpeech challenge calls for automated machine learning (AutoML) solutions to automate the process of applying machine learning to speech processing tasks. These tasks, which cover a large variety of domains, will be shown to the automated system in a random order. Each time when the tasks are switched, the information of the new task will be hinted with its corresponding training set. Thus, every submitted solution should contain an adaptation routine which adapts the system to the new task. Compared to the first edition, the 2020 edition includes advances of 1) more speech tasks, 2) noisier data in each task, 3) a modified evaluation metric. This paper outlines the challenge and describe the competition protocol, datasets, evaluation metric, starting kit, and baseline systems.

AutoSpeech 2020: The Second Automated Machine Learning Challenge for Speech Classification

Following the success of the first AutoML challenges , we designed a new challenge called AutoDL. We target applications such as speech, image, video, and text, for which deep learning (DL) methods have had great success in the past few years. All problems will be multi-label classification problems. We hope to drive the community to work on finding fully automatic ways of designing DL models. Raw data will be provided (no features extracted). The source of the datasets and the type of data will be concealed, but the data structure will be revealed. All datasets will be formatted in a uniform tensor manner, to encourage participants to submit generic algorithms (not necessarily constrained to DL). We will impose restrictions on training time and resources to push the state-of-the-art further. We will provide a large number of pre-formatted public datasets and set up a repository of data exchange to enable meta-learning. In this paper, the challenge protocol and baseline results are presented to seek community feed-back. The challenge is planned for 2019, but the exact schedule is not announced yet.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01906226/document

AutoDL Challenge Design and Beta Tests-Towards automatic deep learning

AutoSpeech 2020: The Second Automated Machine Learning Challenge for Speech Classification.

Auto-KWS 2021 challenge calls for automated machine learning (AutoML) solutions to automate the process of applying machine learning to a customized keyword spotting task. Compared with other keyword spotting tasks, Auto-KWS challenge has the following three characteristics: 1) The challenge focuses on the problem of customized keyword spotting, where the target device can only be awakened by an enrolled speaker with his specified keyword. The speaker can use any language and accent to define his keyword. 2) All dataset of the challenge is recorded in realistic environment. It is to simulate different user scenarios. 3) Auto-KWS is a "code competition", where participants need to submit AutoML solutions, then the platform automatically runs the enrollment and prediction steps with the submitted code.This challenge aims at promoting the development of a more personalized and flexible keyword spotting system. Two baseline systems are provided to all participants as references.

Jingsong Wang

Papers

AutoDL Challenge Design and Beta Tests-Towards automatic deep learning

AutoSpeech 2020: The Second Automated Machine Learning Challenge for Speech Classification

AutoSpeech 2020: The Second Automated Machine Learning Challenge for Speech Classification.

Auto-KWS 2021 Challenge: Task, Datasets, and Baselines

Auto-KWS 2021 Challenge: Task, Datasets, and Baselines