Jiquan Ngiam

Bio: Jiquan Ngiam is an academic researcher from Google. The author has contributed to research in topics: Object detection & Convolutional neural network. The author has an hindex of 20, co-authored 43 publications receiving 6528 citations. Previous affiliations of Jiquan Ngiam include Stanford University.

Multimodal Deep Learning

Abstract: Deep networks have been successfully applied to unsupervised feature learning for single modalities (e.g., text, images or audio). In this work, we propose a novel application of deep networks to learn features over multiple modalities. We present a series of tasks for multimodal learning and show how to train deep networks that learn features to address these tasks. In particular, we demonstrate cross modality feature learning, where better features for one modality (e.g., video) can be learned if multiple modalities (e.g., audio and video) are present at feature learning time. Furthermore, we show how to learn a shared representation between modalities and evaluate it on a unique task, where the classifier is trained with audio-only data but tested with video-only data and vice-versa. Our models are validated on the CUAVE and AVLetters datasets on audio-visual speech classification, demonstrating best published visual speech classification on AVLetters and effective shared representation learning.

Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset

Abstract: The research community has increasing interest in autonomous driving research, despite the resource intensity of obtaining representative real world data. Existing self-driving datasets are limited in the scale and variation of the environments they capture, even though generalization within and between operating regions is crucial to the overall viability of the technology. In an effort to help align the research community's contributions with real-world self-driving problems, we introduce a new large scale, high quality, diverse dataset. Our new dataset consists of 1150 scenes that each span 20 seconds, consisting of well synchronized and calibrated high quality LiDAR and camera data captured across a range of urban and suburban geographies. It is 15x more diverse than the largest camera+LiDAR dataset available based on our proposed diversity metric. We exhaustively annotated this data with 2D (camera image) and 3D (LiDAR) bounding boxes, with consistent identifiers across frames. Finally, we provide strong baselines for 2D as well as 3D detection and tracking tasks. We further study the effects of dataset size and generalization across geographies on 3D detection methods. Find data, code and more up-to-date information at this http URL.

On optimization methods for deep learning

Abstract: The predominant methodology in training deep learning advocates the use of stochastic gradient descent methods (SGDs). Despite its ease of implementation, SGDs are difficult to tune and parallelize. These problems make it challenging to develop, debug and scale up deep learning algorithms with SGDs. In this paper, we show that more sophisticated off-the-shelf optimization methods such as Limited memory BFGS (L-BFGS) and Conjugate gradient (CG) with line search can significantly simplify and speed up the process of pretraining deep algorithms. In our experiments, the difference between L-BFGS/CG and SGDs are more pronounced if we consider algorithmic extensions (e.g., sparsity regularization) and hardware extensions (e.g., GPUs or computer clusters). Our experiments with distributed optimization support the use of L-BFGS with locally connected networks and convolutional neural networks. Using L-BFGS, our convolutional network model achieves 0.69% on the standard MNIST dataset. This is a state-of-the-art result on MNIST among algorithms that do not use distortions or pretraining.

Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset

Abstract: The research community has increasing interest in autonomous driving research, despite the resource intensity of obtaining representative real world data. Existing self-driving datasets are limited in the scale and variation of the environments they capture, even though generalization within and between operating regions is crucial to the over-all viability of the technology. In an effort to help align the research community’s contributions with real-world self-driving problems, we introduce a new large scale, high quality, diverse dataset. Our new dataset consists of 1150 scenes that each span 20 seconds, consisting of well synchronized and calibrated high quality LiDAR and camera data captured across a range of urban and suburban geographies. It is 15x more diverse than the largest camera+LiDAR dataset available based on our proposed diversity metric. We exhaustively annotated this data with 2D (camera image) and 3D (LiDAR) bounding boxes, with consistent identifiers across frames. Finally, we provide strong baselines for 2D as well as 3D detection and tracking tasks. We further study the effects of dataset size and generalization across geographies on 3D detection methods. Find data, code and more up-to-date information at http://www.waymo.com/open.

GPipe: Efficient Training of Giant Neural Networks using Pipeline Parallelism

Abstract: Scaling up deep neural network capacity has been known as an effective approach to improving model quality for several different machine learning tasks. In many cases, increasing model capacity beyond the memory limit of a single accelerator has required developing special algorithms or infrastructure. These solutions are often architecture-specific and do not transfer to other tasks. To address the need for efficient and task-independent model parallelism, we introduce GPipe, a pipeline parallelism library that allows scaling any network that can be expressed as a sequence of layers. By pipelining different sub-sequences of layers on separate accelerators, GPipe provides the flexibility of scaling a variety of different networks to gigantic sizes efficiently. Moreover, GPipe utilizes a novel batch-splitting pipelining algorithm, resulting in almost linear speedup when a model is partitioned across multiple accelerators. We demonstrate the advantages of GPipe by training large-scale neural networks on two different tasks with distinct network architectures: (i) Image Classification: We train a 557-million-parameter AmoebaNet model and attain a top-1 accuracy of 84.4% on ImageNet-2012, (ii) Multilingual Neural Machine Translation: We train a single 6-billion-parameter, 128-layer Transformer model on a corpus spanning over 100 languages and achieve better quality than all bilingual models.

Deep Learning

Abstract: 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.

Visualizing and Understanding Convolutional Networks

Abstract: Large Convolutional Network models have recently demonstrated impressive classification performance on the ImageNet benchmark Krizhevsky et al. [18]. However there is no clear understanding of why they perform so well, or how they might be improved. In this paper we explore both issues. We introduce a novel visualization technique that gives insight into the function of intermediate feature layers and the operation of the classifier. Used in a diagnostic role, these visualizations allow us to find model architectures that outperform Krizhevsky et al on the ImageNet classification benchmark. We also perform an ablation study to discover the performance contribution from different model layers. We show our ImageNet model generalizes well to other datasets: when the softmax classifier is retrained, it convincingly beats the current state-of-the-art results on Caltech-101 and Caltech-256 datasets.

Representation Learning: A Review and New Perspectives

Abstract: The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, covering advances in probabilistic models, autoencoders, manifold learning, and deep networks. This motivates longer term unanswered questions about the appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between representation learning, density estimation, and manifold learning.

Deep Neural Networks for Acoustic Modeling in Speech Recognition: The Shared Views of Four Research Groups

Abstract: Most current speech recognition systems use hidden Markov models (HMMs) to deal with the temporal variability of speech and Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) to determine how well each state of each HMM fits a frame or a short window of frames of coefficients that represents the acoustic input. An alternative way to evaluate the fit is to use a feed-forward neural network that takes several frames of coefficients as input and produces posterior probabilities over HMM states as output. Deep neural networks (DNNs) that have many hidden layers and are trained using new methods have been shown to outperform GMMs on a variety of speech recognition benchmarks, sometimes by a large margin. This article provides an overview of this progress and represents the shared views of four research groups that have had recent successes in using DNNs for acoustic modeling in speech recognition.

Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer

Abstract: Transfer learning, where a model is first pre-trained on a data-rich task before being fine-tuned on a downstream task, has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP). The effectiveness of transfer learning has given rise to a diversity of approaches, methodology, and practice. In this paper, we explore the landscape of transfer learning techniques for NLP by introducing a unified framework that converts all text-based language problems into a text-to-text format. Our systematic study compares pre-training objectives, architectures, unlabeled data sets, transfer approaches, and other factors on dozens of language understanding tasks. By combining the insights from our exploration with scale and our new ``Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus'', we achieve state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks covering summarization, question answering, text classification, and more. To facilitate future work on transfer learning for NLP, we release our data set, pre-trained models, and code.