Sherry Moore

Bio: Sherry Moore is an academic researcher from Google. The author has contributed to research in topics: Deep learning & Evolutionary algorithm. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 6 publications receiving 24079 citations.

TensorFlow: a system for large-scale machine learning

Abstract: 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.

TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems

Abstract: TensorFlow is an interface for expressing machine learning algorithms, and an implementation for executing such algorithms. A computation expressed using TensorFlow can be executed with little or no change on a wide variety of heterogeneous systems, ranging from mobile devices such as phones and tablets up to large-scale distributed systems of hundreds of machines and thousands of computational devices such as GPU cards. The system is flexible and can be used to express a wide variety of algorithms, including training and inference algorithms for deep neural network models, and it has been used for conducting research and for deploying machine learning systems into production across more than a dozen areas of computer science and other fields, including speech recognition, computer vision, robotics, information retrieval, natural language processing, geographic information extraction, and computational drug discovery. This paper describes the TensorFlow interface and an implementation of that interface that we have built at Google. The TensorFlow API and a reference implementation were released as an open-source package under the Apache 2.0 license in November, 2015 and are available at www.tensorflow.org.

TensorFlow: A system for large-scale machine learning

Abstract: TensorFlow is a machine learning system that operates at large scale and in heterogeneous environments. TensorFlow 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 particularly strong support for 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 in contrast to existing systems, and demonstrate the compelling performance that TensorFlow achieves for several real-world applications.

Large-scale evolution of image classifiers

Abstract: Neural networks have proven effective at solving difficult problems but designing their architectures can be challenging, even for image classification problems alone. Our goal is to minimize human participation, so we employ evolutionary algorithms to discover such networks automatically. Despite significant computational requirements, we show that it is now possible to evolve models with accuracies within the range of those published in the last year. Specifically, we employ simple evolutionary techniques at unprecedented scales to discover models for the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, starting from trivial initial conditions and reaching accuracies of 94.6% (95.6% for ensemble) and 77.0%, respectively. To do this, we use novel and intuitive mutation operators that navigate large search spaces; we stress that no human participation is required once evolution starts and that the output is a fully-trained model. Throughout this work, we place special emphasis on the repeatability of results, the variability in the outcomes and the computational requirements.

Large-Scale Evolution of Image Classifiers

Abstract: Neural networks have proven effective at solving difficult problems but designing their architectures can be challenging, even for image classification problems alone. Our goal is to minimize human participation, so we employ evolutionary algorithms to discover such networks automatically. Despite significant computational requirements, we show that it is now possible to evolve models with accuracies within the range of those published in the last year. Specifically, we employ simple evolutionary techniques at unprecedented scales to discover models for the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, starting from trivial initial conditions and reaching accuracies of 94.6% (95.6% for ensemble) and 77.0%, respectively. To do this, we use novel and intuitive mutation operators that navigate large search spaces; we stress that no human participation is required once evolution starts and that the output is a fully-trained model. Throughout this work, we place special emphasis on the repeatability of results, the variability in the outcomes and the computational requirements.

Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks

Abstract: The central building block of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is the convolution operator, which enables networks to construct informative features by fusing both spatial and channel-wise information within local receptive fields at each layer. A broad range of prior research has investigated the spatial component of this relationship, seeking to strengthen the representational power of a CNN by enhancing the quality of spatial encodings throughout its feature hierarchy. In this work, we focus instead on the channel relationship and propose a novel architectural unit, which we term the “Squeeze-and-Excitation” (SE) block, that adaptively recalibrates channel-wise feature responses by explicitly modelling interdependencies between channels. We show that these blocks can be stacked together to form SENet architectures that generalise extremely effectively across different datasets. We further demonstrate that SE blocks bring significant improvements in performance for existing state-of-the-art CNNs at slight additional computational cost. Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks formed the foundation of our ILSVRC 2017 classification submission which won first place and reduced the top-5 error to 2.251 percent, surpassing the winning entry of 2016 by a relative improvement of ${\sim }$ ∼ 25 percent. Models and code are available at https://github.com/hujie-frank/SENet .

Automatic differentiation in PyTorch

Abstract: In this article, we describe an automatic differentiation module of PyTorch — a library designed to enable rapid research on machine learning models. It builds upon a few projects, most notably Lua Torch, Chainer, and HIPS Autograd [4], and provides a high performance environment with easy access to automatic differentiation of models executed on different devices (CPU and GPU). To make prototyping easier, PyTorch does not follow the symbolic approach used in many other deep learning frameworks, but focuses on differentiation of purely imperative programs, with a focus on extensibility and low overhead. Note that this preprint is a draft of certain sections from an upcoming paper covering all PyTorch features.

DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs

Abstract: In this work we address the task of semantic image segmentation with Deep Learning and make three main contributions that are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merit. First , we highlight convolution with upsampled filters, or ‘atrous convolution’, as a powerful tool in dense prediction tasks. Atrous convolution allows us to explicitly control the resolution at which feature responses are computed within Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. It also allows us to effectively enlarge the field of view of filters to incorporate larger context without increasing the number of parameters or the amount of computation. Second , we propose atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) to robustly segment objects at multiple scales. ASPP probes an incoming convolutional feature layer with filters at multiple sampling rates and effective fields-of-views, thus capturing objects as well as image context at multiple scales. Third , we improve the localization of object boundaries by combining methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models. The commonly deployed combination of max-pooling and downsampling in DCNNs achieves invariance but has a toll on localization accuracy. We overcome this by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF), which is shown both qualitatively and quantitatively to improve localization performance. Our proposed “DeepLab” system sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 79.7 percent mIOU in the test set, and advances the results on three other datasets: PASCAL-Context, PASCAL-Person-Part, and Cityscapes. All of our code is made publicly available online.

TensorFlow: a system for large-scale machine learning

Abstract: 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.

Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold

Abstract: Proteins are essential to life, and understanding their structure can facilitate a mechanistic understanding of their function. Through an enormous experimental effort1–4, the structures of around 100,000 unique proteins have been determined5, but this represents a small fraction of the billions of known protein sequences6,7. Structural coverage is bottlenecked by the months to years of painstaking effort required to determine a single protein structure. Accurate computational approaches are needed to address this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics. Predicting the three-dimensional structure that a protein will adopt based solely on its amino acid sequence—the structure prediction component of the ‘protein folding problem’8—has been an important open research problem for more than 50 years9. Despite recent progress10–14, existing methods fall far short of atomic accuracy, especially when no homologous structure is available. Here we provide the first computational method that can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even in cases in which no similar structure is known. We validated an entirely redesigned version of our neural network-based model, AlphaFold, in the challenging 14th Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP14)15, demonstrating accuracy competitive with experimental structures in a majority of cases and greatly outperforming other methods. Underpinning the latest version of AlphaFold is a novel machine learning approach that incorporates physical and biological knowledge about protein structure, leveraging multi-sequence alignments, into the design of the deep learning algorithm. AlphaFold predicts protein structures with an accuracy competitive with experimental structures in the majority of cases using a novel deep learning architecture.