Google Brain researchers published this amazing paper, with accompanying GIF where they show the true power of AutoML.
AutoML stands for automated machine learning, and basically refers to an algorithm autonomously building the best machine learning model for a given problem.
This task of selecting the best ML model is difficult as it is. There are many different ML algorithms to choose from, and each of these has many different settings ([hyper]parameters) you can change to optimalize the model’s predictions.
For instance, let’s look at one specific ML algorithm: the neural network. Not only can we try out millions of different neural network architectures (ways in which the nodes and lyers of a network are connected), but each of these we can test with different loss functions, learning rates, dropout rates, et cetera. And this is only one algorithm!
In their new paper, the Google Brain scholars display how they managed to automatically discover complete machine learning algorithms just using basic mathematical operations as building blocks. Using evolutionary principles, they have developed an AutoML framework that tailors its own algorithms and architectures to best fit the data and problem at hand.
This is AI research at its finest, and the results are truly remarkable!
Sometimes I find these AI / programming hobby projects that I just wished I had thought of…
Will Stedden combined OpenAI’s GPT-2 deep learning text generation model with another deep-learning language model by Google called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and created an elaborate architecture that had one purpose: posting the best replies on Reddit.
The architecture is shown at the end of this post — copied from Will’s original bloghere. Moreover, you can read this post for details regarding the construction of the system. But let me see whether I can explain you what it does in simple language.
The below is what a Reddit comment and reply thread looks like. We have str8cokane making a comment to an original post (not in the picture), and then tupperware-party making a reply to that comment, followed by another reply by str8cokane. Basically, Will wanted to create an AI/bot that could write replies like tupperware-party that real people like str8cokane would not be able to distinguish from “real-people” replies.
Note that with 4 points, str8cokane‘s original comments was “liked” more than tupperware-party‘s reply and str8cokane‘s next reply, which were only upvoted 2 and 1 times respectively.
So here’s what the final architecture looks like, and my attempt to explain it to you.
Basically, we start in the upper left corner, where Will uses a database (i.e. corpus) of Reddit comments and replies to fine-tune a standard, pretrained GPT-2 model to get it to be good at generating (red: “fake”) realistic Reddit replies.
Next, in the upper middle section, these fake replies are piped into a standard, pretrained BERT model, along with the original, real Reddit comments and replies. This way the BERT model sees both real and fake comments and replies. Now, our goal is to make replies that are undistinguishable from real replies. Hence, this is the task the BERT model gets. And we keep fine-tuning the original GPT-2 generator until the BERT discriminator that follows is no longer able to distinguish fake from real replies. Then the generator is “fooling” the discriminator, and we know we are generating fake replies that look like real ones! You can find more information about such generative adversarial networks here.
Next, in the top right corner, we fine-tune another BERT model. This time we give it the original Reddit comments and replies along with the amount of times they were upvoted (i.e. sort of like likes on facebook/twitter). Basically, we train a BERT model to predict for a given reply, how much likes it is going to get.
Finally, we can go to production in the lower lane. We give a real-life comment to the GPT-2 generator we trained in the upper left corner, which produces several fake replies for us. These candidates we run through the BERT discriminator we trained in the upper middle section, which determined which of the fake replies we generated look most real. Those fake but realistic replies are then input into our trained BERT model of the top right corner, which predicts for every fake but realistic reply the amount of likes/upvotes it is going to get. Finally, we pick and reply with the fake but realistic reply that is predicted to get the most upvotes!
What Will’s final architecture, combining GPT-2 and BERT, looked like (via bonkerfield.org)
The results are astonishing! Will’s bot sounds like a real youngster internet troll! Do have a look at the original blog, but here are some examples. Note that tupperware-party — the Reddit user from the above example — is actually Will’s AI.
Will ends his blog with a link to the tutorial if you want to build such a bot yourself. Have a try!
Moreover, he also notes the ethical concerns:
I know there are definitely some ethical considerations when creating something like this. The reason I’m presenting it is because I actually think it is better for more people to know about and be able to grapple with this kind of technology. If just a few people know about the capacity of these machines, then it is more likely that those small groups of people can abuse their advantage.
I also think that this technology is going to change the way we think about what’s important about being human. After all, if a computer can effectively automate the paper-pushing jobs we’ve constructed and all the bullshit we create on the internet to distract us, then maybe it’ll be time for us to move on to something more meaningful.
If you think what I’ve done is a problem feel free to email me , or publically shame me on Twitter.
Ryan Holbrook made awesome animated GIFs in R of several classifiers learning a decision rule boundary between two classes. Basically, what you see is a machine learning model in action, learning how to distinguish data of two classes, say cats and dogs, using some X and Y variables.
These visuals can be great to understand these algorithms, the models, and their learning process a bit better.
Here’s the original tweet, with the logistic regression animation. If you follow it, you will find a whole thread of classifier GIFs. These I extracted, pasted, and explained below.
A thread of classifiers learning a decision rule. Dashed line is optimal boundary. Animations with #gganimate by @thomasp85 and @drob. #rstats
Logistic regression {stats::glm} with each class having normally distributed features. (1/n) pic.twitter.com/kKmqdO2zGy
Below is the GIF which I extracted using EZgif.com.
What you see is observations from two classes, say cats and dogs, each represented using colored dots. The dots are placed along X and Y axes, which represent variables about the observations. Their tail lengths and their hairyness, for instance.
Now there’s an optimal way to seperate these classes, which is the dashed line. That line best seperates the cats from the dogs based on these two variables X and Y. As this is an optimal boundary given this data, it is stable, it does not change.
However, there’s also a solid black line, which does change. This line represents the learned boundary by the machine learning model, in this case using logistic regression. As the model is shown more data, it learns, and the boundary is updated. This learned boundary represents the best line with which the model has learned to seperate cats from dogs.
Anything above the boundary is predicted to be class 1, a dog. Everything below predicted to be class 2, a cat. As logistic regression results in a linear model, the seperation boundary is very much linear/straight.
Logistic regression gif by Ryan Holbrook
These animations are great to get a sense of how the models come to their boundaries in the back-end.
For instance, other machine learning models are able to use non-linear boundaries to dinstinguish classes, such as this quadratic discriminant analysis (qda). This “learned” boundary is much closer to the optimal boundary:
Quadratic discriminant analysis gif by Ryan Holbrook
Multivariate adaptive regression splines gif by Ryan Holbrook
Next, we have the k-nearest neighbors algorithm, which predicts for each point (animal) the class (cat/dog) based on the “k” points closest to it. As you see, this results in a highly fluctuating, localized boundary.
K-nearest neighbors gif by Ryan Holbrook
Now, Ryan decided to push the challenge, and simulate new data for two classes with a more difficult decision boundary. The new data and optimal boundaries look like this:
On these data, Ryan put a whole range of non-linear models to work.
Like this support-vector machine, which tries to create optimal boundaries built of support vectors around all the cats and all the dohs (this is definitely not a technical, error-free explanation of what’s happening here).
Let’s jump into some tree-based algorithms and the resulting models. A decision tree classifies data based on multiple, sequential, binary splits. Here, Ryan trained a simple decision tree:
Decision tree gif by Ryan Holbrook
As well as it’s big brother, a random forest, which uses hundreds of trees in the back end and thus results in a more flexible boundary:
Random forest gif by Ryan Holbrook
Extreme gradient boosting is also a tree-based algorithm, which leverages many machine learning techniques to optimize the bias-variance tradeoff. Here’s an earlier blog on how to get started with Xgboost in Python or R:
The following are my summary and take-aways from Janelle Shane’s 2019 book named You look like a thing and I love you. Most of the below are excerpts from Janelle’s book, combined, or rewritten by me. For the sake of copyright, just consider everything Janelle’s : )
AI weirdness
You look like a thing and I love you is about AI. More specifically, the book is about what AI can and can not do. And how and why AI often fails in miserably hilareous ways.
Janelle has spend her time foing fun experiments with AI. In this book, she shares those experiments along with many real life examples of AIs in practice. While explaining the technical details behind these AIs in an accesible though technically correct way, she informs the reader where, how, and why AIs fail.
Janelle took AIs out of their comfort zone and it produced some hilareously weird results. She proposes five principles of AI Weirdness:
The danger of AI is not that it’s too smart, but that it’s not smart enough
AI has the approximate brainpower of a worm
AI does not really understand the problem you want it to solve
But: AI will do exactly what you tell it to. Or at least it will try its best.
And AI willt ake the path of the least resistance
Definitions: What is (not) AI?
If it seems like AI is everywhere, it’s partly because Artificial Intelligence means lots of things, depending on whether you’re reading science fiction or selling a new app or doing academic research.
To spot an AI in the wild, it’s important to know the difference between machine learning algorithms (what Janelle calls AI in her book) and traditional, rules-based programs.
To solve a problem with a rules-based program, you have to know every step required to complete the program’s task and how to describe each one of those steps. But a machine learning algorithm figures out the rules for itself via trail and error, gauging its success on goals the programmer has specified. As the AI tries to reach this goal, it can discover rules and correlations that the programmer didn’t even know existed. This is what makes AIs attractive problem solvers and is particularly handy if the rules are really complicated or just plain mysterious.
Sometimes an AI’s brilliant problem-solving rules actually rely on mistaken assumptions. Rules that served it well in training but fail miserably when it encountered the real world. While training errors are common in complex AIs, the consequences of these mistakes can be serious.
It’s often not easy to tell when AIs make mistakes. Since we don’t write the rules, they come up with their own, and they don’t write them down or explain them the way a human would.
The difference between succesful AI problem solving and failure usually has a lot to do with the suitability of the task for an AI solution. And there are plenty of tasks for which AI solutions are more efficient than human solutions. But there are also plenty of cases where things go miserably wrong.
Janelle proposes four signs of “AI Doom”, contexts where machine learning will not produce the desired results:
The problem is too hard, broad, or complex
The problem is not what we thought it was
There are sneaky shortcuts to solving the problem
The AI tried to solve the problem learning from flawed data
Programming an AI is almost more like teaching a child than programming a computer.
Explaining how AI works
In her book, Janelle takes us through many example problems which she or others tried to solve using AIs. These example problems are increasingly hilareous, but I assure you that they are technically and didactically sound:
Playing tic-tac-toe
Managing a cockroach farm
Riding a bicycle
Rating sandwich deliciousness
Tossing a sandwich into a wall
Guiding people through a hallway
Answering questions regarding photo’s
Categorizing doodles
Categorizing fish
Tossing pancakes
Autonomous walking
Autonomous driving
Playing Pacman
The amazing thing is these ridiculous example problems actually serve a purpose. They are used to explain different algorithms and their applications, strengths, and limitations! Janelle covers a wide variety of algorithms in such a way that anyone new to machine learning would understand, while people with some experience will still be amused.
Janelle talks about artificial neural networks, random forests, and markov chains. Moreover, she explains how activation functions, recurrancy and long short-term memory, evolutionary algorithms and gradient descent work. And all in understandable though technically correct language.
Janelle herself seems particularly fond of generative algorithms. She’s elaborates on having deployed recurrent neural nets, generative adversial networks, and markov chains for a wide variety of generative tasks. In the book, Jabekke explains what went well and went wrong when coming up with new and original…
Janelle’s book is lingered with examples of failing AI. As a matter of fact, the whole book seems like an ode to how machine learning can and will inevitably fail. Particularly in the latter chapters, Janelle covers many limitations of and issues with AI in much detail:
I have yet to come across a book that explain AI in this much detail and in a manner as accessible and entertaining as Janelle Shane does in You look like a thing and I love you. Janelle makes machine learning and AI understandable for a wide public without passing on the deeper technical details. Taking a critical stance, she provides a good overview of the strenghts and weaknesses of AI, and a realistic outlook for the future to come. This book is not looking for sensation or hype, although reading it will be a most amusing experience for the more technical as well as the lay reader.
I highly recommend you reward yourself with a copy!
The repository consists of tools for multiple languages (R, Python, Matlab, Java) and resources in the form of:
Books & Academic Papers
Online Courses and Videos
Outlier Datasets
Algorithms and Applications
Open-source and Commercial Libraries/Toolkits
Key Conferences & Journals
Outlier Detection (also known as Anomaly Detection) is an exciting yet challenging field, which aims to identify outlying objects that are deviant from the general data distribution. Outlier detection has been proven critical in many fields, such as credit card fraud analytics, network intrusion detection, and mechanical unit defect detection.
Xander Steenbrugge shared his latest work on LinkedIn yesterday, and I was completely stunned!
Xander had been working on, what he called, a “fun side-project”, but which was in my eyes, absolutely awesome. He had used two generative adversarial networks (GANs) to teach one another how to respond visually to changing audio cues.
This resulted in the generation of stunning audio-visual fanatasy worlds that are complete brain porn. You just can’t stop staring. So much is happening in these video’s; everything looks familiar, whereas nothing really represent anything realistic. There’s always a sliver of reality before the visual shapes morph to their next form.
Have a look yourself at the video’s on Xander’s new Youtube channel “Neural Synesthesia“ dedicated to this project. The videos are also hosted here on Vimeo, where they are rendered in higher resolution even.
This is my favorite video, but there are more below.
Amazing how the image responds to changes in the music, right? I suspect Xander let’s the algorithm traverse some latent space with spaces that are determined by the bass, trebble, and other audio-cues.
Here’s another one of Xander’s videos, with the same audio track as background:
But Xander didn’t limit his GANs to generating landscapes and still paintings, but he also dared to do some human faces. These also turned out amazing.
Both the left and right face seem to start out in about the same position/seed in the latent space, but traverse in different, though still similar directions, morphing into all kinds of reaslistic and more alien forms. The result is simply out of this world!
Curious to see where this project and others head as we continue to see development in this GAN field. This must turn the world of design and art up side down in the coming decade…
A beautiful machine-generated still from the Neural Synthesia videos (link)
Last week, this interesting reddit thread was filled with overviews for cool projects that may help you learn a programming language. The top entries are:
