Digests » 19

this week's favorite



How to make a racist AI without really trying

Sentiment analysis is a very frequently-implemented task in NLP, and it’s no surprise. Recognizing whether people are expressing positive or negative opinions about things has obvious business applications. It’s used in social media monitoring, customer feedback, and even automatic stock trading.

Conditional Neural Processes

Deep neural networks excel at function approximation, yet they are typically trained from scratch for each new function. On the other hand, Bayesian methods, such as Gaussian Processes (GPs), exploit prior knowledge to quickly infer the shape of a new function at test time. Yet GPs are computationally expensive, and it can be hard to design appropriate priors. In this paper we propose a family of neural models, Conditional Neural Processes (CNPs), that combine the benefits of both. CNPs are inspired by the flexibility of stochastic processes such as GPs, but are structured as neural networks and trained via gradient descent. CNPs make accurate predictions after observing only a handful of training data points, yet scale to complex functions and large datasets. We demonstrate the performance and versatility of the approach on a range of canonical machine learning tasks, including regression, classification and image completion.

An Intuitive Guide to Optimal Transport, Part II: The Wasserstein GAN made easy

In this post I will provide an intuitive explanation of the concepts behind the wGAN and discuss their motivations and implications. Moreover, instead of using weight clipping like in the original wGAN paper, I will use a new form of regularization that is in my opinion closer to the original Wasserstein loss. Implementing the method using a deep learning framework should be relatively easy after reading the post. A simple Chainer implementation is available here. Let’s get started!

Why building your own Deep Learning Computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

The machine I built costs $3k and has the parts shown below. There’s one 1080 Ti GPU to start (you can just as easily use the new 2080 Ti for Machine Learning at $500 more — just be careful to get one with a blower fan design), a 12 Core CPU, 64GB RAM, and 1TB M.2 SSD. You can add three more GPUs easily for a total of four.