Publications

Building End-To-End Dialogue Systems Using Generative Hierarchical Neural Network Models
We investigate the task of building open domain, conversational dialogue systems based on large dialogue corpora using generative models. Ge… (voir plus)nerative models produce system responses that are autonomously generated word-by-word, opening up the possibility for realistic, flexible interactions. In support of this goal, we extend the recently proposed hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder neural network to the dialogue domain, and demonstrate that this model is competitive with state-of-the-art neural language models and back-off n-gram models. We investigate the limitations of this and similar approaches, and show how its performance can be improved by bootstrapping the learning from a larger question-answer pair corpus and from pretrained word embeddings.
A Controller Recognizer Framework: How necessary is recognition for control?
Recently there has been growing interest in building active visual object recognizers, as opposed to the usual passive recognizers which cla… (voir plus)ssifies a given static image into a predefined set of object categories. In this paper we propose to generalize these recently proposed end-to-end active visual recognizers into a controller-recognizer framework. A model in the controller-recognizer framework consists of a controller, which interfaces with an external manipulator, and a recognizer which classifies the visual input adjusted by the manipulator. We describe two most recently proposed controller-recognizer models: recurrent attention model and spatial transformer network as representative examples of controller-recognizer models. Based on this description we observe that most existing end-to-end controller-recognizers tightly, or completely, couple a controller and recognizer. We ask a question whether this tight coupling is necessary, and try to answer this empirically by building a controller-recognizer model with a decoupled controller and recognizer. Our experiments revealed that it is not always necessary to tightly couple them and that by decoupling a controller and recognizer, there is a possibility of building a generic controller that is pretrained and works together with any subsequent recognizer.
Variance Reduction in SGD by Distributed Importance Sampling
Humans are able to accelerate their learning by selecting training materials that are the most informative and at the appropriate level of d… (voir plus)ifficulty. We propose a framework for distributing deep learning in which one set of workers search for the most informative examples in parallel while a single worker updates the model on examples selected by importance sampling. This leads the model to update using an unbiased estimate of the gradient which also has minimum variance when the sampling proposal is proportional to the L2-norm of the gradient. We show experimentally that this method reduces gradient variance even in a context where the cost of synchronization across machines cannot be ignored, and where the factors for importance sampling are not updated instantly across the training set.
Fault-Tolerant Associative Memories Based on $c$-Partite Graphs
François Leduc-Primeau
Michael G. Rabbat
Warren J. Gross
Associative memories allow the retrieval of previously stored messages given a part of their content. In this paper, we are interested in as… (voir plus)sociative memories based on c-partite graphs that were recently introduced. These memories are almost optimal in terms of the amount of storage they require (efficiency) and allow retrieving messages with low complexity. We propose a generic implementation model for the retrieval algorithm that can be readily mapped to an integrated circuit and study the retrieval performance when hardware components are affected by faults. We show using analytical and simulation results that these associative memories can be made resilient to circuit faults with a minor modification of the retrieval algorithm. In one example, the memory retains 88% of its efficiency when 1% of the storage cells are faulty, or 98% when 0.1% of the binary outputs of the retrieval algorithm are faulty. When considering storage faults, the fault tolerance exhibited by the proposed associative memory can be comparable to using a capacity-achieving error correction code for protecting the stored information.
Discriminative Regularization for Generative Models
We explore the question of whether the representations learned by classifiers can be used to enhance the quality of generative models. Our c… (voir plus)onjecture is that labels correspond to characteristics of natural data which are most salient to humans: identity in faces, objects in images, and utterances in speech. We propose to take advantage of this by using the representations from discriminative classifiers to augment the objective function corresponding to a generative model. In particular we enhance the objective function of the variational autoencoder, a popular generative model, with a discriminative regularization term. We show that enhancing the objective function in this way leads to samples that are clearer and have higher visual quality than the samples from the standard variational autoencoders.
Deep Learning Vector Quantization
. While deep neural nets (DNN’s) achieve impressive performance on image recognition tasks, previous studies have reported that DNN’s gi… (voir plus)ve high confidence predictions for unrecognizable images. Motivated by the observation that such fooling examples might be caused by the extrapolating nature of the log-softmax, we propose to combine neural networks with Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ). Our proposed method, called Deep LVQ (DLVQ), achieves comparable performance on MNIST while being more robust against fooling and adversarial examples.
Editorial on Special Issue on Probabilistic Models for Biomedical Image Analysis.
Manuel Jorge Cardoso
William M. Wells III
Albert C. S. Chung
Former NASA chief unveils $ 100 million neural chip maker KnuEdge
C. Strasser
Dean Takahashi
Tim Klinger
Gerald Tesauro
Kartik Talamadupula
Bowen Zhou
Medium, Moore Data, Carly Strasser from June 07, 2016 Open access to research articles has been in the news quite a bit lately (see the SciH… (voir plus)ub controversy, the preprints in biology discussion, and the European Union’s recent announcement). The Data-Driven Discovery team at the Moore Foundation has also been discussing open access, particularly as it relates to the publications generated by our #MooreData researchers. Our grantee population is fairly progressive when it comes to open science, and many of the outputs that they generate are already publicly available (including proposals, software, workflows, and publications). It is therefore easy for us to imagine that they would embrace a policy that mandates open access for research articles that they produce. That said, we are always open to discussions!
Medical Computer Vision and Bayesian and Graphical Models for Biomedical Imaging
Henning Müller
B. Kelm
Weidong (Tom) Cai
M. Jorge Cardoso
Georg Langs
Bjoern Menze
Dimitris N. Metaxas
Albert A. Montillo
William Wells
Shaoting Zhang
Albert C.S. Chung
M. Jenkinson
Annemie Ribbens
Professor Forcing: A New Algorithm for Training Recurrent Networks
The Teacher Forcing algorithm trains recurrent networks by supplying observed sequence values as inputs during training and using the networ… (voir plus)k’s own one-step-ahead predictions to do multi-step sampling. We introduce the Professor Forcing algorithm, which uses adversarial domain adaptation to encourage the dynamics of the recurrent network to be the same when training the network and when sampling from the network over multiple time steps. We apply Professor Forcing to language modeling, vocal synthesis on raw waveforms, handwriting generation, and image generation. Empirically we find that Professor Forcing acts as a regularizer, improving test likelihood on character level Penn Treebank and sequential MNIST. We also find that the model qualitatively improves samples, especially when sampling for a large number of time steps. This is supported by human evaluation of sample quality. Trade-offs between Professor Forcing and Scheduled Sampling are discussed. We produce T-SNEs showing that Professor Forcing successfully makes the dynamics of the network during training and sampling more similar.
Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions
Rami Al-Rfou
Amjad Almahairi
Christof Angermueller
Frédéric Bastien
Justin Bayer
Anatoly Belikov
Alexander Belopolsky
Josh Bleecher Snyder
Pierre-Luc Carrier
Paul Christiano
Myriam Côté
Yann N. Dauphin
Julien Demouth
Sander Dieleman
Ziye Fan
Mathieu Germain
Matt Graham
Balázs Hidasi
Arjun Jain
Kai Jia
Mikhail Korobov
Vivek Kulkarni
Pascal Lamblin
Eric Larsen
Sean Lee
Simon Lefrancois
Jesse A. Livezey
Cory Lorenz
Jeremiah Lowin
Qianli Ma
Robert T. McGibbon
Mehdi Mirza
Alberto Orlandi
Christopher Pal
Colin Raffel
Daniel Renshaw
Matthew Rocklin
Adriana Romero
Markus Roth
Peter Sadowski
John Salvatier
Jan Schlüter
John Schulman
Gabriel Schwartz
Iulian Vlad Serban
Samira Shabanian
Sigurd Spieckermann
S. Ramana Subramanyam
Gijs van Tulder
Sebastian Urban
Dustin J. Webb
Matthew Willson
Lijun Xue
Theano is a Python library that allows to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficie… (voir plus)ntly. Since its introduction, it has been one of the most used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers - especially in the machine learning community - and has shown steady performance improvements. Theano is being actively and continuously developed since 2008, multiple frameworks have been built on top of it and it has been used to produce many state-of-the-art machine learning models. The present article is structured as follows. Section I provides an overview of the Theano software and its community. Section II presents the principal features of Theano and how to use them, and compares them with other similar projects. Section III focuses on recently-introduced functionalities and improvements. Section IV compares the performance of Theano against Torch7 and TensorFlow on several machine learning models. Section V discusses current limitations of Theano and potential ways of improving it.
Zoneout: Regularizing RNNs by Randomly Preserving Hidden Activations
We propose zoneout, a novel method for regularizing RNNs. At each timestep, zoneout stochastically forces some hidden units to maintain thei… (voir plus)r previous values. Like dropout, zoneout uses random noise to train a pseudo-ensemble, improving generalization. But by preserving instead of dropping hidden units, gradient information and state information are more readily propagated through time, as in feedforward stochastic depth networks. We perform an empirical investigation of various RNN regularizers, and find that zoneout gives significant performance improvements across tasks. We achieve competitive results with relatively simple models in character- and word-level language modelling on the Penn Treebank and Text8 datasets, and combining with recurrent batch normalization yields state-of-the-art results on permuted sequential MNIST.