Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to maximize the translation performance. The models proposed recently for neural machine translation often belong to a family of encoder-decoders and consists of an encoder that encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector from which a decoder generates a translation. In this paper, we conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and propose to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly. With this new approach, we achieve a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the task of English-to-French translation. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals that the (soft-)alignments found by the model agree well with our intuition.
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.
Scikit-learn is a Python module integrating a wide range of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms for medium-scale supervised and unsupervised problems. This package focuses on bringing machine learning to non-specialists using a general-purpose high-level language. Emphasis is put on ease of use, performance, documentation, and API consistency. It has minimal dependencies and is distributed under the simplified BSD license, encouraging its use in both academic and commercial settings. Source code, binaries, and documentation can be downloaded from http://scikit-learn.org.
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.
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an end-to-end learning approach for automated translation, with the potential to overcome many of the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based translation systems. Unfortunately, NMT systems are known to be computationally expensive both in training and in translation inference. Also, most NMT systems have difficulty with rare words. These issues have hindered NMT's use in practical deployments and services, where both accuracy and speed are essential. In this work, we present GNMT, Google's Neural Machine Translation system, which attempts to address many of these issues. Our model consists of a deep LSTM network with 8 encoder and 8 decoder layers using attention and residual connections. To improve parallelism and therefore decrease training time, our attention mechanism connects the bottom layer of the decoder to the top layer of the encoder. To accelerate the final translation speed, we employ low-precision arithmetic during inference computations. To improve handling of rare words, we divide words into a limited set of common sub-word units ("wordpieces") for both input and output. This method provides a good balance between the flexibility of "character"-delimited models and the efficiency of "word"-delimited models, naturally handles translation of rare words, and ultimately improves the overall accuracy of the system. Our beam search technique employs a length-normalization procedure and uses a coverage penalty, which encourages generation of an output sentence that is most likely to cover all the words in the source sentence. On the WMT'14 English-to-French and English-to-German benchmarks, GNMT achieves competitive results to state-of-the-art. Using a human side-by-side evaluation on a set of isolated simple sentences, it reduces translation errors by an average of 60% compared to Google's phrase-based production system.
Machine learning algorithms frequently require careful tuning of model hyperparameters, regularization terms, and optimization parameters. Unfortunately, this tuning is often a "black art" that requires expert experience, unwritten rules of thumb, or sometimes brute-force search. Much more appealing is the idea of developing automatic approaches which can optimize the performance of a given learning algorithm to the task at hand. In this work, we consider the automatic tuning problem within the framework of Bayesian optimization, in which a learning algorithm's generalization performance is modeled as a sample from a Gaussian process (GP). The tractable posterior distribution induced by the GP leads to efficient use of the information gathered by previous experiments, enabling optimal choices about what parameters to try next. Here we show how the effects of the Gaussian process prior and the associated inference procedure can have a large impact on the success or failure of Bayesian optimization. We show that thoughtful choices can lead to results that exceed expert-level performance in tuning machine learning algorithms. We also describe new algorithms that take into account the variable cost (duration) of learning experiments and that can leverage the presence of multiple cores for parallel experimentation. We show that these proposed algorithms improve on previous automatic procedures and can reach or surpass human expert-level optimization on a diverse set of contemporary algorithms including latent Dirichlet allocation, structured SVMs and convolutional neural networks.
The goal of precipitation nowcasting is to predict the future rainfall intensity in a local region over a relatively short period of time. Very few previous studies have examined this crucial and challenging weather forecasting problem from the machine learning perspective. In this paper, we formulate precipitation nowcasting as a spatiotemporal sequence forecasting problem in which both the input and the prediction target are spatiotemporal sequences. By extending the fully connected LSTM (FC-LSTM) to have convolutional structures in both the input-to-state and state-to-state transitions, we propose the convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) and use it to build an end-to-end trainable model for the precipitation nowcasting problem. Experiments show that our ConvLSTM network captures spatiotemporal correlations better and consistently outperforms FC-LSTM and the state-of-the-art operational ROVER algorithm for precipitation nowcasting.
This volume contains the papers accepted to the 24th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2007), which was held at Oregon State University in Corvalis, Oregon, from June 20th to 24th, 2007. ICML is the annual conference of the International Machine Learning Society (IMLS), and provides a venue for the presentation and discussion of current research in the field of machine learning. These proceedings can also be found online at: http://www.machinelearning.org. This year there were 522 submissions to ICML. There was a very thorough review process, in which each paper was reviewed by three program committee (PC) members. Authors were able to respond to the initial reviews, and the PC members could then modify their reviews based on online discussions and the content of this author response. For the first time this year there were two discussion periods led by the senior program committee (SPC), one just before and one after the submission of author responses. At the end of the second discussion period, the SPC members gave their recommendations and provided a summary review for each of their papers. Also for the first time, authors were asked to submit a list of changes with their final accepted papers, which was checked by the SPCs to ensure that reviewer comments had been addressed. Apart from the length restrictions on papers and the compressed time frame, the review process for ICML resembles that of many journal publications. In total, 150 papers were accepted to ICML this year, including a very small number of papers which were initially conditionally accepted, yielding an overall acceptance rate of 29%. ICML attracts submissions from machine learning researchers around the globe. The 150 accepted papers this year were geographically distributed as follows: 66 papers had a first author from the US, 32 from Europe, 19 from China or Hong Kong, 11 from Canada, 6 from India, 5 each from Australia and Japan, 3 from Israel, and 1 each from Korea, Russia and Taiwan. In addition to the main program of accepted papers, which includes both a talk and poster presentation for each paper, the ICML program included 3 workshops and 8 tutorials on machine learning topics which are currently of broad interest. We were also extremely pleased to have David Heckerman (Microsoft Research), Joshua Tenenbaum (Massachussetts Institute of Technology), and Bernhard Schölkopf (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics) as the invited speakers this year. Thanks to sponsorship by the Machine Learning Journal, we were able to award a number of outstanding student paper prizes. We were fortunate this year that ICML was co-located with the International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP 2007). ICML and ILP held joint sessions on the first day of ICML 2007.
Neural machine translation is a relatively new approach to statistical machine translation based purely on neural networks.The neural machine translation models often consist of an encoder and a decoder.The encoder extracts a fixed-length representation from a variable-length input sentence, and the decoder generates a correct translation from this representation.In this paper, we focus on analyzing the properties of the neural machine translation using two models; RNN Encoder-Decoder and a newly proposed gated recursive convolutional neural network.We show that the neural machine translation performs relatively well on short sentences without unknown words, but its performance degrades rapidly as the length of the sentence and the number of unknown words increase.Furthermore, we find that the proposed gated recursive convolutional network learns a grammatical structure of a sentence automatically.
This volume contains the papers accepted to the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2008). ICML is the annual conference of the International Machine Learning Society (IMLS), and provides a venue for the presentation and discussion of current research in the field of machine learning. These proceedings can also be found online at http://www.machinelearning.org. This year, ICML was held July 5..9 at the University of Helsinki, in Helsinki, Finland, and was co-located with COLT-2008, the 21st Annual Conference on Computational Learning Theory, and UAI-2008, the 24th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. No less than 583 papers were submitted to ICML 2008. There was a very thorough review process, in which each paper was reviewed double-blind by three program committee (PC) members. Authors were able to respond to the initial reviews, and the PC members could then modify their reviews based on online discussions and the content of this author response. There were two discussion periods led by the senior program committee (SPC), one just before and one after the submission of author responses. At the end of the second discussion period, the SPC members gave their recommendations and provided a summary review for each of their papers. Some papers were checked by the SPCs to ensure that reviewer comments had been addressed. Apart from the length restrictions on papers and the compressed time frame, the review process for ICML resembles that of many journal publications. In total, 158 papers were accepted to ICML this year, including a small number of papers which were initially conditionally accepted, yielding an overall acceptance rate of 27%. ICML authors presented their papers both orally and in a poster session, allowing time for detailed discussions with any interested attendees of the conference. Each day of the main conference included one or two invited talks by a prominent researcher. We were very fortunate to be able to host Michael Collins, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Andrew Ng, of Stanford University; and Luc De Raedt, of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and John Winn of Microsoft Research Cambridge. In addition to the technical talks, ICML- 2008 also included nine tutorials held before the main conference, presented by Alex Smola, Arthur Gretton, and Kenji Fukumizu; Bert Kappen and Marc Toussaint; Neil Lawrence; MartinWainwright; Ralf Herbrich and Thore Graepel; Andreas Krause and Carlos Guestrin; Shai Shalev-Shwartz and Yoram Singer; Rob Fergus; and Matthias Seeger. This year our workshops were organized jointly with COLT and UAI as part of a special overlap day, consisting of eleven workshops selected and arranged collaboratively by the respective workshop chairs of the three conferences. This day provided a rich opportunity for interaction among the attendees of the conferences. This year, ICML enlarged its award offerings to match several other well-established conferences. We hope these will help build our community, celebrate our advances, and encourage applications and long-term thinking. In addition to our previously traditional Paper and Student Paper awards, we also gave awards for Application Paper and 10-year Best Paper (for the best paper of ICML 1998, optionally given in conjunction with a co-located conference). We thank the Machine Learning Journal for sponsoring some of our paper awards.
Algorithms for constructing decision trees are among the most well known and widely used of all machine learning methods. Among decision tree algorithms, J. Ross Quinlan's ID3 and its successor, C4.5, are probably the most popular in the machine learning community. These algorithms and variations on them have been the subject of numerous research papers since Quinlan introduced ID3. Until recently, most researchers looking for an introduction to decision trees turned to Quinlan's seminal 1986 Machine Learning journal article [Quinlan, 1986]. In his new book, C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning, Quinlan has put together a definitive, much needed description of his complete system, including the latest developments. As such, this book will be a welcome addition to the library of many researchers and students.
Machine learning addresses the question of how to build computers that improve automatically through experience. It is one of today's most rapidly growing technical fields, lying at the intersection of computer science and statistics, and at the core of artificial intelligence and data science. Recent progress in machine learning has been driven both by the development of new learning algorithms and theory and by the ongoing explosion in the availability of online data and low-cost computation. The adoption of data-intensive machine-learning methods can be found throughout science, technology and commerce, leading to more evidence-based decision-making across many walks of life, including health care, manufacturing, education, financial modeling, policing, and marketing.
Due to the simplicity of their implementations, least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) and proximal support vector machine (PSVM) have been widely used in binary classification applications. The conventional LS-SVM and PSVM cannot be used in regression and multiclass classification applications directly, although variants of LS-SVM and PSVM have been proposed to handle such cases. This paper shows that both LS-SVM and PSVM can be simplified further and a unified learning framework of LS-SVM, PSVM, and other regularization algorithms referred to extreme learning machine (ELM) can be built. ELM works for the "generalized" single-hidden-layer feedforward networks (SLFNs), but the hidden layer (or called feature mapping) in ELM need not be tuned. Such SLFNs include but are not limited to SVM, polynomial network, and the conventional feedforward neural networks. This paper shows the following: 1) ELM provides a unified learning platform with a widespread type of feature mappings and can be applied in regression and multiclass classification applications directly; 2) from the optimization method point of view, ELM has milder optimization constraints compared to LS-SVM and PSVM; 3) in theory, compared to ELM, LS-SVM and PSVM achieve suboptimal solutions and require higher computational complexity; and 4) in theory, ELM can approximate any target continuous function and classify any disjoint regions. As verified by the simulation results, ELM tends to have better scalability and achieve similar (for regression and binary class cases) or much better (for multiclass cases) generalization performance at much faster learning speed (up to thousands times) than traditional SVM and LS-SVM.
As with any burgeoning technology that enjoys commercial attention, the use of data mining is surrounded by a great deal of hype. Exaggerated reports tell of secrets that can be uncovered by setting algorithms loose on oceans of data. But there is no magic in machine learning, no hidden power, no alchemy. Instead there is an identifiable body of practical techniques that can extract useful information from raw data. This book describes these techniques and shows how they work. The book is a major revision of the first edition that appeared in 1999. While the basic core remains the same, it has been updated to reflect the changes that have taken place over five years, and now has nearly double the references. The highlights for the new edition include thirty new technique sections; an enhanced Weka machine learning workbench, which now features an interactive interface; comprehensive information on neural networks; a new section on Bayesian networks; plus much more.
This book is the first comprehensive introduction to Support Vector Machines (SVMs), a new generation learning system based on recent advances in statistical learning theory. The book also introduces Bayesian analysis of learning and relates SVMs to Gaussian Processes and other kernel based learning methods. SVMs deliver state-of-the-art performance in real-world applications such as text categorisation, hand-written character recognition, image classification, biosequences analysis, etc. Their first introduction in the early 1990s lead to a recent explosion of applications and deepening theoretical analysis, that has now established Support Vector Machines along with neural networks as one of the standard tools for machine learning and data mining. Students will find the book both stimulating and accessible, while practitioners will be guided smoothly through the material required for a good grasp of the theory and application of these techniques. The concepts are introduced gradually in accessible and self-contained stages, though in each stage the presentation is rigorous and thorough. Pointers to relevant literature and web sites containing software ensure that it forms an ideal starting point for further study. Equally the book will equip the practitioner to apply the techniques and an associated web site will provide pointers to updated literature, new applications, and on-line software
Gradient boosting machines are a family of powerful machine-learning techniques that have shown considerable success in a wide range of practical applications. They are highly customizable to the particular needs of the application, like being learned with respect to different loss functions. This article gives a tutorial introduction into the methodology of gradient boosting methods with a strong focus on machine learning aspects of modeling. A theoretical information is complemented with descriptive examples and illustrations which cover all the stages of the gradient boosting model design. Considerations on handling the model complexity are discussed. Three practical examples of gradient boosting applications are presented and comprehensively analyzed.
This is the first comprehensive introduction to Support Vector Machines (SVMs), a generation learning system based on recent advances in statistical learning theory. SVMs deliver state-of-the-art performance in real-world applications such as text categorisation, hand-written character recognition, image classification, biosequences analysis, etc., and are now established as one of the standard tools for machine learning and data mining. Students will find the book both stimulating and accessible, while practitioners will be guided smoothly through the material required for a good grasp of the theory and its applications. The concepts are introduced gradually in accessible and self-contained stages, while the presentation is rigorous and thorough. Pointers to relevant literature and web sites containing software ensure that it forms an ideal starting point for further study. Equally, the book and its associated web site will guide practitioners to updated literature, new applications, and on-line software.
Today's Web-enabled deluge of electronic data calls for automated methods of data analysis. Machine learning provides these, developing methods that can automatically detect patterns in data and then use the uncovered patterns to predict future data. This textbook offers a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to the field of machine learning, based on a unified, probabilistic approach. The coverage combines breadth and depth, offering necessary background material on such topics as probability, optimization, and linear algebra as well as discussion of recent developments in the field, including conditional random fields, L1 regularization, and deep learning. The book is written in an informal, accessible style, complete with pseudo-code for the most important algorithms. All topics are copiously illustrated with color images and worked examples drawn from such application domains as biology, text processing, computer vision, and robotics. Rather than providing a cookbook of different heuristic methods, the book stresses a principled model-based approach, often using the language of graphical models to specify models in a concise and intuitive way. Almost all the models described have been implemented in a MATLAB software package--PMTK (probabilistic modeling toolkit)--that is freely available online. The book is suitable for upper-level undergraduates with an introductory-level college math background and beginning graduate students.
The automated categorization (or classification) of texts into predefined categories has witnessed a booming interest in the last 10 years, due to the increased availability of documents in digital form and the ensuing need to organize them. In the research community the dominant approach to this problem is based on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of preclassified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The advantages of this approach over the knowledge engineering approach (consisting in the manual definition of a classifier by domain experts) are a very good effectiveness, considerable savings in terms of expert labor power, and straightforward portability to different domains. This survey discusses the main approaches to text categorization that fall within the machine learning paradigm. We will discuss in detail issues pertaining to three different problems, namely, document representation, classifier construction, and classifier evaluation.
A general method, suitable for fast computing machines, for investigating such properties as equations of state for substances consisting of interacting individual molecules is described. The method consists of a modified Monte Carlo integration over configuration space. Results for the two-dimensional rigid-sphere system have been obtained on the Los Alamos MANIAC and are presented here. These results are compared to the free volume equation of state and to a four-term virial coefficient expansion.