A Taxonomy of Deep Convolutional Neural Nets for Computer Vision

Traditional architectures for solving computer vision problems and the degree of success they enjoyed have been heavily reliant on hand-crafted features. However, of late, deep learning techniques have offered a compelling alternative -- that of automatically learning problem-specific features. With this new paradigm, every problem in computer vision is now being re-examined from a deep learning perspective. Therefore, it has become important to understand what kind of deep networks are suitable for a given problem. Although general surveys of this fast-moving paradigm (i.e. deep-networks) exist, a survey specific to computer vision is missing. We specifically consider one form of deep networks widely used in computer vision - convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We start with "AlexNet" as our base CNN and then examine the broad variations proposed over time to suit different applications. We hope that our recipe-style survey will serve as a guide, particularly for novice practitioners intending to use deep-learning techniques for computer vision.Comment: Published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI (http://goo.gl/6691Bm

Adversarial Generation of Natural Language

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have gathered a lot of attention from the computer vision community, yielding impressive results for image generation. Advances in the adversarial generation of natural language from noise however are not commensurate with the progress made in generating images, and still lag far behind likelihood based methods. In this paper, we take a step towards generating natural language with a GAN objective alone. We introduce a simple baseline that addresses the discrete output space problem without relying on gradient estimators and show that it is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on a Chinese poem generation dataset. We present quantitative results on generating sentences from context-free and probabilistic context-free grammars, and qualitative language modeling results. A conditional version is also described that can generate sequences conditioned on sentence characteristics.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 5 table

PassGAN: A Deep Learning Approach for Password Guessing

State-of-the-art password guessing tools, such as HashCat and John the Ripper, enable users to check billions of passwords per second against password hashes. In addition to performing straightforward dictionary attacks, these tools can expand password dictionaries using password generation rules, such as concatenation of words (e.g., "password123456") and leet speak (e.g., "password" becomes "p4s5w0rd"). Although these rules work well in practice, expanding them to model further passwords is a laborious task that requires specialized expertise. To address this issue, in this paper we introduce PassGAN, a novel approach that replaces human-generated password rules with theory-grounded machine learning algorithms. Instead of relying on manual password analysis, PassGAN uses a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to autonomously learn the distribution of real passwords from actual password leaks, and to generate high-quality password guesses. Our experiments show that this approach is very promising. When we evaluated PassGAN on two large password datasets, we were able to surpass rule-based and state-of-the-art machine learning password guessing tools. However, in contrast with the other tools, PassGAN achieved this result without any a-priori knowledge on passwords or common password structures. Additionally, when we combined the output of PassGAN with the output of HashCat, we were able to match 51%-73% more passwords than with HashCat alone. This is remarkable, because it shows that PassGAN can autonomously extract a considerable number of password properties that current state-of-the art rules do not encode.Comment: This is an extended version of the paper which appeared in NeurIPS 2018 Workshop on Security in Machine Learning (SecML'18), see https://github.com/secml2018/secml2018.github.io/raw/master/PASSGAN_SECML2018.pd

Incremental construction of LSTM recurrent neural network

Long Short--Term Memory (LSTM) is a recurrent neural network that uses structures called memory blocks to allow the net remember significant events distant in the past input sequence in order to solve long time lag tasks, where other RNN approaches fail. Throughout this work we have performed experiments using LSTM networks extended with growing abilities, which we call GLSTM. Four methods of training growing LSTM has been compared. These methods include cascade and fully connected hidden layers as well as two different levels of freezing previous weights in the cascade case. GLSTM has been applied to a forecasting problem in a biomedical domain, where the input/output behavior of five controllers of the Central Nervous System control has to be modelled. We have compared growing LSTM results against other neural networks approaches, and our work applying conventional LSTM to the task at hand.Postprint (published version

Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should (a) build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; (b) ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology, to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and (c) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes towards these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models.Comment: In press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Open call for commentary proposals (until Nov. 22, 2016). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/information/calls-for-commentary/open-calls-for-commentar