A Comparative Exploration of ML Techniques for Tuning Query Degree of Parallelism

There is a large body of recent work applying machine learning (ML) techniques to query optimization and query performance prediction in relational database management systems (RDBMSs). However, these works typically ignore the effect of \textit{intra-parallelism} -- a key component used to boost the performance of OLAP queries in practice -- on query performance prediction. In this paper, we take a first step towards filling this gap by studying the problem of \textit{tuning the degree of parallelism (DOP) via ML techniques} in Microsoft SQL Server, a popular commercial RDBMS that allows an individual query to execute using multiple cores. In our study, we cast the problem of DOP tuning as a {\em regression} task, and examine how several popular ML models can help with query performance prediction in a multi-core setting. We explore the design space and perform an extensive experimental study comparing different models against a list of performance metrics, testing how well they generalize in different settings: $(i)$ to queries from the same template, $(ii)$ to queries from a new template, $(iii)$ to instances of different scale, and $(iv)$ to different instances and queries. Our experimental results show that a simple featurization of the input query plan that ignores cost model estimations can accurately predict query performance, capture the speedup trend with respect to the available parallelism, as well as help with automatically choosing an optimal per-query DOP

Does computer vision matter for action?

Computer vision produces representations of scene content. Much computer vision research is predicated on the assumption that these intermediate representations are useful for action. Recent work at the intersection of machine learning and robotics calls this assumption into question by training sensorimotor systems directly for the task at hand, from pixels to actions, with no explicit intermediate representations. Thus the central question of our work: Does computer vision matter for action? We probe this question and its offshoots via immersive simulation, which allows us to conduct controlled reproducible experiments at scale. We instrument immersive three-dimensional environments to simulate challenges such as urban driving, off-road trail traversal, and battle. Our main finding is that computer vision does matter. Models equipped with intermediate representations train faster, achieve higher task performance, and generalize better to previously unseen environments. A video that summarizes the work and illustrates the results can be found at https://youtu.be/4MfWa2yZ0JcComment: Published in Science Robotics, 4(30), May 201

Natural Language Processing (almost) from Scratch

We propose a unified neural network architecture and learning algorithm that can be applied to various natural language processing tasks including: part-of-speech tagging, chunking, named entity recognition, and semantic role labeling. This versatility is achieved by trying to avoid task-specific engineering and therefore disregarding a lot of prior knowledge. Instead of exploiting man-made input features carefully optimized for each task, our system learns internal representations on the basis of vast amounts of mostly unlabeled training data. This work is then used as a basis for building a freely available tagging system with good performance and minimal computational requirements

Machine learning \& artificial intelligence in the quantum domain

Quantum information technologies, and intelligent learning systems, are both emergent technologies that will likely have a transforming impact on our society. The respective underlying fields of research -- quantum information (QI) versus machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) -- have their own specific challenges, which have hitherto been investigated largely independently. However, in a growing body of recent work, researchers have been probing the question to what extent these fields can learn and benefit from each other. QML explores the interaction between quantum computing and ML, investigating how results and techniques from one field can be used to solve the problems of the other. Recently, we have witnessed breakthroughs in both directions of influence. For instance, quantum computing is finding a vital application in providing speed-ups in ML, critical in our "big data" world. Conversely, ML already permeates cutting-edge technologies, and may become instrumental in advanced quantum technologies. Aside from quantum speed-up in data analysis, or classical ML optimization used in quantum experiments, quantum enhancements have also been demonstrated for interactive learning, highlighting the potential of quantum-enhanced learning agents. Finally, works exploring the use of AI for the very design of quantum experiments, and for performing parts of genuine research autonomously, have reported their first successes. Beyond the topics of mutual enhancement, researchers have also broached the fundamental issue of quantum generalizations of ML/AI concepts. This deals with questions of the very meaning of learning and intelligence in a world that is described by quantum mechanics. In this review, we describe the main ideas, recent developments, and progress in a broad spectrum of research investigating machine learning and artificial intelligence in the quantum domain.Comment: Review paper. 106 pages. 16 figure

RA-UNet: A hybrid deep attention-aware network to extract liver and tumor in CT scans

Automatic extraction of liver and tumor from CT volumes is a challenging task due to their heterogeneous and diffusive shapes. Recently, 2D and 3D deep convolutional neural networks have become popular in medical image segmentation tasks because of the utilization of large labeled datasets to learn hierarchical features. However, 3D networks have some drawbacks due to their high cost on computational resources. In this paper, we propose a 3D hybrid residual attention-aware segmentation method, named RA-UNet, to precisely extract the liver volume of interests (VOI) and segment tumors from the liver VOI. The proposed network has a basic architecture as a 3D U-Net which extracts contextual information combining low-level feature maps with high-level ones. Attention modules are stacked so that the attention-aware features change adaptively as the network goes "very deep" and this is made possible by residual learning. This is the first work that an attention residual mechanism is used to process medical volumetric images. We evaluated our framework on the public MICCAI 2017 Liver Tumor Segmentation dataset and the 3DIRCADb dataset. The results show that our architecture outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. We also extend our RA-UNet to brain tumor segmentation on the BraTS2018 and BraTS2017 datasets, and the results indicate that RA-UNet achieves good performance on a brain tumor segmentation task as well

Taking Human out of Learning Applications: A Survey on Automated Machine Learning

Machine learning techniques have deeply rooted in our everyday life. However, since it is knowledge- and labor-intensive to pursue good learning performance, human experts are heavily involved in every aspect of machine learning. In order to make machine learning techniques easier to apply and reduce the demand for experienced human experts, automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a hot topic with both industrial and academic interest. In this paper, we provide an up to date survey on AutoML. First, we introduce and define the AutoML problem, with inspiration from both realms of automation and machine learning. Then, we propose a general AutoML framework that not only covers most existing approaches to date but also can guide the design for new methods. Subsequently, we categorize and review the existing works from two aspects, i.e., the problem setup and the employed techniques. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of AutoML approaches and explain the reasons underneath their successful applications. We hope this survey can serve as not only an insightful guideline for AutoML beginners but also an inspiration for future research.Comment: This is a preliminary and will be kept update

Evolutionary aspects of Reservoir Computing

Reservoir Computing (RC) is a powerful computational paradigm that allows high versatility with cheap learning. While other artificial intelligence approaches need exhaustive resources to specify their inner workings, RC is based on a reservoir with highly non-linear dynamics that does not require a fine tuning of its parts. These dynamics project input signals into high-dimensional spaces, where training linear readouts to extract input features is vastly simplified. Thus, inexpensive learning provides very powerful tools for decision making, controlling dynamical systems, classification, etc. RC also facilitates solving multiple tasks in parallel, resulting in a high throughput. Existing literature focuses on applications in artificial intelligence and neuroscience. We review this literature from an evolutionary perspective. RC's versatility make it a great candidate to solve outstanding problems in biology, which raises relevant questions: Is RC as abundant in Nature as its advantages should imply? Has it evolved? Once evolved, can it be easily sustained? Under what circumstances? (In other words, is RC an evolutionarily stable computing paradigm?) To tackle these issues we introduce a conceptual morphospace that would map computational selective pressures that could select for or against RC and other computing paradigms. This guides a speculative discussion about the questions above and allows us to propose a solid research line that brings together computation and evolution with RC as a working bench.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, review pape

Personalized Web Services for Web Information Extraction

The field of information extraction from the Web emerged with the growth of the Web and the multiplication of online data sources. This paper is an analysis of information extraction methods. It presents a service oriented approach for web information extraction considering both web data management and extraction services. Then we propose an SOA based architecture to enhance flexibility and on-the-fly modification of web extraction services. An implementation of the proposed architecture is proposed on the middleware level of Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) servers

Personalized Saliency and its Prediction

Nearly all existing visual saliency models by far have focused on predicting a universal saliency map across all observers. Yet psychology studies suggest that visual attention of different observers can vary significantly under specific circumstances, especially a scene is composed of multiple salient objects. To study such heterogenous visual attention pattern across observers, we first construct a personalized saliency dataset and explore correlations between visual attention, personal preferences, and image contents. Specifically, we propose to decompose a personalized saliency map (referred to as PSM) into a universal saliency map (referred to as USM) predictable by existing saliency detection models and a new discrepancy map across users that characterizes personalized saliency. We then present two solutions towards predicting such discrepancy maps, i.e., a multi-task convolutional neural network (CNN) framework and an extended CNN with Person-specific Information Encoded Filters (CNN-PIEF). Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our models for PSM prediction as well their generalization capability for unseen observers.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, journa

Driver Gaze Zone Estimation using Convolutional Neural Networks: A General Framework and Ablative Analysis

Driver gaze has been shown to be an excellent surrogate for driver attention in intelligent vehicles. With the recent surge of highly autonomous vehicles, driver gaze can be useful for determining the handoff time to a human driver. While there has been significant improvement in personalized driver gaze zone estimation systems, a generalized system which is invariant to different subjects, perspectives and scales is still lacking. We take a step towards this generalized system using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We finetune 4 popular CNN architectures for this task, and provide extensive comparisons of their outputs. We additionally experiment with different input image patches, and also examine how image size affects performance. For training and testing the networks, we collect a large naturalistic driving dataset comprising of 11 long drives, driven by 10 subjects in two different cars. Our best performing model achieves an accuracy of 95.18% during cross-subject testing, outperforming current state of the art techniques for this task. Finally, we evaluate our best performing model on the publicly available Columbia Gaze Dataset comprising of images from 56 subjects with varying head pose and gaze directions. Without any training, our model successfully encodes the different gaze directions on this diverse dataset, demonstrating good generalization capabilities