Wednesday, October 28, 2015

What is Deep Learning?

Deep Learning is a buzzword which entered the mainstream thanks to some recent results capturing the attention of a global audience. Google’s Brain project learns to finds cats in videos, Facebook recognizes faces in images, Baidu recognizes visual shapes and objects, and both Baidu and Microsoft use deep learning for speech recognition. Apart from buzzwords, the most prestigious minds are world-wide working in deep learning including Jeff Dean (Google), Yann LeCun(Facebook), Andrew Ng(Baidu).

One very interesting progress made with Deep Learning is that it is now possible to learn how to extract discriminative features in an automatic way. Instead, traditional machine learning requires a lot of human effort for hand-crafting features and the machine learning was essentially a way to learn weights for balancing those features. Automatically discovering of discriminative features is indeed a big step forward toward reasoning. Machines can now learn what is important and what is not, while before humans had to pick features which were potentially important and, then, let the machines weight them at the risk of missing discriminative and fundamental information simply because it was not considered. In short, we can say that now we have Trainable Feature Extractors and Trainable Learning while before we only had the former. Auto-encoders are one tool used by Deep Learning for finding features useful for representing an input distribution.

Another interesting characteristic of Deep Learning is the ability to learn from mostly unlabelled data in a typical semi-supervised learning setting where a very large number of training examples are not having complete and correct true labels.
Yet another interesting trait of Deep Learning is the ability to learn how to approximate highly varying functions which happens when a piecewise approximation (with constant or linear pieces) of a function requires a very large number of pieces.

Deep learning uses a cascade of many layers of non linear processing units which performs feature extraction and transformation. What is still required is to compose manually the layers according the specific problem to be solved. So, the big next step would be to learn how to self-organize layers. Typically, Deep Learning compose many (recurrent) layers of ANNs with even more sophisticated generative models such as Deep Belief Networks and Deep Bolzmann Machines.
One fundamental assumption is that each level will learn more abstract concepts of the previous level. This concept is well explained in this image where the first layer learns basic features, while the second layer learns components of human face, and the third layer learns different types of faces. Hence, the learning system is a high dimensional entity able to discriminate many observed features that are related by unknown statistical relations. The learning is distributed in the sense that the the knowledge itself is not associated with one single neuron but it is the result of sharing the information within the network and the consequent activation of multiple neurons.

As shown in this image, the features become more extended and complex deeper in the network. In addition to that, multiple networks can be specialized on different concepts and learn how faces, cars, elephants, and chairs are visualized.

Advances in hardware have also been an important enabling factor for Deep Learning. In particular, powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) are highly suited for matrix and vector operations involved in machine learning and GPUs can speed up training algorithms by orders of magnitude, bringing running times of weeks back to few hours. This allows to increase the number of layers in a deep network and therefore the level of sophistication in representing models. This image gives another idea of how different levels are progressively learning more and more complex visual features.



Deep Learning network are typically trained via backpropagation where weights are updated via Stochastic Gradient Descent using an equation such as
 

so that the weight between the units  is updated at time  based on the weight available at time t plus a fraction of the partial derivative of a chosen cost function.  is the learning rate. Google built an Asynchronous Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent server where more than 16000 CPUs independently update the gradient weights for learning the rather sophisticate recognition of the concept of “cats” from a generic YouTube video.  Other types of training have been proposed including forward propagation and forward-backward propagation for Restricted Bolzmann Machines and for Recurrent Networks.      
Another rather sophisticate approach uses Convolutional networks (networks where the same weight is used in all the spatial locations in the layer) with 24 layers for annotating images with concepts showing an impressive 6.6% error rate at top 5 results, which is a result competitive with the human brain.[1]


Embedding is another key concept introduced by Deep Learning. Embedding is used to avoid the problems encountered when learning with sparse data. For instance, we can extract words from documents and then create words embedding where words are simply grouped together if they occur within a chosen text window. A word embedding  : is a parameterized function mapping words in some language to high-dimensional vectors (perhaps 200 to 500 dimensions). Embedding vectors trained for language modelling task have very interesting proprieties where it is possible to express concepts and equivalences such as the relations between capitals and countries, and the relation between the queen and the king, and the meaning of superlative[2]
This table describe a word embedding learned on a skip model trained on 783M words with 300 dimensionalities        

If you are interested in knowing more about Deep Learning, then it could be worth having a look to a very exciting keynote by the way of Andrew Ng[3]. The author of this book strongly believes that the next step for Deep Learning is to integrate progress in HPC computation (where Spark is) with GPU computation (where packages like Theano and Lasagne are). This will open the root on deep learning cloud computation also leveraging the power of GPU platforms like CUDA.[4]

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