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attention deep learning deep neural network neural machine translation recurrent neural network

Some Useful Links on Neural Machine Translation

Some good resources for NNMT

Tutorial:

a bit special: Tensor2Tensor uses a novel architecture instead of pure RNN/CNN decoder/encoder.   It gives a surprisingly large amount of gain.  So it’s likely that it will become a trend in NNMT in the future.

Important papers:

  • Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder–Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation by Cho Et al. (link) – Very innovative and smart paper by Kyunghyun Cho.  It also introduces GRU.
  • Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks by Ilya Sutskever (link) – By Google’s researchers, and perhaps it shows for the first time an NMT system is comparable to the traditional pipeline.
  • Google’s Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation (link)
  • Neural Machine Translation by Joint Learning to Align and Translate by Dzmitry Bahdanau (link) – The paper which introduce attention
  • Neural Machine Translation by Min-Thuong Luong (link)
  • Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation by Min-Thuong Luong (link) – On how to improve attention approach based on local attention.
  • Massive Exploration of Neural Machine Translation Architectures by Britz et al (link)
  • Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks for Discourse Compositionality by Kalchbrenner and Blunsom (link)

Important Blog Posts/Web page:

Summarization:

Usage in Dialogue System:

Others: (Unsorted, and seems less important)

Categories
DBN deep leaerning deep learning deep neural network energy-based models ESN Geoff Hinton Machine Learning RBM recurrent neural network

A Review on Hinton’s Coursera “Neural Networks and Machine Learning”

CajalCerebellum
Cajal’s drawing chick cerebellum cells, from Estructura de los centros nerviosos de las aves, Madrid, 1905

For me, finishing Hinton’s deep learning class, or Neural Networks and Machine Learning(NNML) is a long overdue task. As you know, the class was first launched back in 2012. I was not so convinced by deep learning back then. Of course, my mind changed at around 2013, but the class was archived. Not until 2 years later I decided to take Andrew Ng’s class on ML, and finally I was able to loop through the Hinton’s class once. But only last year October when the class relaunched, I decided to take it again, i.e watch all videos the second times, finish all homework and get passing grades for the course. As you read through my journey, this class is hard.  So some videos I watched it 4-5 times before groking what Hinton said. Some assignments made me takes long walks to think through. Finally I made through all 20 assignments, even bought a certificate for bragging right; It’s a refreshing, thought-provoking and satisfying experience.

So this piece is my review on the class, why you should take it and when.  I also discuss one question which has been floating around forums from time to time: Given all these deep learning classes now, is the Hinton’s class outdated?   Or is it still the best beginner class? I will chime in on the issue at the end of this review.

The Old Format Is Tough

I admire people who could finish this class in the Coursera’s old format.  NNML is well-known to be much harder than Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning as multiple reviews said (here, here).  Many of my friends who have PhD cannot quite follow what Hinton said in the last half of the class.

No wonder: at the time when Kapathay reviewed it in 2013, he noted that there was an influx of non-MLers were working on the course. For new-comers, it must be mesmerizing for them to understand topics such as energy-based models, which many people have hard time to follow.   Or what about deep belief network (DBN)? Which people these days still mix up with deep neural network (DNN).  And quite frankly I still don’t grok some of the proofs in lecture 15 after going through the course because deep belief networks are difficult material.

The old format only allows 3 trials in quiz, with tight deadlines, and you only have one chance to finish the course.  One homework requires deriving the matrix form of backprop from scratch.  All of these make the class unsuitable for busy individuals (like me).  But more for second to third year graduate students, or even experienced practitioners who have plenty of time (but, who do?).

The New Format Is Easier, but Still Challenging

I took the class last year October, when Coursera had changed most classes to the new format, which allows students to re-take.  [1]  It strips out some difficulty of the task, but it’s more suitable for busy people.   That doesn’t mean you can go easy on the class : for the most part, you would need to review the lectures, work out the Math, draft pseudocode etc.   The homework requires you to derive backprop is still there.  The upside: you can still have all the fun of deep learning. 🙂 The downside:  you shouldn’t expect going through the class without spending 10-15 hours/week.

Why the Class is Challenging –  I: The Math

Unlike Ng’s and cs231n, NNML is not too easy for beginners without background in calculus.   The Math is still not too difficult, mostly differentiation with chain rule, intuition on what Hessian is, and more importantly, vector differentiation – but if you never learn it – the class would be over your head.  Take at least Calculus I and II before you join, and know some basic equations from the Matrix Cookbook.

Why the Class is Challenging – II:  Energy-based Models

Another reason why the class is difficult is that last half of the class was all based on so-called energy-based models. i.e. Models such as Hopfield network (HopfieldNet), Boltzmann machine (BM) and restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM).  Even if you are used to the math of supervised learning method such as linear regression, logistic regression or even backprop, Math of RBM can still throw you off.   No wonder: many of these models have their physical origin such as Ising model.  Deep learning research also frequently use ideas from Bayesian networks such as explaining away.  If you have no basic background on either physics or Bayesian networks, you would feel quite confused.

In my case, I spent quite some time to Google and read through relevant literature, that power me through some of the quizzes, but I don’t pretend I understand those topics because they can be deep and unintuitive.

Why the Class is Challenging – III: Recurrent Neural Network

If you learn RNN these days, probably from Socher’s cs224d or by reading Mikolov’s thesis.  LSTM would easily be your only thought on how  to resolve exploding/vanishing gradients in RNN.  Of course, there are other ways: echo state network (ESN) and Hessian-free methods.  They are seldom talked about these days.   Again, their formulation is quite different from your standard methods such as backprop and gradient-descent.  But learning them give you breadth, and make you think if the status quote is the right thing to do.

But is it Good?

You bet! Let me quantify the statement in next section.

Why is it good?

Suppose you just want to use some of the fancier tools in ML/DL, I guess you can just go through Andrew Ng’s class, test out bunches of implementations, then claim yourself an expert – That’s what many people do these days.  In fact, Ng’s Coursera class is designed to give you a taste of ML, and indeed, you should be able to wield many ML tools after the course.

That’s said, you should realize your understanding of ML/DL is still …. rather shallow.  May be you are thinking of “Oh, I have a bunch of data, let’s throw them into Algorithm X!”.  “Oh, we just want to use XGBoost, right! It always give you the best results!”   You should realize performance number isn’t everything.  It’s important to understand what’s going on with your model.   You easily make costly short-sighted and ill-informed decision when you lack of understanding.  It happens to many of my peers, to me, and sadly even to some of my mentors.

Don’t make the mistake!  Always seek for better understanding! Try to grok.  If you only do Ng’s neural network assignment, by now you would still wonder how it can be applied to other tasks.   Go for Hinton’s class, feel perplexed by the Prof said, and iterate.  Then you would start to build up a better understanding of deep learning.

Another more technical note:  if you want to learn deep unsupervised learning, I think this should be the first course as well.   Prof. Hinton teaches you the intuition of many of these machines, you will also have chance to implement them.   For models such as Hopfield net and RBM, it’s quite doable if you know basic octave programming.

So it’s good, but is it outdated?

Learners these days are perhaps luckier, they have plenty of choices to learn deep topic such as deep learning.   Just check out my own “Top 5-List“.   cs231n, cs224d and even Silver’s class are great contenders to be the second class.

But I still recommend NNML.  There are four reasons:

  1. It is deeper and tougher than other classes.  As I explained before, NNML is tough, not exactly mathematically (Socher’s, Silver’s Maths are also non-trivial), but conceptually.  e.g. energy-based model and different ways to train RNN are some of the examples.
  2. Many concepts in ML/DL can be seen in different ways.  For example, bias/variance is a trade-off for frequentist, but it’s seen as “frequentist illusion” for Bayesian.    Same thing can be said about concepts such as backprop, gradient descent.  Once you think about them, they are tough concepts.    So one reason to take a class, is not to just teach you a concept, but to allow you to look at things from different perspective.  In that sense, NNML perfectly fit into the bucket.  I found myself thinking about Hinton’s statement during many long promenades.
  3. Hinton’s perspective – Prof Hinton has been mostly on the losing side of ML during last 30 years.   But then he persisted, from his lectures, you would get a feeling of how/why he starts a certain line of research, and perhaps ultimately how you would research something yourself in the future.
  4. Prof. Hinton’s delivery is humorous.   Check out his view in Lecture 10 about why physicists worked on neural network in early 80s.  (Note: he was a physicist before working on neural networks.)

Conclusion and What’s Next?

All-in-all, Prof. Hinton’s “Neural Network and Machine Learning” is a must-take class.  All of us, beginners and experts include, will be benefited from the professor’s perspective, breadth of the subject.

I do recommend you to first take the Ng’s class if you are absolute beginners, and perhaps some Calculus I or II, plus some Linear Algebra, Probability and Statistics, it would make the class more enjoyable (and perhaps doable) for you.  In my view, both Kapathy’s and Socher’s class are perhaps easier second class than Hinton’s class.

If you finish this class, make sure you check out other fundamental classes.  Check out my post “Learning Deep Learning – My Top 5 List“, you would have plenty of ideas for what’s next.   A special mention here perhaps is Daphne Koller’s Probabilistic Graphical Model, which I found equally challenging, and perhaps it will give you some insights on very deep topics such as Deep Belief Network as well.

Another suggestion for you: may be you can take the class again. That’s what I plan to do about half a year later – as I mentioned, I don’t understand every single nuance in the class.  But I think understanding would come up at my 6th to 7th times going through the material.

Arthur Chan

[1] To me, this makes a lot of sense for both the course’s preparer and the students, because students can take more time to really go through the homework, and the course’s preparer can monetize their class for infinite period of time.

History:

(20170410) First writing
(20170411) Fixed typos. Smooth up writings.
(20170412) Fixed typos
(20170414) Fixed typos.

If you like this message, subscribe the Grand Janitor Blog’s RSS feed. You can also find me (Arthur) at twitter, LinkedInPlus, Clarity.fm. Together with Waikit Lau, I maintain the Deep Learning Facebook forum.  Also check out my awesome employer: Voci.

Categories
ANN deep learning Language Modeling SMT

Some Speculations On Why Microsoft Tay Collapsed

Microsoft’s Tay, following Google AlphaGo, was meant to be yet another highly intelligent A.I. program which fulfill human’s long standing dream: a machine which can truly converse.   But as you know, Tay fails spectacularly.  To me, this is a highly unusual event, part of it is that Microsoft’s another conversation agent, Xiaoice, was extremely successful in China.   The other part is MSR, is one of the leading sites on using deep learning in various machine learning problems.   You would think that a major P.R. problem such as Tay confirming “Donald Trump is the hope”,  and purportedly support genocide should be weeded out before launch.

As I read many posts in the past week attempted to describe why Tay fails, sadly they offer me no insights.  Some even written from respected magazines, e.g. in New Yorkers‘ “I’ve Seen the Greatest A.I. Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Twitter” at the end the author concluded,

“If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that consciousness wants conscience. Most consumer-tech companies have, at one time or another, launched a product before it was ready, or thought that it was equipped to do something that it ended up failing at dismally. “

While I always love the prose from New Yorkers, there is really no machine which can mimic/model  human consciousness (yet).   In fact, no one really knows how “consciousness” works, it’s also tough to define what “consciousness” is.   And it’s worthwhile to mention that chatbot technology is not new.   Google had released similar technology and get great press.  (See here)  So the New Yorkers’ piece reflect how much the public does not understand technology.

As a result, I decided to write a Tay’s postmortem myself, and offer some thoughts on why this problem could occur and how one could actively avoid such problems.

Since I try to write this piece for general audience, (say my facebook friends), the piece contains only small amount of technicalities.   If you are interested, I also list several more technical articles in the reference section.

How does a Chatbot work?  The Pre-Deep Learning Version

By now,  all of us use a chat bot or two, there is obviously Siri, which perhaps is the first program which put speech recognition and dialogue system in the national spotlight.  If you are familiar with history of computing, you would probably know ELIZA [1], which is the first example of using rule-based approach to respond to users.

What does it mean?  In such system, usually a natural language parser is used to parse human’s input, then come up with an answer with some pre-defined and mostly manually rules.    It’s a simple approach, but when it’s done correctly.   It creates an illusion of intelligence.

Rule-base approach can go quite far.  e.g. The ALICE language is a pretty popular tool to create intelligent sounding bot. (History as shown in here.)   There are many existing tools which help programmers to create dialogue.   Programmer can also extract existing dialogues into the own system.

The problem of rule-based approach is obvious: the response is rigid.  So if someone use the system for a while, they will easily notice they are talking with a machine.  In a way, you can say the illusion can be easily dispersed by human observation.

Another issue of rule-based approach is it taxes programmers to produce a large scale chat bot.   Even with convenient languages such as AIML (ALICE Markup Language), it would take a programmer a long long time to come up with a chat-bot, not to say one which can answer a wide-variety of questions.

Converser as a Translator

Before we go on to look at chat bot in the time of deep learning.  It is important to ask how we can model conversation.   Of course, you can think of it as … well… we first parse the sentence, generate entities and their grammatical relationships,  then based on those relationships, we come up with an answer.

This approach of decomposing a sentence to its element, is very natural to human beings.   In a way, this is also how the rule-based approach arise in the first place.  But we just discuss the weakness of rule-based approach, namely, it is hard to program and generalize.

So here is a more convenient way to think, you could simply ask,  “Hey, now I have an input sentence, what is the best response?”    It turns out this is very similar to the formulation of statistical machine translation.   “If I have an English sentence, what would be the best French translation?”    As it turns out, a converser can be built with the same principle and technology as a translator.    So all powerful technology developed for statistical machine translation (SMT) can be used on making a conversation bot.   This technology includes I.B.M. models, phrase-based models, syntax model [2]   And the training is very similar.

In fact, this is how many chat bots was made just before deep-learning arrived.    So some method simply use an existing translator to translate input-response pair.    e.g. [3]

The good thing about using a statistical approach, in particular, is that it generalizes much better than the rule-based approach.    Also, as the program is based on machine learning, all you have to do is to prepare (carefully) a bunch of training data.   Then existing machine learning program would help you come up with a system automatically.   It eases the programmer from long and tedious tweaking of the bot.

How does a Chatbot work?  The Deep Learning Version

Now given what we discuss, then how does Microsoft’s chat bot Tay works?   Since we don’t know Tay’s implementation, we can only speculate:

  1. Tay is smart, so it doesn’t sound like a purely rule-based system.  so let’s assume it is based on the aforementioned “converser-as-translator” paradigm.
  2. It’s Microsoft, there got to be some deep neural network.  (Microsoft is one of the first sites picked up the modern “deep” neural network” paradigm.)
  3. What’s the data?  Well,  given Tay is built for millennials, the guy who train Tay must be using dialogue between teenagers.  If I research for Microsoft [4],  may be I would use data collected from Microsoft Messenger or Skype.   Since Microsoft has all the age data for all users, the data can easily be segmented and bundled into training.

So let’s piece everything together.  Very likely,  Tay is a neural-network (NN)-based program which can intelligently translate an user’s natural language input to a response.    The program’s training is based on chat data.   So my speculation is the data is exactly where things goes wrong.   Before I conclude, the neural network in question is likely to be an Long-Short Term Model (LSTM).    I believe Google’s researchers are the first advocate such approach [5] (headlined last year and the bot is known for its philosophical undertone.) Microsoft did couple of papers on how LSTM can be used to model conversation.  [6].    There are also several existing bot building software on line e.g. Andrej Karpathy ‘s char-RNN.    So it’s likely that Tay is based on such approach. [7]

 

What goes wrong then?

Oh well, given that Tay is just a machine learning program.  Her behavior is really governed by the training material.   Since the training data is likely to be chat data, we can only conclude the data must contain some offensive speech, given the political landscape of the world.   So one reasonable hypothesis is the researcher who prepares the training material hadn’t really filter out topics related to hate speech and sensitive topics.    I guess one potential explanation of not doing that is that filtering would reduce the amount of training data.     But then given the data owned by Microsoft,  it doesn’t make sense.  Say 20% of 1 billion conversation is still a 200 million, which is more than enough to train a good chatterbot.  So I tend to think the issue is a human oversight. 

And then, as a simple fix,  you can also give the robots a list of keywords, e.g. you can just program  a simple regular expression match of “Hitler”,  then make sure there is a special rule to respond the user with  “No comment”.   At least the consequence wouldn’t be as huge as a take down.     That again, it’s another indication that there are oversights in the development.   You only need to spend more time in testing the program, this kind of issues would be noticed and rooted out.

Conclusion

In this piece, I come up with couple of hypothesis why Microsoft Tay fails.   At the end, I echo with the title of New Yorker’s piece: “I’ve Seen the Greatest A.I. Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Twitter” …. at least partially. Tay is perhaps one of the smartest chatter bots, backed by one of the strongest research organization in the world, trained by tons of data. But it is not destroyed by Twitter or trolls. More likely, it is destroyed by human oversights and lack of testing. In this sense, it’s failure is not too different from why many software fails.

Reference/Footnote

[1] Weizenbaum, Joseph “ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And Machine”, Communications of the ACM 9 (1): 36–45,

[2] Philip Koehn, Statistical Machine Translation

[3] Alan Ritter, Colin Cherry, and William Dolan. 2011. Data-driven response generation in social media. In Proc. of EMNLP, pages 583–593. Association for Computational Linguistics.

[4] Woa! I could only dream! But I prefer to work on speech recognition, instead of chatterbot.

[5] Oriol Vinyal, Le Quoc, A Neural Conversational Model.

[6] Jiwei Li, Michel Galley, Chris Brockett, Jianfeng Gao, and Bill Dolan, A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models

[7] A more technical point here: Using LSTM, a type of recurrent neural network (RNN), also resolved one issue of the classical models such as IBM models because the language model is usually n-gram which has limited long-range prediction capability.