Huge New NSFW Dataset for Content Filtering
There are some things that some people just don’t want showing up on their websites, and this has spawned a wide range of activities and technologies that fall under “content review.”
Category: Technology
Technical review of the newest machine intelligence research.
Microsoft’s New MT-DNN Outperforms Google BERT
Microsoft researchers have released technical details of an AI system that combines both approaches. The new Multi-Task Deep Neural Network (MT-DNN) is a natural language processing (NLP) model that outperforms Google BERT in nine of eleven benchmark NLP tasks.
Federated Learning: The Future of Distributed Machine Learning
In 2017 Google introduced Federated Learning (FL), “a specific category of distributed machine learning approaches which trains machine learning models using decentralized data residing on end devices such as mobile phones.” A new Google paper has now proposed a scalable production system for federated learning to enable increasing workload and output through the addition of resources such as compute, storage, bandwidth, etc.
OpenAI Guards Its ML Model Code & Data to Thwart Malicious Usage
The San Francisco-based AI non-profit however has raised eyebrows in the research community with its unusual decision to not release the language model’s code and training dataset. In a statement sent to Synced, OpenAI explained the choice was made to prevent malicious use: “it’s clear that the ability to generate synthetic text that is conditioned on specific subjects has the potential for significant abuse.”
Uber’s Code-Free Ludwig: Deep Learning for Dummies?
Uber has unveiled Ludwig, a new TensorFlow-based toolkit that enables users to train and test deep learning models without writing any code. The toolkit will help non-experts understand models and accelerate their iterative development by simplifying the prototyping process and data processing.
DeepFashion2: A Versatile Benchmark for Fashion Image Understanding
CUHK researchers recently teamed up with Chinese AI giant SenseTime to develop a greatly improved iteration in DeepFashion2, a large-scale benchmark with comprehensive tasks and annotations of fashion image understanding.
Exciting Papers and Projects from Google
Synced Global AI Weekly February 10th
NVIDIA Open-Sources Hyper-Realistic Face Generator StyleGAN
In December Synced reported on a hyperrealistic face generator developed by US chip giant NVIDIA. The GAN-based model performs so well that most people can’t distinguish the faces it generates from real photos. This week NVIDIA announced that it is open-sourcing the nifty tool, which it has dubbed “StyleGAN”.
Facebook Boosts Cross-Lingual Language Model Pretraining Performance
Facebook researchers have introduced two new methods for pretraining cross-lingual language models (XLMs). The unsupervised method uses monolingual data, while the supervised version leverages parallel data with a new cross-lingual language model.
Shannon.AI’s Glyce Masters 13 Chinese NLP Tasks
Researchers from NLP startup Shannon.AI have published a study proposing Glyce — a set of Chinese glyph-vectors for Chinese character representations. Glyce has already mastered 13 core Chinese natural language processing tasks.
AI Loves Open-Sourced Data: What’s New in January
To help keep our readers abreast of the trend, Synced has identified five high-quality open-source datasets that were released this month (January 2019) and that AI researchers and engineers might find useful in their work.
Facebook BISON: An Alternative Evaluation Task for Visual-Grounding Systems
A cooperative research group from Facebook and the University of Southern California has introduced an alternative evaluation task for visual-grounding systems: BISON (Binary Image Selection).
Tsinghua University Proves Quantum Supremacy on GANs
Many scientists believe that a quantum computing device will one day perform highly complex computational tasks which are far beyond the ability of today’s classical computers.
Filling Holes: Adobe Proposes Foreground-Aware Image Inpainting
A research team from the University of Rochester, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Adobe Research has proposed a foreground-aware image inpainting system to achieve superior results on challenging cases with complex compositions.
Game On! DeepMind Vs StarCraft II
DeepMind and Blizzard Entertainment will present a StarCraft II live-stream demonstration on Thursday, Jan 24. The London-based Alphabet company known for taking down the world’s top Go master in 2017 tweeted the announcement yesterday.
GIF2Video Gives GIFs Realism
The internet loves those little looping action images we call GIFs. They can tell a short visual story in a small file size that has high portability. The visual quality of GIFs is however usually low compared to the videos they were sourced from. If you are sick of fuzzy, low resolution GIFs, then researchers from Stony Brook University, UCLA, and Megvii Research have just the thing for you: “the first learning-based method for enhancing the visual quality of GIFs in the wild.”
Automatic Creation of Machine Learning Algorithms for Autonomous Vehicles
To make ML-based solutions available for a wider variety of deployment scenarios, Waymo’s autonomous driving team has collaborated with Google AI Brain Team researchers on a system that automates the creation of high quality and low latency neural networks on existing AutoML architectures.
Auto-DeepLab: Fei-Fei Li & Alan Yuille on Semantic Image Segmentation
A cooperative research group from Google, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins has proposed “Auto-DeepLab,” a new method which utilizes hierarchical Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for semantic image segmentation. The project team includes top AI researchers Director of the Stanford Vision Lab Fei-Fei Li; and UCLA Center for Cognition, Vision, and Learning Director Alan Yuille.
NSFW Dataset Removes Humans From Content Review
The proliferation of social media in our daily lives has profoundly changed the way we work and play with others. It has also created an entirely new job: thousands of people worldwide now work for Google, Facebook and Twitter “Community Operations Teams.” Whenever a user flags content as offensive, it’s sent to these guys for review.
Enhanced Super-Resolution GAN Remasters Max Payne
Researchers using enhanced super-resolution technology are giving classic video games of the past incredible, texture-rich visual makeovers. The team has released ‘remastered’ versions of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and most recently — a visually enhanced version of 2001 third-person shooter game Max Payne.
AI Uses Face Scans to Diagnose Rare Genetic Disorders
Boston-based biotech and digital health tech company FDNA has developed a deep learning application, Face2Gene, which can help doctors spot rare genetic disorders.
Stanford Open-Sources Neural Network Verification Project
A Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL) research group has announced it is open-sourcing its NeuralVerification.jl project, which helps verify deep neural networks’ training, robustness and safety results.
CES Day One: AI Is Everywhere
The world’s largest and most exciting technology show, CES officially kicks off this morning in Las Vegas, USA. With an abundance of products to present, tech giants such as Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Intel started revving up their engines two days ago, hosting press conferences to showcase their “New Year’s Resolutions.”
InstaGAN Excels in Instance-Aware Image-To-Image Translation
Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Pohang University of Science and Technology have introduced a machine learning algorithm system, InstaGAN, which can perform multiple instance-aware image-to-image translation tasks — such as replacing sheep in photos with giraffes — on multiple image datasets.
Tsinghua University Publishes Comprehensive Machine Translation Reading List
Tsinghua Natural Language Processing Group (THUNLP) has published a great reading list for any budding AI researchers whose New Year’s resolution is to study machine translation. The list compiles the most influential machine translation papers from the past 30 years, spotlighting the 10 most important contributions to the development of machine translation.
Alibaba Open-Sources Mars to Complement NumPy
Alibaba Cloud recently announced that it has open sourced Mars — its tensor-based framework for large-scale data computation — on Github. Mars can be regarded as “a parallel and distributed NumPy.” Mars can tile a large tensor into small chunks and describe the inner computation with a directed graph, enabling the running of parallel computation on a wide range of distributed environments, from a single machine to a cluster comprising thousands of machines.
NVIDIA “Super SloMo” Makes Video Smooth
NVIDIA researchers have developed a deep learning-based system which can produce high-quality slow-motion video from a standard (30 fps) video clip. In comparison with manual slow motion results, the NVIDIA demonstration video shows far superior smoothness.
Are You Ready for A 5G Robot Cafe?
Synced Global AI Weekly December 30th
Explore, Exploit, and Explode — The Time for Reinforcement Learning is Coming
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been making spectacular achievements, e.g., Atari games, AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero, AlphaZero, DeepStack, Libratus, OpenAI Five, Dactyl, DeepMimic, Catch The Flag, learning to dress, data center cooling, chemical syntheses, drug design, etc. See more RL applications.
White Hats Vs CAPTCHAs
Text-based CAPTCHA remain one of the most visible and commonly used mechanisms for website security. As a sort of online gatekeeper that distinguishes between humans and bots, the little solvable image fields have critical commercial applications in blocking automatic spam and preventing e-transfer fraud; and can also stop bots from spreading fraudulent information, etc.
Preferred Networks Unveils Dedicated DL Processor MN-Core
Japanese AI startup Preferred Networks (PFN) has developed a new processor dedicated to deep learning. The company unveiled the MN-Core chip, board, and server last week at SEMICON Japan 2018 in Tokyo.
Snow Lake AI FPGA Upgrader: 30x More Functional Than GPUs
This summer Chinese beauty cam and photo editor specialist Meitu Inc. announced an FPGA-accelerated neural network computing project with young startup Snow Lake AI. The collaboration aims to boost computing speed on Meitu mobile phones by 30 times.
Alibaba AI Detects Pig Pregnancies
While previous pregnancy detection techniques relied heavily on human labour, Alibaba’s new “pregnancy diagnosis algorithms” can help. The AI system was developed by Alibaba Cloud engineers in a joint effort with pig farming scientists.
MLPerf Announces First Results; Microsoft & Facebook Get On Board
The team behind MLPerf has announced the machine learning benchmark’s first set of results. MLPerf is a broad machine learning benchmark designed to measure the best performance of each participant with its own resources on a specific task.
GAN 2.0: NVIDIA’s Hyperrealistic Face Generator
The NVIDIA paper proposes an alternative generator architecture for GAN that draws insights from style transfer techniques. The system can learn and separate different aspects of an image unsupervised; and enables intuitive, scale-specific control of the synthesis.
Using Machine Learning to Synthesize Peptides
Synthesizing peptides — the chains of amino acids that conduct various functions within cells — has long been a research area of interest for scientists and engineers. There has however been little success thus far, as existing methods for synthesizing peptides have been prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.
Meet Deep Graph Library, a Python Package For Graph Neural Networks
The MXNet team and the Amazon Web Services AI lab recently teamed up with New York University / NYU Shanghai to announce Deep Graph Library (DGL), a Python package that provides easy implementations of GNNs research. Some fast takeaways on DGL:
Insilico Medicine Announces MOSES Benchmark Platform for Molecular Generation
Insilico Medicine, a drug discovery startup located in Johns Hopkins University, has introduced MOSES (Molecular Sets), a platform which can be used to compare model accuracy in molecular generation. MOSES provides a standardized benchmarking dataset, a set of open-sourced models with unified implementation, and evaluation metrics.
AI Brush: New GAN Tool Paints Worlds
The digital painting tool GANpaint has gone viral on social media. The product of a team of high-profile researchers from MIT, IBM, Google, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, GAPpaint allows anyone — even those with little knowledge of digital painting or photoshop — to “paint” incredibly complex and detailed photorealistic scenes.
DeepMind AlphaFold Delivers “Unprecedented Progress” on Protein Folding
In 2016 Google’s DeepMind stunned the world when their Go computer AlphaGo secured a historic victory over Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol. Yesterday the UK’s top AI team delivered their latest “wow moment” as their AI system AlphaFold topped the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition.