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Pylearn2 is a machine learning research library. This does not just mean that it is a collection of machine learning algorithms that share a common API; it means that it has been designed for flexibility and extensibility in order to facilitate research projects that involve new or unusual use cases. In this paper we give a brief history of the library, an overview of its basic philosophy, a summary of the librarys architecture, and a description of how the Pylearn2 community functions socially.
Federated learning (FL) is a rapidly growing research field in machine learning. However, existing FL libraries cannot adequately support diverse algorithmic development; inconsistent dataset and model usage make fair algorithm comparison challenging. In this work, we introduce FedML, an open research library and benchmark to facilitate FL algorithm development and fair performance comparison. FedML supports three computing paradigms: on-device training for edge devices, distributed computing, and single-machine simulation. FedML also promotes diverse algorithmic research with flexible and generic API design and comprehensive reference baseline implementations (optimizer, models, and datasets). We hope FedML could provide an efficient and reproducible means for developing and evaluating FL algorithms that would benefit the FL research community. We maintain the source code, documents, and user community at https://fedml.ai.
We present Kaolin, a PyTorch library aiming to accelerate 3D deep learning research. Kaolin provides efficient implementations of differentiable 3D modules for use in deep learning systems. With functionality to load and preprocess several popular 3D datasets, and native functions to manipulate meshes, pointclouds, signed distance functions, and voxel grids, Kaolin mitigates the need to write wasteful boilerplate code. Kaolin packages together several differentiable graphics modules including rendering, lighting, shading, and view warping. Kaolin also supports an array of loss functions and evaluation metrics for seamless evaluation and provides visualization functionality to render the 3D results. Importantly, we curate a comprehensive model zoo comprising many state-of-the-art 3D deep learning architectures, to serve as a starting point for future research endeavours. Kaolin is available as open-source software at https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/kaolin/.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely applied to game-playing and surpassed the best human-level performance in many domains, yet there are few use-cases in industrial or commercial settings. We introduce OR-Gym, an open-source library for developing reinforcement learning algorithms to address operations research problems. In this paper, we apply reinforcement learning to the knapsack, multi-dimensional bin packing, multi-echelon supply chain, and multi-period asset allocation model problems, as well as benchmark the RL solutions against MILP and heuristic models. These problems are used in logistics, finance, engineering, and are common in many business operation settings. We develop environments based on prototypical models in the literature and implement various optimization and heuristic models in order to benchmark the RL results. By re-framing a series of classic optimization problems as RL tasks, we seek to provide a new tool for the operations research community, while also opening those in the RL community to many of the problems and challenges in the OR field.
This paper presents an alternative approach to p-values in regression settings. This approach, whose origins can be traced to machine learning, is based on the leave-one-out bootstrap for prediction error. In machine learning this is called the out-of-bag (OOB) error. To obtain the OOB error for a model, one draws a bootstrap sample and fits the model to the in-sample data. The out-of-sample prediction error for the model is obtained by calculating the prediction error for the model using the out-of-sample data. Repeating and averaging yields the OOB error, which represents a robust cross-validated estimate of the accuracy of the underlying model. By a simple modification to the bootstrap data involving noising up a variable, the OOB method yields a variable importance (VIMP) index, which directly measures how much a specific variable contributes to the prediction precision of a model. VIMP provides a scientifically interpretable measure of the effect size of a variable, we call the predictive effect size, that holds whether the researchers model is correct or not, unlike the p-value whose calculation is based on the assumed correctness of the model. We also discuss a marginal VIMP index, also easily calculated, which measures the marginal effect of a variable, or what we call the discovery effect. The OOB procedure can be applied to both parametric and nonparametric regression models and requires only that the researcher can repeatedly fit their model to bootstrap and modified bootstrap data. We illustrate this approach on a survival data set involving patients with systolic heart failure and to a simulated survival data set where the model is incorrectly specified to illustrate its robustness to model misspecification.
The ICML 2013 Workshop on Challenges in Representation Learning focused on three challenges: the black box learning challenge, the facial expression recognition challenge, and the multimodal learning challenge. We describe the datasets created for these challenges and summarize the results of the competitions. We provide suggestions for organizers of future challenges and some comments on what kind of knowledge can be gained from machine learning competitions.