Elastic Distributed Training
With an increasing demand for training powers for deep learning algorithms and the rapid growth of computation resources in data centers, it is desirable to dynamically schedule different distributed deep learning tasks to maximize resource utilization and reduce cost. In this process, different tasks may receive varying numbers of machines at different time, a setting we call elastic distributed training. Despite the recent successes in large mini-batch distributed training, these methods are rarely tested in elastic distributed training environments and suffer degraded performance in our experiments, when we adjust the learning rate linearly immediately with respect to the batch size. One difficulty we observe is that the noise in the stochastic momentum estimation is accumulated over time and will have delayed effects when the batch size changes. We therefore propose to smoothly adjust the learning rate over time to alleviate the influence of the noisy momentum estimation. Our experiments on image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation have demonstrated that our proposed Dynamic SGD method achieves stabilized performance when varying the number of GPUs from 8 to 128. We also provide theoretical understanding on the optimality of linear learning rate scheduling and the effects of stochastic momentum. …

Explanation-assisted Guess (ExAG)
While there have been many proposals on how to make AI algorithms more transparent, few have attempted to evaluate the impact of AI explanations on human performance on a task using AI. We propose a Twenty-Questions style collaborative image guessing game, Explanation-assisted Guess Which (ExAG) as a method of evaluating the efficacy of explanations in the context of Visual Question Answering (VQA) – the task of answering natural language questions on images. We study the effect of VQA agent explanations on the game performance as a function of explanation type and quality. We observe that ‘effective’ explanations are not only conducive to game performance (by almost 22% for ‘excellent’ rated explanations), but also helpful when VQA system answers are erroneous or noisy (by almost 30% compared to no explanations). We also see that players develop a preference for explanations even when penalized and that the explanations are mostly rated as ‘helpful’. …

Distributed Online Linear Regression
We study online linear regression problems in a distributed setting, where the data is spread over a network. In each round, each network node proposes a linear predictor, with the objective of fitting the \emph{network-wide} data. It then updates its predictor for the next round according to the received local feedback and information received from neighboring nodes. The predictions made at a given node are assessed through the notion of regret, defined as the difference between their cumulative network-wide square errors and those of the best off-line network-wide linear predictor. Various scenarios are investigated, depending on the nature of the local feedback (full information or bandit feedback), on the set of available predictors (the decision set), and the way data is generated (by an oblivious or adaptive adversary). We propose simple and natural distributed regression algorithms, involving, at each node and in each round, a local gradient descent step and a communication and averaging step where nodes aim at aligning their predictors to those of their neighbors. We establish regret upper bounds typically in ${\cal O}(T^{3/4})$ when the decision set is unbounded and in ${\cal O}(\sqrt{T})$ in case of bounded decision set. …

Quantitative CBA
Quantitative CBA is a postprocessing algorithm for association rule classification algorithm CBA (Liu et al, 1998). QCBA uses original, undiscretized numerical attributes to optimize the discovered association rules, refining the boundaries of literals in the antecedent of the rules produced by CBA. Some rules as well as literals from the rules can consequently be removed, which makes the resulting classifier smaller. One-rule classification and crisp rules make CBA classification models possibly most comprehensible among all association rule classification algorithms. These viable properties are retained by QCBA. The postprocessing is conceptually fast, because it is performed on a relatively small number of rules that passed data coverage pruning in CBA. Benchmark of our QCBA approach on 22 UCI datasets shows average 53% decrease in the total size of the model as measured by the total number of conditions in all rules. Model accuracy remains on the same level as for CBA. …