Generative adversarial network

A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. The concept was initially developed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in June 2014. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. Given a training set, this technique learns to generate new data with the same statistics as the training set. For example, a GAN trained on photographs can generate new photographs that look at least superficially authentic to human observers, having many realistic characteristics. Though originally proposed as a form of generative model for unsupervised learning, GANs have also proved useful for semi-supervised learning, fully supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. The core idea of a GAN is based on the "indirect" training through the discriminator, another neural network that can tell how "realistic" the input seems,

Generating daily activity schedules using machine learning Master Thesis Sergej Gasparovich June 19, 2020 Prof. M. Bierlaire, J. Pougala, T. Hillel Transport and Mobility Laboratory, EPFL Y. Liu Visual Intelligence

Sergej Gasparovich

The study of how people schedule their daily activities is of interest in the context of transport demand forecasting using activity based-models, where activity schedules are generated in order to estimate the trip demand they produce. Machine learning has achieved efficient results in a number of areas due to its strong data processing capacity and can be useful for demand forecast models. This paper demonstrates for the first time how Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) can be applied in this context. We create a GAN model adapted for the specificity of the task, capable of working with discrete data and generating feasible daily activity patterns based on data of Swiss residents from the MTMC 2015 data set. We also show how we can condition our model to generate patterns for distinct days of the week. This work can be used as a framework for the activity generation step for activity-based modelling, in order to provide accurate and diverse activity schedules predictions using machine learning.

2020

Theory of Deep Learning: Neural Tangent Kernel and Beyond

Arthur Ulysse Jacot-Guillarmod

In the recent years, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have managed to succeed at tasks that previously appeared impossible, such as human-level object recognition, text synthesis, translation, playing games and many more. In spite of these major achievements, our understanding of these models, in particular of what happens during their training, remains very limited. This PhD started with the introduction of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) to describe the evolution of the function represented by the network during training. In the infinite-width limit, i.e. when the number of neurons in the layers of the network grows to infinity, the NTK converges to a deterministic and time-independent limit, leading to a simple yet complete description of the dynamics of infinitely-wide DNNs. This allowed one to give the first general proof of convergence of DNNs to a global minimum, and yielded the first description of the limiting spectrum of the Hessian of the loss surface of DNNs throughout training.More importantly, the NTK plays a crucial role in describing the generalization abilities of DNNs, i.e. the performance of the trained network on unseen data. The NTK analysis uncovered a direct link between the function learned by infinitely wide DNNs and Kernel Ridge Regression predictors, whose generalization properties are studied in this thesis using tools of random matrix theory. Our analysis of KRR reveals the importance of the eigendecomposition of the NTK, which is affected by a number of architectural choices. In very deep networks, an ordered regime and a chaotic regime appear, determined by the choice of non-linearity and the balance between the weights and bias parameters; these two phases are characterized by different speeds of decay of the eigenvalues of the NTK, leading to a tradeoff between convergence speed and generalization. In practical contexts such as Generative Adversarial Networks or Topology Optimization, the network architecture can be chosen to guarantee certain properties of the NTK and its spectrum.These results give an almost complete description DNNs in this infinite-width limit. It is then natural to wonder how it extends to finite-width networks used in practice. In the so-called NTK regime, the discrepancy between finite- and infinite-widths DNNs is mainly a result of the variance w.r.t. to the sampling of the parameters, as shown empirically and mathematically relying on the similarity between DNNs and random feature models.In contrast to the NTK regime, where the NTK remains constant during training, there exist so-called active regimes, where the evolution of the NTK is significant, which appear in a number of settings. One such regime appears in Deep Linear Networks with a very small initialization, where the training dynamics approach a sequence of saddle-points, representing linear maps of increasing rank, leading to a low-rank bias which is absent in the NTK regime.

EPFL2022

CryoETGAN: Cryo-Electron Tomography Image Synthesis via Unpaired Image Translation

Chengkun Li, Min Xu

Cryo-electron tomography (Cryo-ET) has been regarded as a revolution in structural biology and can reveal molecular sociology. Its unprecedented quality enables it to visualize cellular organelles and macromolecular complexes at nanometer resolution with native conformations. Motivated by developments in nanotechnology and machine learning, establishing machine learning approaches such as classification, detection and averaging for Cryo-ET image analysis has inspired broad interest. Yet, deep learning-based methods for biomedical imaging typically require large labeled datasets for good results, which can be a great challenge due to the expense of obtaining and labeling training data. To deal with this problem, we propose a generative model to simulate Cryo-ET images efficiently and reliably: CryoETGAN. This cycle-consistent and Wasserstein generative adversarial network (GAN) is able to generate images with an appearance similar to the original experimental data. Quantitative and visual grading results on generated images are provided to show that the results of our proposed method achieve better performance compared to the previous state-of-the-art simulation methods. Moreover, CryoETGAN is stable to train and capable of generating plausibly diverse image samples.

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Theory of Deep Learning: Neural Tangent Kernel and Beyond

Arthur Ulysse Jacot-Guillarmod

EPFL2022