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TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

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Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#201

Post by Steuard »

sytelus wrote: post #153
Fede_V wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One small note on the paper itself. I love that the paper's author are in alphabetical orders, without any stupid jostling over first/last authorship. I think that's fantastic and wish academia went that way too (yeah right).

Why is alphabetical order great? It just only means that people with last names starting with z will get penalized every single time because of choosing wrong parents! I would think randomized order would be chosen - especially if you were mathematician.

Why "penalized"? If there's no significance attached to author ordering, why should it matter who's listed first?

(I can actually answer my own question to some degree: the "alphabetical authors" convention is also the norm in my own field of high energy physics. Only after I finally landed a tenure-track job and served on another search committee did I realize that folks from other fields of physics would see my lack of first-author publications as a black mark. But in principle, among those who know the convention, order ought to be unimportant, shouldn't it?)

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#202

Post by kragen »

hmehta wrote: post #181
w_t_payne wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing too serious ... mostly to glue embedded machine vision system components together in a simulation environment.

Do you guys know of any theoretical analysis on Data flow vs Control flow software ?

This comment is not being answered, not because there is none, but because there is far too much to fit a good summary of it into this margin. It includes most of modern compiler and CPU design, as well as most current HPC work.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#203

Post by elcritch »

kragen wrote: post #202
hmehta wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you guys know of any theoretical analysis on Data flow vs Control flow software ?

This comment is not being answered, not because there is none, but because there is far too much to fit a good summary of it into this margin. It includes most of modern compiler and CPU design, as well as most current HPC work.

That's a fair point overall. It's basically the entirety of the debate between functional languages and imperative languages. Nonetheless, it is still pretty good question as far as someone trying to understand the differences and why it might be useful.

@hmehta, one of my recent favorite videos generally on this topic has been from Curry On conference [1]. It's not strictly data-flow vs control flow, but it does discuss some of the more practical differences in between using monads for structuring data flows vs imperative control.

My take is that monads can be roughly considered as wrapping up imperative control flow along with the data. E.g. wrapping up the if/else choices into a data structure. Currently I actually found studying up on actual category theory easier than all the "easy introduction" things regarding monads. As in, the ideas when presented straightforwardly and technically correct are simpler than we give credence to.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=449j7oKQVkc

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#204

Post by Zephyr314 »

orasis wrote: post #187
Zephyr314 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on how long it takes to "evaluate the goodness of a solution" techniques like multi-start gradient decent can rapidly become intractable though, especially in higher dimensions. There are a handful of open source libraries out there that try to tackle this time consuming and expensive black box optimization problem from a more Bayesian approach [1] [2]. There's also a YC company to do this as a service (ful…

Could something like MOE be made to run on TensorFlow?

Yes, if you could expose the parameters to MOE from within TensorFlow. We're going to work on an example of showing how this can be done with SigOpt, which has a similar interface.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#205

Post by mcnawoh »

ant6n wrote: post #190
Swizec wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also legally change your last name to anything you want at any point in time. If you care enough. Or use a pseudonym.

Meet Mr. Aaberg.

Interestingly, with this sounding like a somewhat realistic Norwegian/Danish name, it should actually show up at the bottom by the sorting rules of those two languages.

The digraph "aa" is an archaic representation of the modern character "å", the last letter of the Norwegian and Danish alphabets, and should be sorted accordingly.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#206

Post by m00n »

Minor nitpick: The authors are not the first ones to recognize that 'tensor' makes a great (brand-) name. As someone who is paid to think about tensors this is a bit annoying, because the first thing in my mind when I read a page like OP, is "where are the tensors?". Alas, there are none.

For a mathematician, a "multidimensional data array" is not a tensor. It is a tuple. A tensor is a tuple with much more structure, associated to linear actions on its components. Said differently, if you can't tell me, what 7*[Alice] means, you have no right to call [Alice] a tensor.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#207

Post by AdamGS »

an4rchy wrote: post #76

I tried going through the site and also the comments but couldn't wrap my head around what this library actually is. It sounds awesome based on the response/comments. Can anyone explain this to a layman?

I'm not a machine learning/math guy by any means - but the whitepaper (http://download.tensorflow.org/paper/whitepaper2015.pdf) is pretty good and offers some very interesting concepts and comparisons.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#208

Post by mohamedmansour »

dswalter wrote: post #74
doczoidberg wrote: post #62

I am a newbie to machine learning. How does it compete to Azure ML besides it is open source?

It's not really directly comparable. This is a computational framework which you can use to implement a variety of ML algorithms (or in general numerical computation), so the interface to this is lower-level than Azure ML. If Azure ML is a bunch of premade sandcastle molds, TensorFlow is a more accurate, faster way to pour sand. You make the mold.

TensorFlow built a language, AzureML uses a bunch of languages of your choice to build any machine learning on Azure. Try it https://studio.azureml.net/ follow the tutorial

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#209

Post by robert-zaremba »

davmre wrote: post #158
sandGorgon wrote: post #122

what would be really awesome is if Andrew Ng or Norvig build a course around Tensorflow. It is really not useful to a beginner to be learning everything in matlab.

There are already a few university ML courses out there using Theano (for which Tensorflow is essentially a drop-in replacement), and I think this will be a much bigger trend over the next few years. IMHO for a first course it's useful to do some work at the Matlab/numpy level just so you get experience with deriving/implementing gradients yourself, but for larger (deep) models automatic differentiation is an amazing…

The same goes for Torch: New York, Oxford ...
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