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How Google Translate squeezes deep learning onto a phone

googleresearch.blogspot.com

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Re: How Google Translate squeezes deep learning onto a phone

#51

Post by liabru »

This is great. I particularly like that they also automatically generated dirty versions for their training set, because that's exactly what I ended up doing for my dissertation project (a computer vision system [1] that automatically referees Scrabble boards). I also used dictionary analysis and the classifier's own confusion matrix to boost its accuracy.

If you're also interested in real time OCR like this, I did a write up [2] of the approach that worked well for my project. It only needed to recognize Scrabble fonts, but it could be extended to more fonts by using more training examples.

[1] http://brm.io/kwyjibo/

[2] http://brm.io/real-time-ocr/

Re: How Google Translate squeezes deep learning onto a phone

#52

Post by Animats »

Word Lens is impressive. It came from a small startup. Google didn't develop it; it was a product before Google bought it. I saw an early version being shown around TechShop years ago, before Google Glass, even. It was quite fast even then, translating signs and keeping the translation positioned over the sign as the phone was moved in real time. But the initial version was English/Spanish only.

Re: How Google Translate squeezes deep learning onto a phone

#54

Post by ssalazar »

joosters wrote: post #14
teraflop wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes one kind of neural net 'deep' and are all the other ones suddenly 'shallow' ? If this is a serious question, then googling "what is a deep neural network" would take you to any number of explanations. But to summarize very briefly, it's not a buzzword; it's a technical term referring to a network with multiple nonlinear layers that are chained together in sequence. Deep networks have been talked about fo…

I honestly didn't realise that it had any definition - I see now that calling it a 'fad' is unfair. However, the boundary between deep learning and (representational) machine learning still seems murky.

Machine learning proper encompasses a swath of applied statistical techniques, of which deep learning is only one. Machine learning could refer to linear regression, SVM, hidden markov models, dimensionality reduction, neural nets, or any number of other loosely related methods. Intro ML classes often don't even get to deep learning because theres so much more fundamental stuff to cover.

Re: How Google Translate squeezes deep learning onto a phone

#56

Post by afsina »

api wrote: post #9

"Squeezes" is very relative. These phones are equal to or larger than most desktops 10-15 years ago, back when I was doing AI research with evolutionary computing and genetic algorithms. We did some pretty mean stuff on those machines, and now we have them in our pockets.

The main issue here is probably not squeezing memory but squeezing performance. Even using regular SIMD is not good enough if your network is medium sized. They apply linear quantization, lookups and special SIMD operations to make it speedy.

See here for what they did for offline speech recognition: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

Re: How Google Translate squeezes deep learning onto a phone

#58

Post by ibrahima »

dchichkov wrote: post #41
motoboi wrote: post #15

I am 15 years into this computers thing and this blog post made me feel like "those guys are doing black magic". Neural networks and deep learning are truly awesome technologies.

They are doing matrix multiplications. To pass input a single time through even some very large neural network - it is a relatively fast operation (if compared to training such a network, that is). Training requires data centers and arrays of GPUs. Passing the input through the network - usually you can get away with a single core and vectorized operations. Unless you are doing high resolution computer vision in real…

Completely right. Applying a neural network is much faster than training one. The main trick here is fitting the trained model into cache (or smaller) so that the matrix multiplies are fast.

Re: How Google Translate squeezes deep learning onto a phone

#59

Post by shkkmo »

eosrei wrote: post #37

I used this in Brazil this last March to read menus. It works extremely well. The mistranslations make it even more fun. Much faster than learning Portuguese! I took a few screen shots. Aligning the phone, focus, light, shadows on the small menu font was difficult. You must keep steady. Sadly, I ended up hitting the volume control on this best example. Tasty cockroaches! Ha! http://imgur.com/j9iRaY0

I had some Brazilian roomates who didn't speak english (and I don't speak portugues). We used a combination of my poor spanish and google translate off my phone to comunicate.

It worked ok (much better than nothing.) However there were a number of times when there were very large issues in the translations that created some pretty big misunderstandings. Luckily we had a friend who had fluent English and Portuguese who would translate when things got to confused.

To reduce errors, you do need to be really careful to use short, complete sentences with simple and correct grammar. It's also better to use and that contain words that aren't ambiguous. (Those two sentences would probably not translate well.)

e.g. Please write simple words, short phrases and simple phrases. Please write words with just one meaning. Those phrases and words are easier to translate.

Re: How Google Translate squeezes deep learning onto a phone

#60

Post by raverbashing »

eosrei wrote: post #37

I used this in Brazil this last March to read menus. It works extremely well. The mistranslations make it even more fun. Much faster than learning Portuguese! I took a few screen shots. Aligning the phone, focus, light, shadows on the small menu font was difficult. You must keep steady. Sadly, I ended up hitting the volume control on this best example. Tasty cockroaches! Ha! http://imgur.com/j9iRaY0

Interesting

It seems it can't really handle context, so 'cockroaches' may have been a mistranslation of 'cheap' in some contexts, as the 'it had stopped chestnut' may have simply been 'brazil nuts'

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