YOLOv4; PyTorch 1.5; Nvidia DGX A100; Tesla at ScaledML Conference
Vision Week Issue #4
YOLO v4 - Better Speed and Accuracy
You might have heard by now, YOLOv4 has been released. But not actually from the original author of YOLO, Joseph Redmon. This is from different researchers including Alexey Bochkovskiy who is known for his popular github repo on DarkNet, forked from original DarkNet repo. He has made several improvements to DarkNet. In a way his repo was more popular than the original one.
YOLOv4 employs more modern state-of-the-art techniques such as Weighted-Residual-Connections (WRC), Cross-Stage-Partial-connections (CSP), Cross mini-Batch Normalization (CmBN), Self-adversarial-training (SAT) and Mish-activation to achieve better speed and accuracy. Checkout the paper and code for more details.
Nvidia DGX A100
Nvidia CEO Jenson Huang announced new products in his “kitchen keynote” as part of GTC 2020. The highlight was the absolute GPU beast DGX A100 which is aimed at datacenter usage or as a server node for high intensive training/inference for your research team, amazingly priced at $199K (yes, you read that right) along with other announcements real time ray tracing and audio-to-face (A2F).
PyTorch 1.5
PyTorch 1.5 has been released with several changes and additions along with updates for torchvision, torchaudio and torchtext. Facebook (maintainer of PyTorch) is also partnering with AWS for TorchServe, a tool that helps you deploy your PyTorch models to the cloud and use them in production with API calls over the internet. Checkout the official blog post for more details.
Machine Learning Yearning
Doing online courses and assignments is one thing, applying machine learning in the real world and deploying the model to production is completely a different thing. Dr. Andrew Ng shares his practical experience building real world products at companies like Baidu and Google.
This book is a treasure trove of practical knowledge and best practices for AI Engineers. Be sure to get the draft of the book for free here. A must read.
Tesla at ScaledML Conference
Andrej Karpathy (Director of AI at Tesla) gave a talk at ScaledML conference 2020 on how the company is using AI to get closer to Full Self Driving. Particularly he discussed about stop sign detection which looks like a simple problem but in reality how challenging it is in production. Also he discussed how Tesla is achieving these results without actually having a LiDAR, just with cameras and few other sensors (radar, ultrasonic) which is quite difficult and impressive.
ICLR 2020
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) is one of the premier conferences in the field of ML/AI. This year it was planned to be conducted at Ethiopia. But due to the current corona virus situation, the organizing committee has decided to make it a virtual conference going completely online.
I think this is the first premier conference to go completely online. Last year NeurIPS was live streamed online. But it was additional to the physical event happened in Canada. A portion of the talks (including the talks from Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Ng etc.) and workshops from ICLR have been made available online. Feel free to check it out.
The age of AI
YouTube has released an original series on AI featuring Robert Downey Jr. as host. The series explores the current state of the art works in AI, the impact it can have in our lives and what the future has in store for us. Interesting watch if you have some time to kill.
