Tag Archives: Neural Networks

Grammar Correction as You Type, on Pixel 6

Posted by Tony Mak, Software Engineer, Google Research and Simon Tong, Principal Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team

Despite the success and widespread adoption of smartphones, using them to compose longer pieces of text is still quite cumbersome. As one writes, grammatical errors can often creep into the text (especially undesirable in formal situations), and correcting these errors can be time consuming on a small display with limited controls.

To address some of these challenges, we are launching a grammar correction feature that is directly built into Gboard on Pixel 6 that works entirely on-device to preserve privacy, detecting and suggesting corrections for grammatical errors while the user is typing. Building such functionality required addressing a few key obstacles: memory size limitations, latency requirements, and handling partial sentences. Currently, the feature is capable of correcting English sentences (we plan to expand to more languages in the near future) and available on almost any app with Gboard1.

Gboard suggests how to correct an ungrammatical sentence as the user types.

Model Architecture
We trained a sequence-to-sequence neural network to take an input sentence (or a sentence prefix) and output the grammatically correct version — if the original text is already grammatically correct, the output of the model is identical to its input, indicating that no corrections are needed. The model uses a hybrid architecture that combines a Transformer encoder with an LSTM decoder, a combination that provides a good balance of quality and latency.

Overview of the grammatical error correction (GEC) model architecture.

Mobile devices are constrained by limited memory and computational power, which make it more difficult to build a high quality grammar checking system. There are a few techniques we use to build a small, efficient, and capable model.

  • Shared embedding: Because the input and output of the model are structurally similar (e.g., both are text in the same language), we share some of the model weights between the Transformer encoder and the LSTM decoder, which reduces the model file size considerably without unduly affecting accuracy.
  • Factorized embedding: The model splits a sentence into a sequence of predefined tokens. To achieve good quality, we find that it is important to use a large vocabulary of predefined tokens, however, this substantially increases the model size. A factorized embedding separates the size of the hidden layers from the size of the vocabulary embedding. This enables us to have a model with a large vocabulary without significantly increasing the number of total weights.
  • Quantization: To reduce the model size further, we perform post-training quantization, which allows us to store each 32-bit floating point weight using only 8-bits. While this means that each weight is stored with lower fidelity, nevertheless, we find that the quality of the model is not materially affected.

By employing these techniques, the resulting model takes up only 20MB of storage and performs inference on 60 input characters under 22ms on the Google Pixel 6 CPU.

Training the Model
In order to train the model, we needed training data in the form of <original, corrected> text pairs.

One possible approach to generating a small on-device model would be to use the same training data as a large cloud-based grammar model. While this data produces a reasonably high quality on-device model, we found that using a technique called hard distillation to generate training data that is better-matched to the on-device domain yields even better quality results.

Hard distillation works as follows: We first collected hundreds of millions of English sentences from across the public web. We then used the large cloud-based grammar model to generate grammar corrections for those sentences. This training dataset of <original, corrected> sentence pairs is then used to train a smaller on-device model that can correct full sentences. We found that the on-device model built from this training dataset produces significantly higher quality suggestions than a similar-sized on-device model built on the original data used to train the cloud-based model.

Before training the model from this data, however, there is another issue to address. To enable the model to correct grammar as the user types (an important capability of mobile devices) it needs to be able to handle sentence prefixes. While this enables grammar correction when the user has only typed part of a sentence, this capability is particularly useful in messaging apps, where the user often omits the final period in a sentence and presses the send button as soon as they finish typing. If grammar correction is only triggered on complete sentences, it might miss many errors.

This raises the question of how to decide whether a given sentence prefix is grammatically correct. We used a heuristic to solve this — if a given sentence prefix can be completed to form a grammatically correct sentence, we then consider it grammatically correct. If not, it is assumed to be incorrect.

What the user has typed so far       Suggested grammar correction
She puts a lot
She puts a lot of
She puts a lot of effort
She puts a lot of effort yesterday   Replace "puts" with "put in".
GEC on incomplete sentences. There is no correction for valid sentence prefixes.

We created a second dataset suitable for training a large cloud-based model, but this time focusing on sentence prefixes. We generated the data using the aforementioned heuristic by taking the <original, corrected> sentence pairs from the cloud-based model’s training dataset and randomly sampling aligned prefixes from them.

For example, given the <original, corrected> sentence pair:

Original sentence: She puts a lot of effort yesterday afternoon.
Corrected sentence: She put in a lot of effort yesterday afternoon.

We might sample the following prefix pairs:

Original prefix: She puts
Corrected prefix: She put in

Original prefix: She puts a lot of effort yesterday
Corrected prefix: She put in a lot of effort yesterday

We then autocompleted each original prefix to a full sentence using a neural language model (similar in spirit to that used by SmartCompose). If a full-sentence grammar model finds no errors in the full sentence, then that means there is at least one possible way to complete this original prefix without making any grammatical errors, so we consider the original prefix to be correct and output <original prefix, original prefix> as a training example. Otherwise, we output <original prefix, corrected prefix>. We used this training data to train a large cloud-based model that can correct sentence prefixes, then used that model for hard distillation, generating new <original, corrected> sentence prefix pairs that are better-matched to the on-device domain.

Finally, we constructed the final training data for the on-device model by combining these new sentence prefix pairs with the full sentence pairs. The on-device model trained on this combined data is then capable of correcting both full sentences as well as sentence prefixes.

Training data for the on-device model is generated from cloud-based models.

Grammar Correction On-Device
Gboard sends a request to the on-device grammar model whenever the user has typed more than three words, whether the sentence is completed or not. To provide a quality user experience, we underline the grammar mistakes and provide replacement suggestions when the user interacts with them. However, the model outputs only corrected sentences, so those need to be transformed into replacement suggestions. To do this, we align the original sentence and the corrected sentence by minimizing the Levenshtein distance (i.e., the number of edits that are needed to transform the original sentence to the corrected sentence).

Extracting edits by aligning the corrected sentence to the original sentence.

Finally, we transform the insertion edits and deletion edits to be replacement edits. In the above example, we transform the suggested insertion of "in" to be an edit that suggests replacing "puts" with "put in". And we similarly suggest replacing “effort on” with “effort”.

Conclusion
We have built a small high-quality grammar correction model by designing a compact model architecture and leveraging a cloud-based grammar system during training via hard distillation. This compact model enables users to correct their text entirely on their own device without ever needing to send their keystrokes to a remote server.

Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the key contributions of the other team members, including Abhanshu Sharma, Akshay Kannan, Bharath Mankalale, Chenxi Ni, Felix Stahlberg, Florian Hartmann, Jacek Jurewicz, Jayakumar Hoskere, Jenny Chin, Kohsuke Yatoh, Lukas Zilka, Martin Sundermeyer, Matt Sharifi, Max Gubin, Nick Pezzotti, Nithi Gupta, Olivia Graham, Qi Wang, Sam Jaffee, Sebastian Millius, Shankar Kumar, Sina Hassani, Vishal Kumawat, and Yuanbo Zhang, Yunpeng Li, Yuxin Dai. We would also like to thank Xu Liu and David Petrou for their support.

1The feature will eventually be available in all apps with Gboard, but is currently unavailable for those in WebView. ↩

Source: Google AI Blog


KELM: Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Language Model Pre-training Corpora

Posted by Siamak Shakeri, Staff Software Engineer and Oshin Agarwal, Research Intern, Google Research

Large pre-trained natural language processing (NLP) models, such as BERT, RoBERTa, GPT-3, T5 and REALM, leverage natural language corpora that are derived from the Web and fine-tuned on task specific data, and have made significant advances in various NLP tasks. However, natural language text alone represents a limited coverage of knowledge, and facts may be contained in wordy sentences in many different ways. Furthermore, existence of non-factual information and toxic content in text can eventually cause biases in the resulting models.

Alternate sources of information are knowledge graphs (KGs), which consist of structured data. KGs are factual in nature because the information is usually extracted from more trusted sources, and post-processing filters and human editors ensure inappropriate and incorrect content are removed. Therefore, models that can incorporate them carry the advantages of improved factual accuracy and reduced toxicity. However, their different structural format makes it difficult to integrate them with the existing pre-training corpora in language models.

In “Knowledge Graph Based Synthetic Corpus Generation for Knowledge-Enhanced Language Model Pre-training” (KELM), accepted at NAACL 2021, we explore converting KGs to synthetic natural language sentences to augment existing pre-training corpora, enabling their integration into the pre-training of language models without architectural changes. To that end, we leverage the publicly available English Wikidata KG and convert it into natural language text in order to create a synthetic corpus. We then augment REALM, a retrieval-based language model, with the synthetic corpus as a method of integrating natural language corpora and KGs in pre-training. We have released this corpus publicly for the broader research community.

Converting KG to Natural Language Text
KGs consist of factual information represented explicitly in a structured format, generally in the form of [subject entity, relation, object entity] triples, e.g., [10x10 photobooks, inception, 2012]. A group of related triples is called an entity subgraph. An example of an entity subgraph that builds on the previous example of a triple is { [10x10 photobooks, instance of, Nonprofit Organization], [10x10 photobooks, inception, 2012] }, which is illustrated in the figure below. A KG can be viewed as interconnected entity subgraphs.

Converting subgraphs into natural language text is a standard task in NLP known as data-to-text generation. Although there have been significant advances on data-to-text-generation on benchmark datasets such as WebNLG, converting an entire KG into natural text has additional challenges. The entities and relations in large KGs are more vast and diverse than small benchmark datasets. Moreover, benchmark datasets consist of predefined subgraphs that can form fluent meaningful sentences. With an entire KG, such a segmentation into entity subgraphs needs to be created as well.

An example illustration of how the pipeline converts an entity subgraph (in bubbles) into synthetic natural sentences (far right).

In order to convert the Wikidata KG into synthetic natural sentences, we developed a verbalization pipeline named “Text from KG Generator” (TEKGEN), which is made up of the following components: a large training corpus of heuristically aligned Wikipedia text and Wikidata KG triples, a text-to-text generator (T5) to convert the KG triples to text, an entity subgraph creator for generating groups of triples to be verbalized together, and finally, a post-processing filter to remove low quality outputs. The result is a corpus containing the entire Wikidata KG as natural text, which we call the Knowledge-Enhanced Language Model (KELM) corpus. It consists of ~18M sentences spanning ~45M triples and ~1500 relations.

Converting a KG to natural language, which is then used for language model augmentation

Integrating Knowledge Graph and Natural Text for Language Model Pre-training
Our evaluation shows that KG verbalization is an effective method of integrating KGs with natural language text. We demonstrate this by augmenting the retrieval corpus of REALM, which includes only Wikipedia text.

To assess the effectiveness of verbalization, we augment the REALM retrieval corpus with the KELM corpus (i.e., “verbalized triples”) and compare its performance against augmentation with concatenated triples without verbalization. We measure the accuracy with each data augmentation technique on two popular open-domain question answering datasets: Natural Questions and Web Questions.

Augmenting REALM with even the concatenated triples improves accuracy, potentially adding information not expressed in text explicitly or at all. However, augmentation with verbalized triples allows for a smoother integration of the KG with the natural language text corpus, as demonstrated by the higher accuracy. We also observed the same trend on a knowledge probe called LAMA that queries the model using fill-in-the-blank questions.

Conclusion
With KELM, we provide a publicly-available corpus of a KG as natural text. We show that KG verbalization can be used to integrate KGs with natural text corpora to overcome their structural differences. This has real-world applications for knowledge-intensive tasks, such as question answering, where providing factual knowledge is essential. Moreover, such corpora can be applied in pre-training of large language models, and can potentially reduce toxicity and improve factuality. We hope that this work encourages further advances in integrating structured knowledge sources into pre-training of large language models.

Acknowledgements
This work has been a collaborative effort involving Oshin Agarwal, Heming Ge, Siamak Shakeri and Rami Al-Rfou. We thank William Woods, Jonni Kanerva, Tania Rojas-Esponda, Jianmo Ni, Aaron Cohen and Itai Rolnick for rating a sample of the synthetic corpus to evaluate its quality. We also thank Kelvin Guu for his valuable feedback on the paper.

Source: Google AI Blog


KELM: Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Language Model Pre-training Corpora

Posted by Siamak Shakeri, Staff Software Engineer and Oshin Agarwal, Research Intern, Google Research

Large pre-trained natural language processing (NLP) models, such as BERT, RoBERTa, GPT-3, T5 and REALM, leverage natural language corpora that are derived from the Web and fine-tuned on task specific data, and have made significant advances in various NLP tasks. However, natural language text alone represents a limited coverage of knowledge, and facts may be contained in wordy sentences in many different ways. Furthermore, existence of non-factual information and toxic content in text can eventually cause biases in the resulting models.

Alternate sources of information are knowledge graphs (KGs), which consist of structured data. KGs are factual in nature because the information is usually extracted from more trusted sources, and post-processing filters and human editors ensure inappropriate and incorrect content are removed. Therefore, models that can incorporate them carry the advantages of improved factual accuracy and reduced toxicity. However, their different structural format makes it difficult to integrate them with the existing pre-training corpora in language models.

In “Knowledge Graph Based Synthetic Corpus Generation for Knowledge-Enhanced Language Model Pre-training” (KELM), accepted at NAACL 2021, we explore converting KGs to synthetic natural language sentences to augment existing pre-training corpora, enabling their integration into the pre-training of language models without architectural changes. To that end, we leverage the publicly available English Wikidata KG and convert it into natural language text in order to create a synthetic corpus. We then augment REALM, a retrieval-based language model, with the synthetic corpus as a method of integrating natural language corpora and KGs in pre-training. We have released this corpus publicly for the broader research community.

Converting KG to Natural Language Text
KGs consist of factual information represented explicitly in a structured format, generally in the form of [subject entity, relation, object entity] triples, e.g., [10x10 photobooks, inception, 2012]. A group of related triples is called an entity subgraph. An example of an entity subgraph that builds on the previous example of a triple is { [10x10 photobooks, instance of, Nonprofit Organization], [10x10 photobooks, inception, 2012] }, which is illustrated in the figure below. A KG can be viewed as interconnected entity subgraphs.

Converting subgraphs into natural language text is a standard task in NLP known as data-to-text generation. Although there have been significant advances on data-to-text-generation on benchmark datasets such as WebNLG, converting an entire KG into natural text has additional challenges. The entities and relations in large KGs are more vast and diverse than small benchmark datasets. Moreover, benchmark datasets consist of predefined subgraphs that can form fluent meaningful sentences. With an entire KG, such a segmentation into entity subgraphs needs to be created as well.

An example illustration of how the pipeline converts an entity subgraph (in bubbles) into synthetic natural sentences (far right).

In order to convert the Wikidata KG into synthetic natural sentences, we developed a verbalization pipeline named “Text from KG Generator” (TEKGEN), which is made up of the following components: a large training corpus of heuristically aligned Wikipedia text and Wikidata KG triples, a text-to-text generator (T5) to convert the KG triples to text, an entity subgraph creator for generating groups of triples to be verbalized together, and finally, a post-processing filter to remove low quality outputs. The result is a corpus containing the entire Wikidata KG as natural text, which we call the Knowledge-Enhanced Language Model (KELM) corpus. It consists of ~18M sentences spanning ~45M triples and ~1500 relations.

Converting a KG to natural language, which is then used for language model augmentation

Integrating Knowledge Graph and Natural Text for Language Model Pre-training
Our evaluation shows that KG verbalization is an effective method of integrating KGs with natural language text. We demonstrate this by augmenting the retrieval corpus of REALM, which includes only Wikipedia text.

To assess the effectiveness of verbalization, we augment the REALM retrieval corpus with the KELM corpus (i.e., “verbalized triples”) and compare its performance against augmentation with concatenated triples without verbalization. We measure the accuracy with each data augmentation technique on two popular open-domain question answering datasets: Natural Questions and Web Questions.

Augmenting REALM with even the concatenated triples improves accuracy, potentially adding information not expressed in text explicitly or at all. However, augmentation with verbalized triples allows for a smoother integration of the KG with the natural language text corpus, as demonstrated by the higher accuracy. We also observed the same trend on a knowledge probe called LAMA that queries the model using fill-in-the-blank questions.

Conclusion
With KELM, we provide a publicly-available corpus of a KG as natural text. We show that KG verbalization can be used to integrate KGs with natural text corpora to overcome their structural differences. This has real-world applications for knowledge-intensive tasks, such as question answering, where providing factual knowledge is essential. Moreover, such corpora can be applied in pre-training of large language models, and can potentially reduce toxicity and improve factuality. We hope that this work encourages further advances in integrating structured knowledge sources into pre-training of large language models.

Acknowledgements
This work has been a collaborative effort involving Oshin Agarwal, Heming Ge, Siamak Shakeri and Rami Al-Rfou. We thank William Woods, Jonni Kanerva, Tania Rojas-Esponda, Jianmo Ni, Aaron Cohen and Itai Rolnick for rating a sample of the synthetic corpus to evaluate its quality. We also thank Kelvin Guu for his valuable feedback on the paper.

Source: Google AI Blog


Do Wide and Deep Networks Learn the Same Things?

Posted by Thao Nguyen, AI Resident, Google Research

A common practice to improve a neural network’s performance and tailor it to available computational resources is to adjust the architecture depth and width. Indeed, popular families of neural networks, including EfficientNet, ResNet and Transformers, consist of a set of architectures of flexible depths and widths. However, beyond the effect on accuracy, there is limited understanding of how these fundamental choices of architecture design affect the model, such as the impact on its internal representations.

In “Do Wide and Deep Networks Learn the Same Things? Uncovering How Neural Network Representations Vary with Width and Depth”, we perform a systematic study of the similarity between wide and deep networks from the same architectural family through the lens of their hidden representations and final outputs. In very wide or very deep models, we find a characteristic block structure in their internal representations, and establish a connection between this phenomenon and model overparameterization. Comparisons across models demonstrate that those without the block structure show significant similarity between representations in corresponding layers, but those containing the block structure exhibit highly dissimilar representations. These properties of the internal representations in turn translate to systematically different errors at the class and example levels for wide and deep models when they are evaluated on the same test set.

Comparing Representation Similarity with CKA
We extended prior work on analyzing representations by leveraging our previously developed Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) technique, which provides a robust, scalable way to determine the similarity between the representations learned by any pair of neural network layers. CKA takes as input the representations (i.e., the activation matrices) from two layers, and outputs a similarity score between 0 (not at all similar) and 1 (identical representations).

We apply CKA to a family of ResNets of varying depths and widths, trained on common benchmark datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet), and use representation heatmaps to illustrate the results. The x and y axes of each heatmap index the layers of the model(s) in consideration, going from input to output, and each entry (i, j) is the CKA similarity score between layer i and layer j.

We use CKA to compute the representation similarity for all pairs of layers within a single model (i.e., when network 1 and network 2 are identical), and across models (i.e., when network 1 and network 2 are trained with different random initializations, or have different architectures altogether).

Below is an example of the resulting heatmap when we compare representations of each layer to every other layer within a single ResNet of depth 26 and width multiplier 1. In the design convention used here, the stated depth only refers to the number of convolutional layers in the network, but we analyze all layers present, and the width multiplier applies to the number of filters in each convolution. Notice the checkerboard pattern in the heatmap, which is caused by skip connections (shortcuts between layers) in the architecture.

The Emergence of the Block Structure
What stands out from the representation heatmaps of deeper or wider networks is the emergence of a large set of consecutive layers with highly similar representations, which appears in the heatmaps as a yellow square (i.e., a region with high CKA scores). This phenomenon, which we call the block structure, suggests that the underlying layers may not be as efficient at progressively refining the network’s representations as we expect. Indeed, we show that the task performance becomes stagnant inside the block structure, and that it is possible to prune some underlying layers without affecting the final performance.

Block structure — a large, contiguous set of layers with highly similar representations — emerges with increasing width or depth. Each heatmap panel shows the CKA similarity between all pairs of layers within a single neural network. While its size and position can vary across different training runs, the block structure is a robust phenomenon that arises consistently in larger models.

With additional experiments, we show that the block structure has less to do with the absolute model size, than with the size of the model relative to the size of the training dataset. As we reduce the training dataset size, the block structure starts to appear in shallower and narrower networks:

With increasing network width (towards the right along each row) and decreasing dataset size (down each column), the relative model capacity (with respect to a given task) is effectively inflated, and the block structure begins to appear in smaller models.

Through further analysis, we are also able to demonstrate that the block structure arises from preserving and propagating the dominant principal components of its underlying representations. Refer to our paper for more details.

Comparing Representations Across Models
Going further, we study the implications of depth and width on representations across models of different random initializations and different architectures, and find that the presence of block structure makes a significant difference in this context as well. Despite having different architectures, wide and deep models without the block structure do exhibit representation similarity with each other, with corresponding layers broadly being of the same proportional depth in the model. However, when the block structure is present, its representations are unique to each model. This suggests that despite having similar overall performance, each wide or deep model with the block structure picks up a unique mapping from the input to the output.

For smaller models (e.g., ResNet-38 1×), CKA across different initializations (off the diagonal) closely resembles CKA within a single model (on the diagonal). In contrast, representations within the block structure of wider and deeper models (e.g., ResNet-38 10×, ResNet-164 1×) are highly dissimilar across training runs.

Error Analysis of Wide and Deep Models
Having explored the properties of the learned representations of wide and deep models, we next turn to understanding how they influence the diversity of the output predictions. We train populations of networks of different architectures and determine on which test set examples each architecture configuration tends to make errors.

On both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets, wide and deep models that have the same average accuracy still demonstrate statistically significant differences in example-level predictions. The same observation holds for class-level errors on ImageNet, with wide models exhibiting a small advantage in identifying classes corresponding to scenes, and deep networks being relatively more accurate on consumer goods.

Per-class differences on ImageNet between models with increased width (y-axis) or depth (x-axis). Orange dots reflect differences between two sets of 50 different random initializations of ResNet-83 (1×).

Conclusions
In studying the effects of depth and width on internal representations, we uncover a block structure phenomenon, and demonstrate its connection to model capacity. We also show that wide and deep models exhibit systematic output differences at class and example levels. Check out the paper for full details on these results and additional insights! We’re excited about the many interesting open questions these findings suggest, such as how the block structure arises during training, whether the phenomenon occurs in domains beyond image classification, and ways these insights on internal representations can inform model efficiency and generalization.

Acknowledgements
This is a joint work with Maithra Raghu and Simon Kornblith. We would like to thank Tom Small for the visualizations of the representation heatmap.

Source: Google AI Blog


Contactless Sleep Sensing in Nest Hub

Posted by Michael Dixon, Software Engineer and Reena Singhal Lee, Product Manager, Google Health

People often turn to technology to manage their health and wellbeing, whether it is to record their daily exercise, measure their heart rate, or increasingly, to understand their sleep patterns. Sleep is foundational to a person’s everyday wellbeing and can be impacted by (and in turn, have an impact on) other aspects of one’s life — mood, energy, diet, productivity, and more.

As part of our ongoing efforts to support people’s health and happiness, today we announced Sleep Sensing in the new Nest Hub, which uses radar-based sleep tracking in addition to an algorithm for cough and snore detection. While not intended for medical purposes1, Sleep Sensing is an opt-in feature that can help users better understand their nighttime wellness using a contactless bedside setup. Here we describe the technologies behind Sleep Sensing and discuss how we leverage on-device signal processing to enable sleep monitoring (comparable to other clinical- and consumer-grade devices) in a way that protects user privacy.

Soli for Sleep Tracking
Sleep Sensing in Nest Hub demonstrates the first wellness application of Soli, a miniature radar sensor that can be used for gesture sensing at various scales, from a finger tap to movements of a person’s body. In Pixel 4, Soli powers Motion Sense, enabling touchless interactions with the phone to skip songs, snooze alarms, and silence phone calls. We extended this technology and developed an embedded Soli-based algorithm that could be implemented in Nest Hub for sleep tracking.

Soli consists of a millimeter-wave frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar transceiver that emits an ultra-low power radio wave and measures the reflected signal from the scene of interest. The frequency spectrum of the reflected signal contains an aggregate representation of the distance and velocity of objects within the scene. This signal can be processed to isolate a specified range of interest, such as a user’s sleeping area, and to detect and characterize a wide range of motions within this region, ranging from large body movements to sub-centimeter respiration.

Soli spectrogram illustrating its ability to detect a wide range of motions, characterized as (a) an empty room (no variation in the reflected signal demonstrated by the black space), (b) large pose changes, (c) brief limb movements, and (d) sub-centimeter chest and torso displacements from respiration while at rest.

In order to make use of this signal for Sleep Sensing, it was necessary to design an algorithm that could determine whether a person is present in the specified sleeping area and, if so, whether the person is asleep or awake. We designed a custom machine-learning (ML) model to efficiently process a continuous stream of 3D radar tensors (summarizing activity over a range of distances, frequencies, and time) and automatically classify each feature into one of three possible states: absent, awake, and asleep.

To train and evaluate the model, we recorded more than a million hours of radar data from thousands of individuals, along with thousands of sleep diaries, reference sensor recordings, and external annotations. We then leveraged the TensorFlow Extended framework to construct a training pipeline to process this data and produce an efficient TensorFlow Lite embedded model. In addition, we created an automatic calibration algorithm that runs during setup to configure the part of the scene on which the classifier will focus. This ensures that the algorithm ignores motion from a person on the other side of the bed or from other areas of the room, such as ceiling fans and swaying curtains.

The custom ML model efficiently processes a continuous stream of 3D radar tensors (summarizing activity over a range of distances, frequencies, and time) to automatically compute probabilities for the likelihood of user presence and wakefulness (awake or asleep).

To validate the accuracy of the algorithm, we compared it to the gold-standard of sleep-wake determination, the polysomnogram sleep study, in a cohort of 33 “healthy sleepers” (those without significant sleep issues, like sleep apnea or insomnia) across a broad age range (19-78 years of age). Sleep studies are typically conducted in clinical and research laboratories in order to collect various body signals (brain waves, muscle activity, respiratory and heart rate measurements, body movement and position, and snoring), which can then be interpreted by trained sleep experts to determine stages of sleep and identify relevant events. To account for variability in how different scorers apply the American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s staging and scoring rules, our study used two board-certified sleep technologists to independently annotate each night of sleep and establish a definitive groundtruth.

We compared our Sleep Sensing algorithm’s outputs to the corresponding groundtruth sleep and wake labels for every 30-second epoch of time to compute standard performance metrics (e.g., sensitivity and specificity). While not a true head-to-head comparison, this study’s results can be compared against previously published studies in similar cohorts with comparable methodologies in order to get a rough estimate of performance. In “Sleep-wake detection with a contactless, bedside radar sleep sensing system”, we share the full details of these validation results, demonstrating sleep-wake estimation equivalent to or, in some cases, better than current clinical and consumer sleep tracking devices.

Aggregate performance from previously published accuracies for detection of sleep (sensitivity) and wake (specificity) of a variety of sleep trackers against polysomnography in a variety of different studies, accounting for 3,990 nights in total. While this is not a head-to-head comparison, the performance of Sleep Sensing on Nest Hub in a population of healthy sleepers who simultaneously underwent polysomnography is added to the figure for rough comparison. The size of each circle is a reflection of the number of nights and the inset illustrates the mean±standard deviation for the performance metrics.

Understanding Sleep Quality with Audio Sensing
The Soli-based sleep tracking algorithm described above gives users a convenient and reliable way to see how much sleep they are getting and when sleep disruptions occur. However, to understand and improve their sleep, users also need to understand why their sleep is disrupted. To assist with this, Nest Hub uses its array of sensors to track common sleep disturbances, such as light level changes or uncomfortable room temperature. In addition to these, respiratory events like coughing and snoring are also frequent sources of disturbance, but people are often unaware of these events.

As with other audio-processing applications like speech or music recognition, coughing and snoring exhibit distinctive temporal patterns in the audio frequency spectrum, and with sufficient data an ML model can be trained to reliably recognize these patterns while simultaneously ignoring a wide variety of background noises, from a humming fan to passing cars. The model uses entirely on-device audio processing with privacy-preserving analysis, with no raw audio data sent to Google’s servers. A user can then opt to save the outputs of the processing (sound occurrences, such as the number of coughs and snore minutes) in Google Fit, in order to view personal insights and summaries of their night time wellness over time.

The Nest Hub displays when snoring and coughing may have disturbed a user’s sleep (top) and can track weekly trends (bottom).

To train the model, we assembled a large, hand-labeled dataset, drawing examples from the publicly available AudioSet research dataset as well as hundreds of thousands of additional real-world audio clips contributed by thousands of individuals.

Log-Mel spectrogram inputs comparing cough (left) and snore (right) audio snippets.

When a user opts in to cough and snore tracking on their bedside Nest Hub, the device first uses its Soli-based sleep algorithms to detect when a user goes to bed. Once it detects that a user has fallen asleep, it then activates its on-device sound sensing model and begins processing audio. The model works by continuously extracting spectrogram-like features from the audio input and feeding them through a convolutional neural network classifier in order to estimate the probability that coughing or snoring is happening at a given instant in time. These estimates are analyzed over the course of the night to produce a report of the overall cough count and snoring duration and highlight exactly when these events occurred.

Conclusion
The new Nest Hub, with its underlying Sleep Sensing features, is a first step in empowering users to understand their nighttime wellness using privacy-preserving radar and audio signals. We continue to research additional ways that ambient sensing and the predictive ability of consumer devices could help people better understand their daily health and wellness in a privacy-preserving way.

Acknowledgements
This work involved collaborative efforts from a multidisciplinary team of software engineers, researchers, clinicians, and cross-functional contributors. Special thanks to D. Shin for his significant contributions to this technology and blogpost, and Dr. Logan Schneider, visiting sleep neurologist affiliated with the Stanford/VA Alzheimer’s Center and Stanford Sleep Center, whose clinical expertise and contributions were invaluable to continuously guide this research. In addition to the authors, key contributors to this research from Google Health include Jeffrey Yu, Allen Jiang, Arno Charton, Jake Garrison, Navreet Gill, Sinan Hersek, Yijie Hong, Jonathan Hsu, Andi Janti, Ajay Kannan, Mukil Kesavan, Linda Lei, Kunal Okhandiar‎, Xiaojun Ping, Jo Schaeffer, Neil Smith, Siddhant Swaroop, Bhavana Koka, Anupam Pathak, Dr. Jim Taylor, and the extended team. Another special thanks to Ken Mixter for his support and contributions to the development and integration of this technology into Nest Hub. Thanks to Mark Malhotra and Shwetak Patel for their ongoing leadership, as well as the Nest, Fit, Soli, and Assistant teams we collaborated with to build and validate Sleep Sensing on Nest Hub.

1 Not intended to diagnose, cure, mitigate, prevent or treat any disease or condition. ↩

Source: Google AI Blog


Contactless Sleep Sensing in Nest Hub

Posted by Michael Dixon, Software Engineer and Reena Singhal Lee, Product Manager, Google Health

People often turn to technology to manage their health and wellbeing, whether it is to record their daily exercise, measure their heart rate, or increasingly, to understand their sleep patterns. Sleep is foundational to a person’s everyday wellbeing and can be impacted by (and in turn, have an impact on) other aspects of one’s life — mood, energy, diet, productivity, and more.

As part of our ongoing efforts to support people’s health and happiness, today we announced Sleep Sensing in the new Nest Hub, which uses radar-based sleep tracking in addition to an algorithm for cough and snore detection. While not intended for medical purposes1, Sleep Sensing is an opt-in feature that can help users better understand their nighttime wellness using a contactless bedside setup. Here we describe the technologies behind Sleep Sensing and discuss how we leverage on-device signal processing to enable sleep monitoring (comparable to other clinical- and consumer-grade devices) in a way that protects user privacy.

Soli for Sleep Tracking
Sleep Sensing in Nest Hub demonstrates the first wellness application of Soli, a miniature radar sensor that can be used for gesture sensing at various scales, from a finger tap to movements of a person’s body. In Pixel 4, Soli powers Motion Sense, enabling touchless interactions with the phone to skip songs, snooze alarms, and silence phone calls. We extended this technology and developed an embedded Soli-based algorithm that could be implemented in Nest Hub for sleep tracking.

Soli consists of a millimeter-wave frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar transceiver that emits an ultra-low power radio wave and measures the reflected signal from the scene of interest. The frequency spectrum of the reflected signal contains an aggregate representation of the distance and velocity of objects within the scene. This signal can be processed to isolate a specified range of interest, such as a user’s sleeping area, and to detect and characterize a wide range of motions within this region, ranging from large body movements to sub-centimeter respiration.

Soli spectrogram illustrating its ability to detect a wide range of motions, characterized as (a) an empty room (no variation in the reflected signal demonstrated by the black space), (b) large pose changes, (c) brief limb movements, and (d) sub-centimeter chest and torso displacements from respiration while at rest.

In order to make use of this signal for Sleep Sensing, it was necessary to design an algorithm that could determine whether a person is present in the specified sleeping area and, if so, whether the person is asleep or awake. We designed a custom machine-learning (ML) model to efficiently process a continuous stream of 3D radar tensors (summarizing activity over a range of distances, frequencies, and time) and automatically classify each feature into one of three possible states: absent, awake, and asleep.

To train and evaluate the model, we recorded more than a million hours of radar data from thousands of individuals, along with thousands of sleep diaries, reference sensor recordings, and external annotations. We then leveraged the TensorFlow Extended framework to construct a training pipeline to process this data and produce an efficient TensorFlow Lite embedded model. In addition, we created an automatic calibration algorithm that runs during setup to configure the part of the scene on which the classifier will focus. This ensures that the algorithm ignores motion from a person on the other side of the bed or from other areas of the room, such as ceiling fans and swaying curtains.

The custom ML model efficiently processes a continuous stream of 3D radar tensors (summarizing activity over a range of distances, frequencies, and time) to automatically compute probabilities for the likelihood of user presence and wakefulness (awake or asleep).

To validate the accuracy of the algorithm, we compared it to the gold-standard of sleep-wake determination, the polysomnogram sleep study, in a cohort of 33 “healthy sleepers” (those without significant sleep issues, like sleep apnea or insomnia) across a broad age range (19-78 years of age). Sleep studies are typically conducted in clinical and research laboratories in order to collect various body signals (brain waves, muscle activity, respiratory and heart rate measurements, body movement and position, and snoring), which can then be interpreted by trained sleep experts to determine stages of sleep and identify relevant events. To account for variability in how different scorers apply the American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s staging and scoring rules, our study used two board-certified sleep technologists to independently annotate each night of sleep and establish a definitive groundtruth.

We compared our Sleep Sensing algorithm’s outputs to the corresponding groundtruth sleep and wake labels for every 30-second epoch of time to compute standard performance metrics (e.g., sensitivity and specificity). While not a true head-to-head comparison, this study’s results can be compared against previously published studies in similar cohorts with comparable methodologies in order to get a rough estimate of performance. In “Sleep-wake detection with a contactless, bedside radar sleep sensing system”, we share the full details of these validation results, demonstrating sleep-wake estimation equivalent to or, in some cases, better than current clinical and consumer sleep tracking devices.

Aggregate performance from previously published accuracies for detection of sleep (sensitivity) and wake (specificity) of a variety of sleep trackers against polysomnography in a variety of different studies, accounting for 3,990 nights in total. While this is not a head-to-head comparison, the performance of Sleep Sensing on Nest Hub in a population of healthy sleepers who simultaneously underwent polysomnography is added to the figure for rough comparison. The size of each circle is a reflection of the number of nights and the inset illustrates the mean±standard deviation for the performance metrics.

Understanding Sleep Quality with Audio Sensing
The Soli-based sleep tracking algorithm described above gives users a convenient and reliable way to see how much sleep they are getting and when sleep disruptions occur. However, to understand and improve their sleep, users also need to understand why their sleep is disrupted. To assist with this, Nest Hub uses its array of sensors to track common sleep disturbances, such as light level changes or uncomfortable room temperature. In addition to these, respiratory events like coughing and snoring are also frequent sources of disturbance, but people are often unaware of these events.

As with other audio-processing applications like speech or music recognition, coughing and snoring exhibit distinctive temporal patterns in the audio frequency spectrum, and with sufficient data an ML model can be trained to reliably recognize these patterns while simultaneously ignoring a wide variety of background noises, from a humming fan to passing cars. The model uses entirely on-device audio processing with privacy-preserving analysis, with no raw audio data sent to Google’s servers. A user can then opt to save the outputs of the processing (sound occurrences, such as the number of coughs and snore minutes) in Google Fit, in order to view personal insights and summaries of their night time wellness over time.

The Nest Hub displays when snoring and coughing may have disturbed a user’s sleep (top) and can track weekly trends (bottom).

To train the model, we assembled a large, hand-labeled dataset, drawing examples from the publicly available AudioSet research dataset as well as hundreds of thousands of additional real-world audio clips contributed by thousands of individuals.

Log-Mel spectrogram inputs comparing cough (left) and snore (right) audio snippets.

When a user opts in to cough and snore tracking on their bedside Nest Hub, the device first uses its Soli-based sleep algorithms to detect when a user goes to bed. Once it detects that a user has fallen asleep, it then activates its on-device sound sensing model and begins processing audio. The model works by continuously extracting spectrogram-like features from the audio input and feeding them through a convolutional neural network classifier in order to estimate the probability that coughing or snoring is happening at a given instant in time. These estimates are analyzed over the course of the night to produce a report of the overall cough count and snoring duration and highlight exactly when these events occurred.

Conclusion
The new Nest Hub, with its underlying Sleep Sensing features, is a first step in empowering users to understand their nighttime wellness using privacy-preserving radar and audio signals. We continue to research additional ways that ambient sensing and the predictive ability of consumer devices could help people better understand their daily health and wellness in a privacy-preserving way.

Acknowledgements
This work involved collaborative efforts from a multidisciplinary team of software engineers, researchers, clinicians, and cross-functional contributors. Special thanks to D. Shin for his significant contributions to this technology and blogpost, and Dr. Logan Schneider, visiting sleep neurologist affiliated with the Stanford/VA Alzheimer’s Center and Stanford Sleep Center, whose clinical expertise and contributions were invaluable to continuously guide this research. In addition to the authors, key contributors to this research from Google Health include Jeffrey Yu, Allen Jiang, Arno Charton, Jake Garrison, Navreet Gill, Sinan Hersek, Yijie Hong, Jonathan Hsu, Andi Janti, Ajay Kannan, Mukil Kesavan, Linda Lei, Kunal Okhandiar‎, Xiaojun Ping, Jo Schaeffer, Neil Smith, Siddhant Swaroop, Bhavana Koka, Anupam Pathak, Dr. Jim Taylor, and the extended team. Another special thanks to Ken Mixter for his support and contributions to the development and integration of this technology into Nest Hub. Thanks to Mark Malhotra and Shwetak Patel for their ongoing leadership, as well as the Nest, Fit, Soli, and Assistant teams we collaborated with to build and validate Sleep Sensing on Nest Hub.

1 Not intended to diagnose, cure, mitigate, prevent or treat any disease or condition. ↩

Source: Google AI Blog


Improving On-Device Speech Recognition with VoiceFilter-Lite

Posted by Quan Wang, Software Engineer, Google Research

Voice assistive technologies, which enable users to employ voice commands to interact with their devices, rely on accurate speech recognition to ensure responsiveness to a specific user. But in many real-world use cases, the input to such technologies often consists of overlapping speech, which poses great challenges to many speech recognition algorithms. In 2018, we published a VoiceFilter system, which leverages Google’s Voice Match to personalize interaction with assistive technology by allowing people to enroll their voices.


While the VoiceFilter approach is highly successful, achieving a better source to distortion ratio (SDR) than conventional approaches, efficient on-device streaming speech recognition requires addressing restrictions such as model size, CPU and memory limitations, as well as battery usage considerations and latency minimization.

In “VoiceFilter-Lite: Streaming Targeted Voice Separation for On-Device Speech Recognition”, we present an update to VoiceFilter for on-device use that can significantly improve speech recognition in overlapping speech by leveraging the enrolled voice of a selected speaker. Importantly, this model can be easily integrated with existing on-device speech recognition applications, allowing the user to access voice assistive features under extremely noisy conditions even if an internet connection is unavailable. Our experiments show that a 2.2MB VoiceFilter-Lite model provides a 25.1% improvement to the word error rate (WER) on overlapping speech.


Improving On-Device Speech Recognition
While the original VoiceFilter system was very successful at separating a target speaker's speech signal from other overlapping sources, its model size, computational cost and latency are not feasible for speech recognition on mobile devices.

The new VoiceFilter-Lite system has been carefully designed to fit on-device applications. Instead of processing audio waveforms, VoiceFilter-Lite takes exactly the same input features as the speech recognition model (stacked log Mel-filterbanks), and directly enhances these features by filtering out components not belonging to the target speaker in real time. Together with several optimizations on network topologies, the number of runtime operations is drastically reduced. After quantizing the neural network with the TensorFlow Lite library, the model size is only 2.2 MB, which fits most on-device applications.

To train the VoiceFilter-Lite model, the filterbanks of the noisy speech are fed as input to the network together with an embedding vector that represents the identity of the target speaker (i.e., a d-vector). The network predicts a mask that is element-wise multiplied to the input to produce enhanced filterbanks. A loss function is defined to minimize the difference between the enhanced filterbanks and the filterbanks from the clean speech during training.

Model architecture of the VoiceFilter-Lite system.

VoiceFilter-Lite is a plug-and-play model, which allows the application in which it’s implemented to easily bypass it if the speaker did not enroll their voice. This also means that the speech recognition model and the VoiceFilter-Lite model can be separately trained and updated, which largely reduces engineering complexity in the deployment process.

As a plug-and-play model, VoiceFilter-Lite can be easily bypassed if the speaker did not enroll their voice.

Addressing the Challenge of Over-Suppression
When speech separation models are used for improving speech recognition, two types of error could occur: under-suppression, when the model fails to filter out noisy components from the signal; and over-suppression, when the model fails to preserve useful signal, resulting in some words being dropped from the recognized text. Over-suppression is especially problematic since modern speech recognition models are usually already trained with extensively augmented data (such as room simulation and SpecAugment), and thus are more robust to under-suppression.

VoiceFilter-Lite addresses the over-suppression issue with two novel approaches. First, it uses an asymmetric loss during the training process, such that the model is less tolerant to over-suppression than under-suppression. Second, it predicts the type of noise at runtime, and adaptively adjusts the suppression strength according to this prediction.

VoiceFilter-Lite adaptively applies stronger suppression strength when overlapping speech is detected.

With these two solutions, the VoiceFilter-Lite model retains great performance on streaming speech recognition for other scenarios, such as single-speaker speech under quiet or various noise conditions, while still providing significant improvement on overlapping speech. From our experiments, we observed a 25.1% improvement of word error rate after the 2.2MB VoiceFilter-Lite model is applied on additive overlapping speech. For reverberant overlapping speech, which is a more challenging task to simulate far-field devices such as smart home speakers, we also observed a 14.7% improvement of word error rate with VoiceFilter-Lite.

Future Work
While VoiceFilter-Lite has shown great promise for various on-device speech applications, we are also exploring several other directions to make VoiceFilter-Lite more useful. First, our current model is trained and evaluated with English speech only. We are excited about adopting the same technology to improve speech recognition for more languages. Second, we would like to directly optimize the speech recognition loss during the training of VoiceFilter-Lite, which can potentially further improve speech recognition beyond overlapping speech.

Acknowledgements
The research described in this post represents joint efforts from multiple teams within Google. Contributors include Quan Wang, Ignacio Lopez Moreno, Mert Saglam, Kevin Wilson, Alan Chiao, Renjie Liu, Yanzhang He, Wei Li, Jason Pelecanos, Philip Chao, Sinan Akay, John Han, Stephen Wu, Hannah Muckenhirn, Ye Jia, Zelin Wu, Yiteng Huang, Marily Nika, Jaclyn Konzelmann, Nino Tasca, and Alexander Gruenstein.

Source: Google AI Blog


Axial-DeepLab: Long-Range Modeling in All Layers for Panoptic Segmentation

Posted by Huiyu Wang, Student Researcher, and Yukun Zhu, Software Engineer, Google Research

The success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) mainly comes from two properties of convolution: translation equivariance and locality. Translation equivariance, although not exact, ensures that the model functions well for objects at different positions in an image or for images of different sizes. Locality ensures efficient computation, but at the cost of making the modeling of long-range spatial relations challenging for panoptic segmentation of large images. For example, segmenting a large object requires modeling the shape of it, which could potentially cover a very large pixel area, and context that could be helpful for segmenting the object may come from farther away. In such cases, the inability to inform the model from context far from the convolution kernel could negatively impact the performance.

A rich set of literature has discussed approaches to solving the limitation of locality and enabling long-range interactions in CNNs. Some employ atrous convolutions, or image pyramids, which expand the receptive field somewhat, but it is still limited to a small local region. Another line of work adopts self-attention mechanisms, e.g., non-local neural networks, which allow the receptive field to cover the entire input image, as opposed to local convolutions. Unfortunately, such approaches are computationally expensive, especially for large inputs. Recent works enable building fully attentional models, but at a cost of applying local constraints to non-local neural networks. These restrictions limit the model receptive field, which is harmful to tasks such as segmentation, especially on high-resolution inputs.

In our recent ECCV 2020 paper, “Axial-DeepLab: Stand-Alone Axial-Attention for Panoptic Segmentation”, we propose to adopt axial-attention (or criss-cross attention), which recovers large receptive field in fully attentional models. The core idea is to separate 2D attention into two steps that apply 1D attention in the height and width axes sequentially. The efficiency of this approach enables attention over large regions, allowing models that learn long-range, or even global, interactions. Additionally, we propose a novel formulation for self-attention modules, which is more sensitive to the position of relevant context in a large receptive field with marginal costs. We evaluate our position-sensitive axial-attention method on panoptic segmentation by applying it to Panoptic-DeepLab, a simple and efficient method for panoptic segmentation. The effectiveness of our model is demonstrated on ImageNet, COCO, and Cityscapes. Axial-DeepLab achieves state-of-the-art results on panoptic segmentation and semantic segmentation, outperforming Panoptic-DeepLab by a large margin.

Axial-Attention Architecture
Axial-DeepLab consists of an Axial-ResNet backbone and Panoptic-DeepLab output heads, which produce panoptic segmentation results. Our Axial-ResNet is built on a ResNet architecture, in which all the 3×3 local convolutions in the ResNet bottleneck blocks are replaced by our proposed global position-sensitive axial-attention, thus enabling both a large receptive field and precise positional information.

An axial-attention block consists of two position-sensitive axial-attention layers operating along height- and width-axis sequentially.

The Axial-DeepLab height axial attention layer provides 1-dimensional self-attention globally, propagating information within individual columns — it does not transfer information between columns. The second 1D attention layer operating in the horizontal direction allows one to capture both column-wise and row-wise information. This separation reduces the complexity of self-attention from quadratic (2D) to linear (1D), which enables using a much larger (65×65 vs. previously 3×3) or even global context in all layers for long-range modeling in panoptic segmentation.

A message can be passed globally with two hops.

Note that a message or feature vector at (x1, y1) can always be passed globally on a 2D lattice to any position (x2, y2), with one hop on the height-axis (x1, y1 →x1, y2), followed by another hop on the width axis (x1, y2 → x2, y2). In this way, we are able to model 2D long-range relations in a single residual block. This axial-attention design also reduces the complexity from quadratic to linear and enables global receptive fields in all layers of a model.

Position-Sensitive Self-Attention
Additionally, we propose a position-sensitive formulation for self-attention. Previous self-attention formulations enabled a given pixel A to aggregate long-range context B, but provided no information about where in the receptive field the context originated. For example, perhaps the feature at pixel A represents the eye of a cat, and the context B might be the nose and another eye. In this case, the aggregated feature at pixel A would be a nose and two eyes, regardless of the geometric structure of a face. This could cause a false indication of the presence of a face when the two eyes are on the bottom-left of an image and the nose is on the top-right. A recently proposed solution is to impose a positional bias on where in the receptive field the context can originate. This bias depends on the feature at A only, (an eye), but not the feature at B, which contains important contextual information.

In this work, we let this bias also depend on the context feature at B (i.e., the nose and another eye). This change enables a more accurate positional bias when a pixel and the context informing it are far away from one another and thus contains different information about the bias. In addition, when pixel A aggregates the context feature B, we also include a feature that indicates the relative position from A to B. This change enables A to know precisely where B originated. These two changes make self-attention position-sensitive, especially in the situation of long-range modeling.

Results
We have tested Axial-DeepLab on COCO, and Cityscapes for panoptic segmentation. Improvements over the state-of-the-art Panoptic-DeepLab for each dataset can be seen in the table below. In particular, our Axial-DeepLab outperforms Panoptic-DeepLab by 2.8% Panoptic Quality (PQ) on the COCO test-dev set. Our single-scale small model performs better than multi-scale Panoptic-DeepLab while improving computational efficiency by 27x and using only 1/4 the number of parameters. We also show state-of-the-art results on Cityscapes. Moreover, we find that the performance increases as the block receptive field increases from 5 × 5 to 65 × 65. Our model is also more robust to out-of-distribution scales, on which the model was not trained.

Model     COCO     Citiscapes
Panoptic-DeepLab     39.7     65.3
Axial-DeepLab (ours)     43.4 (+3.7)     66.5 (+1.2)
Single scale comparison with Panoptic-DeepLab on validation sets

Besides our main results on panoptic segmentation, our full axial-attention model, Axial-ResNet, also performs better than the previous best stand-alone self-attention model on ImageNet.

Model     Params     M-Adds     Top-1
ResNet-50     25.6M     4.1B     76.9
Stand-Alone     18.0M     3.6B     77.6
Full Axial-Attention (ours)     12.5M     3.3B     78.1
Full Axial-Attention also works well on ImageNet.

Conclusion
We have proposed and demonstrated the effectiveness of position-sensitive axial-attention on image classification and panoptic segmentation. On ImageNet, our Axial-ResNet, formed by stacking axial-attention blocks, achieves state-of-the-art results among stand-alone self-attention models. We further convert Axial-ResNet to Axial-DeepLab for bottom-up panoptic segmentation, and also show state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks, including COCO, and Cityscapes. We hope our promising results could establish that axial-attention is an effective building block for modern computer vision models.

Acknowledgements
This post reflects the work of the authors as well as Bradley Green, Hartwig Adam, Alan Yuille, and Liang-Chieh Chen. We also thank Niki Parmar for discussion and support; Ashish Vaswani, Xuhui Jia, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Zhuoran Shen for their insightful comments and suggestions; Maxwell Collins and Blake Hechtman for technical support.

Source: Google AI Blog


Speeding Up Neural Network Training with Data Echoing

Posted by Dami Choi, Student Researcher and George Dahl, Senior Research Scientist, Google Research

Over the past decade, dramatic increases in neural network training speed have made it possible to apply deep learning techniques to many important problems. In the twilight of Moore's law, as improvements in general purpose processors plateau, the machine learning community has increasingly turned to specialized hardware to produce additional speedups. For example, GPUs and TPUs optimize for highly parallelizable matrix operations, which are core components of neural network training algorithms. These accelerators, at a high level, can speed up training in two ways. First, they can process more training examples in parallel, and second, they can process each training example faster. We know there are limits to the speedups from processing more training examples in parallel, but will building ever faster accelerators continue to speed up training?

Unfortunately, not all operations in the training pipeline run on accelerators, so one cannot simply rely on faster accelerators to continue driving training speedups. For example, earlier stages in the training pipeline like disk I/O and data preprocessing involve operations that do not benefit from GPUs and TPUs. As accelerator improvements outpace improvements in CPUs and disks, these earlier stages will increasingly become a bottleneck, wasting accelerator capacity and limiting training speed.
An example training pipeline representative of many large-scale computer vision programs. The stages that come before applying the mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) update generally do not benefit from specialized hardware accelerators.
Consider a scenario where the code upstream to the accelerator takes twice as long as the code that runs on the accelerator – a scenario that is already realistic for some workloads today. Even if the code is pipelined to execute the upstream and downstream stages in parallel, the upstream stage will dominate training time and the accelerator will be idle 50% of the time. In this case, building a faster accelerator will not improve training speed at all. It may be possible to speed up the input pipeline by dedicating engineering effort and additional compute resources, but such efforts are time consuming and distract from the main goal of improving predictive performance. For very small datasets,one can precompute the augmented dataset offline and load the entire preprocessed dataset in memory, but this doesn’t work for most ML training scenarios.

In “Faster Neural Network Training with Data Echoing”, we propose a simple technique that reuses (or “echoes”) intermediate outputs from earlier pipeline stages to reclaim idle accelerator capacity. Rather than waiting for more data to become available, we simply utilize data that is already available to keep the accelerators busy.
Left: Without data echoing, downstream computational capacity is idle 50% of the time. Right: Data echoing with echoing factor 2 reclaims downstream computational capacity.
Repeating Data to Train Faster
Imagine a situation where reading and preprocessing a batch of training data takes twice as long as performing a single optimization step on that batch. In this case, after the first optimization step on the preprocessed batch, we can reuse the batch and perform a second step before the next batch is ready. In the best case scenario, where repeated data is as useful as fresh data, we would see a twofold speedup in training. In reality, data echoing provides a slightly smaller speedup because repeated data is not as useful as fresh data – but it can still provide a significant speedup compared to leaving the accelerator idle.

There are typically several ways to implement data echoing in a given neural network training pipeline. The technique we propose involves duplicating data into a shuffle buffer somewhere in the training pipeline, but we are free to insert this buffer anywhere after whichever stage produces a bottleneck in the given pipeline. When we insert the buffer before batching, we call our technique example echoing, whereas, when we insert it after batching, we call our technique batch echoing. Example echoing shuffles data at the example level, while batch echoing shuffles the sequence of duplicate batches. We can also insert the buffer before data augmentation, such that each copy of repeated data is slightly different (and therefore closer to a fresh example). Of the different versions of data echoing that place the shuffle buffer between different stages, the version that provides the greatest speedup depends on the specific training pipeline.

Data Echoing Across Workloads
So how useful is reusing data? We tried data echoing on five neural network training pipelines spanning 3 different tasks – image classification, language modeling, and object detection – and measured the number of fresh examples needed to reach a particular performance target. We chose targets to match the best result reliably achieved by the baseline during hyperparameter tuning. We found that data echoing allowed us to reach the target performance with fewer fresh examples, demonstrating that reusing data is useful for reducing disk I/O across a variety of tasks. In some cases, repeated data is nearly as useful as fresh data: in the figure below, example echoing before augmentation reduces the number of fresh examples required almost by the repetition factor.
Data echoing, when each data item is repeated twice, either reduces or does not change the number of fresh examples needed to reach the target out-of-sample performance. Dashed lines indicate the values we would expect if repeated examples were as useful as fresh examples.
Reduction in Training Time
Data echoing can speed up training whenever computation upstream from accelerators dominates training time. We measured the training speedup achieved in a training pipeline bottlenecked by input latency due to streaming training data from cloud storage, which is realistic for many of today’s large-scale production workloads or anyone streaming training data over a network from a remote storage system. We trained a ResNet-50 model on the ImageNet dataset and found that data echoing provides a significant training speedup, in this case, more than 3 times faster when using data echoing.
Data echoing can reduce training time for ResNet-50 on ImageNet. In this experiment, reading a batch of training data from cloud storage took 6 times longer than the code that used each batch of data to perform a training step. The Echoing factor in the legend refers to the number of times each data item was repeated. Dashed lines indicate the expected values if repeated examples were as useful as fresh examples and there was no overhead from echoing.
Data Echoing Preserves Predictive Performance
Although one might be concerned that reusing data would harm the model’s final performance, we found that data echoing did not degrade the quality of the final model for any of the workloads we tested.
Comparing the individual trials that achieved the best out-of-sample performance during training for both with and without data echoing shows that reusing data does not harm final model quality. Here validation cross entropy is equivalent to log perplexity.
As improvements in specialized accelerators like GPUs and TPUs continue to outpace general purpose processors, we expect data echoing and similar strategies to become increasingly important parts of the neural network training toolkit.

Acknowledgements
The Data Echoing project was conducted by Dami Choi, Alexandre Passos, Christopher J. Shallue, and George E. Dahl while Dami Choi was a Google AI Resident. We would also like to thank Roy Frostig, Luke Metz, Yiding Jiang, and Ting Chen for helpful discussions.

Source: Google AI Blog


An NLU-Powered Tool to Explore COVID-19 Scientific Literature

Posted by Keith Hall, Research Scientist, Natural Language Understanding, Google Research

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists and researchers around the world are publishing an immense amount of new research in order to understand and combat the disease. While the volume of research is very encouraging, it can be difficult for scientists and researchers to keep up with the rapid pace of new publications. Traditional search engines can be excellent resources for finding real-time information on general COVID-19 questions like "How many COVID-19 cases are there in the United States?", but can struggle with understanding the meaning behind research-driven queries. Furthermore, searching through the existing corpus of COVID-19 scientific literature with traditional keyword-based approaches can make it difficult to pinpoint relevant evidence for complex queries.

To help address this problem, we are launching the COVID-19 Research Explorer, a semantic search interface on top of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), which includes more than 50,000 journal articles and preprints. We have designed the tool with the goal of helping scientists and researchers efficiently pore through articles for answers or evidence to COVID-19-related questions.

When the user asks an initial question, the tool not only returns a set of papers (like in a traditional search) but also highlights snippets from the paper that are possible answers to the question. The user can review the snippets and quickly make a decision on whether or not that paper is worth further reading. If the user is satisfied with the initial set of papers and snippets, we have added functionality to pose follow-up questions, which act as new queries for the original set of retrieved articles. Take a look at the animation below to see an example of a query and a corresponding follow-up question. We hope these features will foster knowledge exploration and efficient gathering of evidence for scientific hypotheses.

Semantic Search
A key technology powering the tool is semantic search. Semantic search aims to not just capture term overlap between a query and a document, but to really understand whether the meaning of a phrase is relevant to the user’s true intent behind their query.

Consider the query, “What regulates ACE2 expression?” Even though this seems like a simple question, certain phrases can still confuse a search engine that relies solely on text matching. For example, “regulates” can refer to a number of biological processes. While traditional information retrieval (IR) systems use techniques like query expansion to mitigate this confusion, semantic search models aim to learn these relationships implicitly.

Word order also matters. ACE2 (angiotensin converting enzyme-2) itself regulates certain biological processes, but the question is actually asking what regulates ACE2. Matching on terms alone will not distinguish between “what regulates ACE2 ” and “what ACE2 regulates.” Traditional IR systems use tricks like n-gram term matching, but semantic search methods strive to model word order and semantics at their core.

The semantic search technology we use is powered by BERT, which has recently been deployed to improve retrieval quality of Google Search. For the COVID-19 Research Explorer we faced the challenge that biomedical literature uses a language that is very different from the kinds of queries submitted to Google.com. In order to train BERT models, we required supervision — examples of queries and their relevant documents and snippets. While we relied on excellent resources produced by BioASQ for fine-tuning, such human-curated datasets tend to be small. Neural semantic search models require large amounts of training data. To augment small human-constructed datasets, we used advances in query generation to build a large synthetic corpus of questions and relevant documents in the biomedical domain.

Specifically, we used large amounts of general domain question-answer pairs to train an encoder-decoder model (part a in the figure below). This kind of neural architecture is used in tasks like machine translation that encodes one piece of text (e.g., an English sentence) and produces another piece of text (e.g., a French sentence). Here we trained the model to translate from answer passages to questions (or queries) about that passage. Next we took passages from every document in the collection, in this case CORD-19, and generated corresponding queries (part b). We then used these synthetic query-passage pairs as supervision to train our neural retrieval model (part c).
Synthetic query construction.
However, we found that there were examples where the neural model performed worse than a keyword-based model. This is because of the memorization-generalization continuum, which is well known in most fields of artificial intelligence and psycholinguistics. Keyword-based models, like tf-idf, are essentially memorizers. They memorize terms from the query and look for documents that have them. Neural retrieval models, on the other hand, learn generalizations about concepts and meaning and try to match based on those. Sometimes they can over-generalize when precision is important. For example, if I query, “What regulates ACE2 expression?”, one may want the model to generalize the concept of “regulation,” but not ACE2 beyond acronym expansion.

Hybrid Term-Neural Retrieval Model
To improve our system we built a hybrid term-neural retrieval model. A crucial observation is that both term-based and neural models can be cast as a vector space model. In other words, we can encode both the query and documents and then treat retrieval as looking for the document vectors that are most similar to the query vector, also known as k-nearest neighbor retrieval. There is a lot of research and engineering that is needed to make this work at scale, but it allows us a simple mechanism to combine methods. The simplest approach is to combine the vectors with a trade-off parameter.
Hybrid Term and Neural Retrieval.
In the figure above, the blue boxes are the term-based vectors, and the red, the neural vectors. We represent documents by concatenating these vectors. We concatenate the two vectors for queries as well, but we control the relative importance of exact term matches versus neural semantic matching. This is done via a weight parameter k. While more complex hybrid schemes are possible, we found that this simple hybrid model significantly increased quality on our biomedical literature retrieval benchmarks.

Availability and Community Feedback
The COVID-19 Research Explorer is freely available to the research community as an open alpha. Over the coming months we will be making a number of usability enhancements, so please check back often. Try out the COVID-19 Research Explorer, and please share any comments you have with us via the feedback channels on the site.

Acknowledgements
This effort has been successful thanks to the hard work of many people, including, but not limited to the following (in alphabetical order of last name): John Alex, Waleed Ammar, Greg Billock, Yale Cong, Ali Elkahky, Daniel Francisco, Stephen Greco, Stefan Hosein, Johanna Katz, Gyorgy Kiss, Margarita Kopniczky, Ivan Korotkov, Dominic Leung, Daphne Luong, Ji Ma, Ryan Mcdonald, Matt Pearson-Beck, Biao She, Jonathan Sheffi, Kester Tong, Ben Wedin

Source: Google AI Blog