Machine learningMachine learning (ML) is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines 'discover' their 'own' algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. Recently, generative artificial neural networks have been able to surpass results of many previous approaches.
Types of artificial neural networksThere are many types of artificial neural networks (ANN). Artificial neural networks are computational models inspired by biological neural networks, and are used to approximate functions that are generally unknown. Particularly, they are inspired by the behaviour of neurons and the electrical signals they convey between input (such as from the eyes or nerve endings in the hand), processing, and output from the brain (such as reacting to light, touch, or heat). The way neurons semantically communicate is an area of ongoing research.
Artificial neural networkArtificial neural networks (ANNs, also shortened to neural networks (NNs) or neural nets) are a branch of machine learning models that are built using principles of neuronal organization discovered by connectionism in the biological neural networks constituting animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected units or nodes called artificial neurons, which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain. Each connection, like the synapses in a biological brain, can transmit a signal to other neurons.
Supervised learningSupervised learning (SL) is a paradigm in machine learning where input objects (for example, a vector of predictor variables) and a desired output value (also known as human-labeled supervisory signal) train a model. The training data is processed, building a function that maps new data on expected output values. An optimal scenario will allow for the algorithm to correctly determine output values for unseen instances. This requires the learning algorithm to generalize from the training data to unseen situations in a "reasonable" way (see inductive bias).
Self-supervised learningSelf-supervised learning (SSL) is a paradigm in machine learning for processing data of lower quality, rather than improving ultimate outcomes. Self-supervised learning more closely imitates the way humans learn to classify objects. The typical SSL method is based on an artificial neural network or other model such as a decision list. The model learns in two steps. First, the task is solved based on an auxiliary or pretext classification task using pseudo-labels which help to initialize the model parameters.
Feature learningIn machine learning, feature learning or representation learning is a set of techniques that allows a system to automatically discover the representations needed for feature detection or classification from raw data. This replaces manual feature engineering and allows a machine to both learn the features and use them to perform a specific task. Feature learning is motivated by the fact that machine learning tasks such as classification often require input that is mathematically and computationally convenient to process.
Feedforward neural networkA feedforward neural network (FNN) is one of the two broad types of artificial neural network, characterized by direction of the flow of information between its layers. Its flow is uni-directional, meaning that the information in the model flows in only one direction—forward—from the input nodes, through the hidden nodes (if any) and to the output nodes, without any cycles or loops, in contrast to recurrent neural networks, which have a bi-directional flow.
Unsupervised learningUnsupervised learning, is paradigm in machine learning where, in contrast to supervised learning and semi-supervised learning, algorithms learn patterns exclusively from unlabeled data. Neural network tasks are often categorized as discriminative (recognition) or generative (imagination). Often but not always, discriminative tasks use supervised methods and generative tasks use unsupervised (see Venn diagram); however, the separation is very hazy. For example, object recognition favors supervised learning but unsupervised learning can also cluster objects into groups.
Convolutional neural networkConvolutional neural network (CNN) is a regularized type of feed-forward neural network that learns feature engineering by itself via filters (or kernel) optimization. Vanishing gradients and exploding gradients, seen during backpropagation in earlier neural networks, are prevented by using regularized weights over fewer connections. For example, for each neuron in the fully-connected layer 10,000 weights would be required for processing an image sized 100 × 100 pixels.
Feature (machine learning)In machine learning and pattern recognition, a feature is an individual measurable property or characteristic of a phenomenon. Choosing informative, discriminating and independent features is a crucial element of effective algorithms in pattern recognition, classification and regression. Features are usually numeric, but structural features such as strings and graphs are used in syntactic pattern recognition. The concept of "feature" is related to that of explanatory variable used in statistical techniques such as linear regression.
Recurrent neural networkA recurrent neural network (RNN) is one of the two broad types of artificial neural network, characterized by direction of the flow of information between its layers. In contrast to uni-directional feedforward neural network, it is a bi-directional artificial neural network, meaning that it allows the output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. Their ability to use internal state (memory) to process arbitrary sequences of inputs makes them applicable to tasks such as unsegmented, connected handwriting recognition or speech recognition.
Reinforcement learningReinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. Reinforcement learning is one of three basic machine learning paradigms, alongside supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Reinforcement learning differs from supervised learning in not needing labelled input/output pairs to be presented, and in not needing sub-optimal actions to be explicitly corrected.
Residual neural networkA Residual Neural Network (a.k.a. Residual Network, ResNet) is a deep learning model in which the weight layers learn residual functions with reference to the layer inputs. A Residual Network is a network with skip connections that perform identity mappings, merged with the layer outputs by addition. It behaves like a Highway Network whose gates are opened through strongly positive bias weights. This enables deep learning models with tens or hundreds of layers to train easily and approach better accuracy when going deeper.
Gradient descentIn mathematics, gradient descent (also often called steepest descent) is a iterative optimization algorithm for finding a local minimum of a differentiable function. The idea is to take repeated steps in the opposite direction of the gradient (or approximate gradient) of the function at the current point, because this is the direction of steepest descent. Conversely, stepping in the direction of the gradient will lead to a local maximum of that function; the procedure is then known as gradient ascent.
Curse of dimensionalityThe curse of dimensionality refers to various phenomena that arise when analyzing and organizing data in high-dimensional spaces that do not occur in low-dimensional settings such as the three-dimensional physical space of everyday experience. The expression was coined by Richard E. Bellman when considering problems in dynamic programming. Dimensionally cursed phenomena occur in domains such as numerical analysis, sampling, combinatorics, machine learning, data mining and databases.
Weak supervisionWeak supervision, also called semi-supervised learning, is a paradigm in machine learning, the relevance and notability of which increased with the advent of large language models due to large amount of data required to train them. It is characterized by using a combination of a small amount of human-labeled data (exclusively used in more expensive and time-consuming supervised learning paradigm), followed by a large amount of unlabeled data (used exclusively in unsupervised learning paradigm).
Attention (machine learning)Machine learning-based attention is a mechanism mimicking cognitive attention. It calculates "soft" weights for each word, more precisely for its embedding, in the context window. It can do it either in parallel (such as in transformers) or sequentially (such as recursive neural networks). "Soft" weights can change during each runtime, in contrast to "hard" weights, which are (pre-)trained and fine-tuned and remain frozen afterwards. Multiple attention heads are used in transformer-based large language models.
Transformer (machine learning model)A transformer is a deep learning architecture that relies on the parallel multi-head attention mechanism. The modern transformer was proposed in the 2017 paper titled 'Attention Is All You Need' by Ashish Vaswani et al., Google Brain team. It is notable for requiring less training time than previous recurrent neural architectures, such as long short-term memory (LSTM), and its later variation has been prevalently adopted for training large language models on large (language) datasets, such as the Wikipedia corpus and Common Crawl, by virtue of the parallelized processing of input sequence.
Neural networkA neural network can refer to a neural circuit of biological neurons (sometimes also called a biological neural network), a network of artificial neurons or nodes in the case of an artificial neural network. Artificial neural networks are used for solving artificial intelligence (AI) problems; they model connections of biological neurons as weights between nodes. A positive weight reflects an excitatory connection, while negative values mean inhibitory connections. All inputs are modified by a weight and summed.
Automated machine learningAutomated machine learning (AutoML) is the process of automating the tasks of applying machine learning to real-world problems. AutoML potentially includes every stage from beginning with a raw dataset to building a machine learning model ready for deployment. AutoML was proposed as an artificial intelligence-based solution to the growing challenge of applying machine learning. The high degree of automation in AutoML aims to allow non-experts to make use of machine learning models and techniques without requiring them to become experts in machine learning.
