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SpecAugment: A New Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition
Monday, April 22, 2019
Posted by Daniel S. Park, AI Resident and William Chan, Research Scientist
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), the process of taking an audio input and transcribing it to text, has benefited greatly from
the ongoing development of deep neural networks
. As a result, ASR has become ubiquitous in many modern devices and products, such as Google Assistant, Google Home and YouTube. Nevertheless, there remain many important challenges in developing deep learning-based ASR systems. One such challenge is that ASR models, which have many parameters, tend to overfit the training data and have a hard time generalizing to unseen data when the training set is not extensive enough.
In the absence of an adequate volume of training data, it is possible to increase the effective size of existing data through the process of
data augmentation
, which has contributed to significantly improving the performance of deep networks in the domain of
image classification
. In the case of speech recognition, augmentation traditionally involves deforming the audio waveform used for training in some fashion (e.g., by speeding it up or slowing it down), or adding background noise. This has the effect of making the dataset effectively larger, as multiple augmented versions of a single input is fed into the network over the course of training, and also helps the network become robust by forcing it to learn relevant features. However, existing conventional methods of augmenting audio input introduces additional computational cost and sometimes requires additional data.
In our recent paper, “
SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition
”, we take a new approach to augmenting audio data, treating it as a visual problem rather than an audio one. Instead of augmenting the input audio waveform as is traditionally done, SpecAugment applies an augmentation policy directly to the audio spectrogram (i.e., an image representation of the waveform). This method is simple, computationally cheap to apply, and does not require additional data. It is also surprisingly effective in improving the performance of ASR networks, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on the ASR tasks
LibriSpeech 960h
and
Switchboard 300h
.
SpecAugment
In traditional ASR, the audio waveform is typically encoded as a visual representation, such as a
spectrogram
, before being input as training data for the network. Augmentation of training data is normally applied to the waveform audio before it is converted into the spectrogram, such that after every iteration, new spectrograms must be generated. In our approach, we investigate the approach of augmenting the spectrogram itself, rather than the waveform data. Since the augmentation is applied directly to the input features of the network, it can be run online during training without significantly impacting training speed.
A waveform is typically converted into a visual representation (in our case, a log mel spectrogram; steps 1 through 3 of
this article
) before being fed into a network.
SpecAugment modifies the spectrogram by
warping
it in the time direction, masking blocks of consecutive frequency channels, and masking blocks of utterances in time. These augmentations have been chosen to help the network to be robust against deformations in the time direction, partial loss of frequency information and partial loss of small segments of speech of the input. An example of such an augmentation policy is displayed below.
The log mel spectrogram is augmented by warping in the time direction, and masking (multiple) blocks of consecutive time steps (vertical masks) and mel frequency channels (horizontal masks). The masked portion of the spectrogram is displayed in purple for emphasis.
To test SpecAugment, we performed some experiments with the LibriSpeech dataset, where we took three
Listen Attend and Spell (LAS) networks
, end-to-end networks commonly used for speech recognition, and compared the test performance between networks trained with and without augmentation. The performance of an ASR network is measured by the
Word Error Rate
(WER) of the transcript produced by the network against the target transcript. Here, all hyperparameters were kept the same, and only the data fed into the network was altered. We found that SpecAugment improves network performance without any additional adjustments to the network or training parameters.
Performance of networks on the test sets of LibriSpeech with and without augmentation. The LibriSpeech test set is divided into two portions, test-clean and test-other, the latter of which contains noisier audio data.
More importantly, SpecAugment prevents the network from over-fitting by giving it deliberately corrupted data. As an example of this, below we show how the WER for the training set and the development (or dev) set evolves through training with and without augmentation. We see that without augmentation, the network achieves near-perfect performance on the training set, while grossly under-performing on both the clean and noisy dev set. On the other hand, with augmentation, the network struggles to perform as well on the training set, but actually shows better performance on the clean dev set, and shows comparable performance on the noisy dev set. This suggests that the network is no longer over-fitting the training data, and that improving training performance would lead to better test performance.
Training, clean (dev-clean) and noisy (dev-other) development set performance with and without augmentation.
State-of-the-Art Results
We can now focus on improving training performance, which can be done by adding more capacity to the networks by making them larger. By doing this in conjunction with increasing training time, we were able to get state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the tasks
LibriSpeech 960h
and
Switchboard 300h
.
Word error rates (%) for state-of-the-art results for the tasks LibriSpeech 960h and Switchboard 300h. The test set for both tasks have a clean (clean/Switchboard) and a noisy (other/CallHome) subset. Previous SOTA results taken from
Li et. al (2019)
,
Yang et. al (2018)
and
Zeyer et. al (2018)
.
The simple augmentation scheme we have used is surprisingly powerful—we are able to improve the performance of the end-to-end LAS networks so much that it surpasses those of classical ASR models, which traditionally did much better on smaller academic datasets such as LibriSpeech or Switchboard.
Performance of various classes of networks on LibriSpeech and Switchboard tasks. The performance of LAS models is compared to classical (e.g.,
HMM
) and other end-to-end models (e.g.,
CTC
/
ASG
) over time.
Language Models
Language models
(LMs), which are trained on a bigger corpus of text-only data, have played a significant role in improving the performance of an ASR network by leveraging information learned from text. However, LMs typically need to be trained separately from the ASR network, and can be very large in memory, making it hard to fit on a small device, such as a phone. An unexpected outcome of our research was that models trained with SpecAugment out-performed all prior methods even without the aid of a language model. While our networks still benefit from adding an LM, our results are encouraging in that it suggests the possibility of training networks that can be used for practical purposes without the aid of an LM.
Word error rates for LibriSpeech and Switchboard tasks with and without LMs. SpecAugment outperforms previous state-of-the-art even before the inclusion of a language model.
Most of the work on ASR in the past has been focused on looking for better networks to train. Our work demonstrates that looking for better ways to train networks is a promising alternative direction of research.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the co-authors of our paper Chung-Cheng Chiu, Ekin Dogus Cubuk, Quoc Le, Yu Zhang and Barret Zoph. We also thank Yuan Cao, Ciprian Chelba, Kazuki Irie, Ye Jia, Anjuli Kannan, Patrick Nguyen, Vijay Peddinti, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Yonghui Wu and Shuyuan Zhang for useful discussions.
MorphNet: Towards Faster and Smaller Neural Networks
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
Posted by Andrew Poon, Senior Software Engineer and Dhyanesh Narayanan, Product Manager, Google AI Perception
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in solving hard problems of practical relevance such as
image classification
,
text recognition
and
speech transcription
. However, designing a suitable DNN architecture for a given problem continues to be a challenging task. Given the large search space of possible architectures, designing a network from scratch for your specific application can be prohibitively expensive in terms of computational resources and time. Approaches such as
Neural Architecture Search and AdaNet
use machine learning to search the design space in order to find improved architectures. An alternative is to take an existing architecture for a similar problem and, in one shot, optimize it for the task at hand.
Here we describe MorphNet, a sophisticated technique for neural network model refinement, which takes the latter approach. Originally presented in our paper, “
MorphNet: Fast & Simple Resource-Constrained Structure Learning of Deep Networks
”, MorphNet takes an existing neural network as input and produces a new neural network that is smaller, faster, and yields better performance tailored to a new problem. We've applied the technique to Google-scale problems to design production-serving networks that are both smaller and more accurate, and now we have open sourced the
TensorFlow implementation of MorphNet
to the community so that you can use it to make your models more efficient.
How it Works
MorphNet optimizes a neural network through a cycle of
shrinking
and
expanding
phases. In the shrinking phase, MorphNet identifies inefficient neurons and prunes them from the network by applying a
sparsifying regularizer
such that the total
loss function
of the network includes a cost for each neuron. However, rather than applying a uniform cost per neuron, MorphNet calculates a neuron cost with respect to the targeted resource. As training progresses, the optimizer is aware of the resource cost when calculating gradients, and thus learns which neurons are resource-efficient and which can be removed.
As an example, consider how MorphNet calculates the computation cost (e.g.,
FLOPs
) of a neural network. For simplicity, let's think of a neural network layer represented as a matrix multiplication. In this case, the layer has 2 inputs (
x
n
), 6 weights (
a
,
b
,...,
f
), and 3 outputs (
y
n
; neurons). Using the standard textbook method of multiplying rows and columns, you can work out that evaluating this layer requires 6 multiplications.
Computation cost of neurons.
MorphNet calculates this as the product of input count and output count. Note that although the example on the left shows weight sparsity where two of the weights are 0, we still need to perform all the multiplications to evaluate this layer. However, the middle example shows structured sparsity, where all the weights in the row for neuron
y
n
are 0. MorphNet recognizes that the new output count for this layer is 2, and the number of multiplications for this layer dropped from 6 to 4. Using this idea, MorphNet can determine the incremental cost of every neuron in the network to produce a more efficient model (right) where neuron
y
3
has been removed.
In the
expanding phase
, we use a
width multiplier
to uniformly expand all layer sizes. For example, if we expand by 50%, then an inefficient layer that started with 100 neurons and shrank to 10 would only expand back to 15, while an important layer that only shrank to 80 neurons might expand to 120 and have more resources with which to work. The net effect is re-allocation of computational resources from less efficient parts of the network to parts of the network where they might be more useful.
One could halt MorphNet after the shrinking phase to simply cut back the network to meet a tighter resource budget. This results in a more efficient network in terms of the targeted cost, but can sometimes yield a degradation in accuracy. Alternatively, the user could also complete the expansion phase, which would match the original target resource cost but with improved accuracy. We'll cover an example of this full implementation later.
Why MorphNet?
There are four key value propositions offered by MorphNet:
Targeted Regularization:
The approach that MorphNet takes towards regularization is more intentional than other sparsifying regularizers. In particular, the MorphNet approach to induce better sparsification is
targeted
at the reduction of a particular resource (such as FLOPs per inference or model size). This enables better control of the network structures induced by MorphNet, which can be markedly different depending on the application domain and associated constraints. For example, the left panel of the figure below presents a baseline network with the commonly used
ResNet-101
architecture trained on
JFT
. The structures generated by MorphNet when targeting FLOPs (center, with 40% fewer FLOPs) or model size (right, with 43% fewer weights) are dramatically different. When optimizing for computation cost, higher-resolution neurons in the lower layers of the network tend to be pruned more than lower-resolution neurons in the upper layers. When targeting smaller model size, the pruning tradeoff is the opposite.
Targeted Regularization by MorphNet. Rectangle width is proportional to the number of channels in the layer. The purple bar at the bottom is the input layer.
Left
: Baseline network used as input to MorphNet.
Center
: Output applying FLOP regularizer.
Right
: Output applying size regularizer.
MorphNet stands out as one of the few solutions available that can target a particular parameter for optimization. This enables it to target parameters for a specific implementation. For example, one could target
latency
as a first-order optimization parameter in a principled manner by incorporating device-specific compute-time and memory-time.
Topology Morphing:
As MorphNet learns the number of neurons per layer, the algorithm could encounter a special case of sparsifying all the neurons in a layer. When a layer has 0 neurons, this effectively changes the topology of the network by cutting the affected branch from the network. For example, in the case of a
ResNet architecture
, MorphNet might keep the skip-connection but remove the residual block as shown below (left). For
Inception-style architectures
, MorphNet might remove entire parallel towers as shown on the right.
Left
: MorphNet can remove residual connections in ResNet-style networks.
Right
: It can also remove parallel towers in Inception-style networks.
Scalability:
MorphNet learns the new structure in a single training run and is a great approach when your training budget is limited. MorphNet can also be applied directly to expensive networks and datasets. For example, in the comparison above, MorphNet was applied directly to ResNet-101, which was originally trained on
JFT
at a cost of 100s of GPU-months.
Portability:
MorphNet produces networks that are "portable" in the sense that they are intended to be retrained from scratch and the weights are not tied to the architecture learning procedure. You don't have to worry about copying checkpoints or following special training recipes. Simply train your new network as you normally would!
Morphing Networks
As a demonstration, we applied MorphNet to
Inception V2
trained on
ImageNet
by targeting FLOPs (see below). The baseline approach is to use a width multiplier to trade off accuracy and FLOPs by uniformly scaling down the number of outputs for each convolution (red). The MorphNet approach targets FLOPs directly and produces a better trade-off curve when shrinking the model (blue). In this case, FLOP cost is reduced 11% to 15% with the same accuracy as compared to the baseline.
MorphNet applied to Inception V2 on ImageNet. Applying the flop regularizer alone (blue) improves the performance relative to baseline (red) by 11-15%. A full cycle, including both the regularizer and width multiplier, yields an increase in accuracy for the same cost (“x1”; purple), with continued improvement from a second cycle (“x2”; cyan).
At this point, you could choose one of the MorphNet networks to meet a smaller FLOP budget. Alternatively, you could complete the cycle by expanding the network back to the original FLOP cost to achieve better accuracy for the same cost (purple). Repeating the MorphNet shrink/expand cycle again results in another accuracy increase (cyan), leading to a total accuracy gain of 1.1%.
Conclusion
We’ve applied MorphNet to several production-scale image processing models at Google. Using MorphNet resulted in significant reduction in model-size/FLOPs with little to no loss in quality. We invite you to try MorphNet—the open source TensorFlow implementation can be found
here
, and you can also read the
MorphNet paper
for more details.
Acknowledgements
This project is a joint effort of the core team including: Elad Eban, Ariel Gordon, Max Moroz, Yair Movshovitz-Attias, and Andrew Poon. We also extend a special thanks to our collaborators, residents and interns: Shraman Ray Chaudhuri, Bo Chen, Edward Choi, Jesse Dodge, Yonatan Geifman, Hernan Moraldo, Ofir Nachum, Hao Wu, and Tien-Ju Yang for their contributions to this project.
Take Your Best Selfie Automatically, with Photobooth on Pixel 3
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Posted by Navid Shiee, Senior Software Engineer and Aseem Agarwala, Staff Research Scientist, Google AI
Taking a good group selfie can be tricky—you need to hover your finger above the shutter, keep everyone’s faces in the frame, look at the camera, make good expressions, try not to shake the camera and hope no one blinks when you finally press the shutter! After building the technology behind
automatic photography with Google Clips
, we asked ourselves: can we bring some of the magic of this automatic picture experience to the Pixel phone?
With Photobooth, a new shutter-free mode in the Pixel 3 Camera app, it’s now easier to shoot selfies—solo, couples, or even groups—that capture you at your best. Once you enter Photobooth mode and click the shutter button, it will automatically take a photo when the camera is steady and it sees that the subjects have good expressions with their eyes open. And in the
newest release of Pixel Camera
, we’ve added kiss detection to Photobooth! Kiss a loved one, and the camera will automatically capture it.
Photobooth automatically captures group shots, when everyone in the photo looks their best.
Photobooth joins
Top Shot
and
Portrait mode
in a suite of exciting Pixel camera features that enable you to take the best pictures possible. However, unlike Portrait mode, which takes advantage of specialized hardware in the back-facing camera to provide its most accurate results, Photobooth is optimized for the front-facing camera. To build Photobooth, we had to solve for three challenges: how to identify good content for a wide range of user groups; how to time the shutter to capture the best moment; and how to animate a visual element that helps users understand what Photobooth sees and captures.
Models for Understanding Good Content
In developing Photobooth, a main challenge was to determine when there was good content in either a typical selfie, in which the subjects are all looking at the camera, or in a shot that includes people kissing and not necessarily facing the camera. To accomplish this, Photobooth relies on two distinct models to capture good selfies—a model for facial expressions and a model to detect when people kiss.
We worked with photographers to identify five key expressions that should trigger capture: smiles, tongue-out, kissy/duck face, puffy-cheeks, and surprise. We then trained a neural network to classify these expressions. The kiss detection model used by Photobooth is a variation of the
Image Content Model
(ICM) trained for Google Clips, fine tuned specifically to focus on kissing. Both of these models use
MobileNets
in order to run efficiently on-device while continuously processing the images at high frame rate. The outputs of the models are used to evaluate the quality of each frame for the shutter control algorithm.
Shutter Control
Once you click the shutter button in Photobooth mode, a basic quality assessment based on the content score from the models above is performed. This first stage is used as a filter that avoids moments that either contain closed eyes, talking, or motion blur, or fail to detect the facial expressions or kissing actions learned by the models. Photobooth temporally analyzes the expression confidence values to detect their presence in the photo, making it robust to variations in the output of machine learning (ML) models. Once the first stage is successfully passed, each frame is subjected to a more fine-grained analysis, which outputs an overall frame score.
The frame score considers both facial expression quality and the kiss score. As the kiss detection model operates on the entire frame, its output can be used directly as a full-frame score value for kissing. The face expressions model outputs a score for each identified expression. Since a variable number of faces may be present in each frame, Photobooth applies an
attention model
using the detected expressions to iteratively compute an expression quality representation and weight for each face. The weighting is important, for example, to emphasize the expressions in the foreground, rather than the background. The model then calculates a single, global score for the quality of expressions in the frame.
The final image quality score used for triggering the shutter is computed by a weighted combination of the attention based facial expression score and the kiss score. In order to detect the peak quality, the shutter control algorithm maintains a short buffer of observed frames and only saves a shot if its frame score is higher than the frames that come after it in the buffer. The length of the buffer is short enough to give users a sense of real time feedback.
Intelligence Indicator
Since Photobooth uses the front-facing camera, the user can see and interact with the display while taking a photo. Photobooth mode includes a visual indicator, a bar at the top of the screen that grows in size when photo quality scores increase, to help users understand what the ML algorithms see and capture. The length of the bar is divided into four distinct ranges: (1) no faces clearly seen, (2) faces seen but not paying attention to the camera, (3) faces paying attention but not making key expressions, and (4) faces paying attention with key expressions.
In order to make this indicator more interpretable, we forced the bar into these ranges, which prevented the bar scaling from being too rapid. This resulted in smooth variability of the bar length as the quality score changes and improved the utility. When the indicator bar reaches a length representative of a high quality score, the screen flashes to signify that a photo was captured and saved.
Using ML outputs directly as intelligence feedback results in rapid variation (left), whereas specifying explicit ranges creates a smooth signal (right).
Conclusion
We’re excited by the possibilities of automatic photography on camera phones. As computer vision continues to improve, in the future we may generally trust smart cameras to select a great moment to capture. Photobooth is an example of how we can carve out a useful corner of this space—selfies and group selfies of smiles, funny faces, and kisses—and deliver a fun and useful experience.
Acknowledgments
Photobooth was a collaboration of several teams at Google. Key contributors to the project include: Kojo Acquah, Chris Breithaupt, Chun-Te Chu, Geoff Clark, Laura Culp, Aaron Donsbach, Relja Ivanovic, Pooja Jhunjhunwala, Xuhui Jia, Ting Liu, Arjun Narayanan, Eric Penner, Arushan Raj, Divya Tyam, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Julian Walker, Jun Xie, Li Zhang, Andrey Zhmoginov, Yukun Zhu.
Capturing Special Video Moments with Google Photos
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Posted by Sudheendra Vijayanarasimhan and David Ross, Software Engineers
Recording video of memorable moments to share with friends and loved ones has become commonplace. But as anyone with a sizable video library can tell you, it's a time consuming task to go through all that raw footage searching for the perfect clips to relive or share with family and friends. Google Photos makes this easier by automatically finding magical moments in your videos—like when your child blows out the candle or when your friend jumps into a pool—and creating animations from them that you can easily share with friends and family.
In "
Rethinking the Faster R-CNN Architecture for Temporal Action Localization
", we address some of the challenges behind automating this task, which are due to the complexity of identifying and categorizing actions from a highly variable array of input data, by introducing an improved method to identify the exact location within a video where a given action occurs. Our
temporal action localization network
(TALNet) draws inspiration from advances in region-based object detection methods such as the
Faster R-CNN
network. TALNet enables identification of moments with large variation in duration, achieving state-of-the-art performance compared to other methods, allowing Google Photos to recommend the best part of a video for you to share with friends and family.
An example of the detected action "blowing out candles"
Identifying Actions for Model Training
The first step in identifying magic moments in videos is to assemble a list of actions that people might wish to highlight. Some examples of actions include "blow out birthday candles", "strike (bowling)", "cat wags tail", etc. We then crowdsourced the annotation of segments within a collection of public videos where these specific actions occurred, in order to create a large training dataset. We asked the raters to find and label all moments, accommodating videos that might have several moments. This final annotated dataset was then used to train our model so that it could identify the desired actions in new, unknown videos.
Comparison to Object Detection
The challenge of recognizing these actions belongs to the field of computer vision known as
temporal action localization,
which, like the more familiar
object detection
, falls under the umbrella of visual detection problems. Given a long, untrimmed video as input, temporal action localization aims to identify the start and end times, as well as the action label (like "blowing out candles"), for each action instance in the full video. While object detection aims to produce spatial bounding boxes around an object in a 2D image, temporal action localization aims to produce temporal segments including an action in a 1D sequence of video frames.
Our approach to TALNet is inspired by the
faster R-CNN
object detection framework for 2D images. So, to understand TALNet, it is useful to first understand faster R-CNN. The figure below demonstrates how the faster R-CNN architecture is used for object detection. The first step is to generate a set of object proposals, regions of the image that can be used for classification. To do this, an input image is first converted into a 2D
feature
map by a
convolutional neural network
(CNN). The
region proposal network
then generates bounding boxes around candidate objects. These boxes are generated at multiple scales in order to capture the large variability in objects' sizes in natural images. With the object proposals now defined, the subjects in the bounding boxes are then classified by a deep neural network (DNN) into specific objects, such as "person", "bike", etc.
Faster R-CNN architecture for object detection
Temporal Action Localization
Temporal action localization is accomplished in a fashion similar to that used by R-CNN. A sequence of input frames from a video are first converted into a sequence of 1D feature maps that encode scene context. This map is passed to a
segment proposal network
that generates candidate segments, each defined by start and end times. A DNN then applies the representations learned from the training dataset to classify the actions in the proposed video segments (e.g., "slam dunk", "pass", etc.). The actions identified in each segment are given weights according to their learned representations, with the top scoring moment selected to share with the user.
Architecture for temporal action localization
Special Considerations for Temporal Action Localization
While temporal action localization can be viewed as the 1D counterpart of the object detection problem, care must be taken to address a number of issues unique to action localization. In particular, we address three specific issues in order to apply the Faster R-CNN approach to the action localization domain, and redesign the architecture to specifically address them.
Actions have much larger variations in durations
The temporal extent of actions varies dramatically—from a fraction of a second to minutes. For long actions, it is not important to understand each and every frame of the action. Instead, we can get a better handle on the action by skimming quickly through the video, using
dilated temporal convolutions
. This approach allows TALNet to search the video for temporal patterns, while skipping over alternate frames based on a given dilation rate. Analysing the video with several different rates that are selected automatically according to the anchor segment's length enables efficient identification of actions as large as the entire video or as short as a second.
The context before and after an action are important
The moments preceding and following an action instance contain critical information for localization and classification, arguably more so than the spatial context of an object. Therefore, we explicitly encode the temporal context by extending the length of proposal segments on both the left and right by a fixed percentage of the segment's length in both the proposal generation stage and the classification stage.
Actions require multi-modal input
Actions are defined by appearance, motion and sometimes even audio information. Therefore, it is important to consider multiple modalities of features for the best results. We use a late fusion scheme for both the proposal generation network and the classification network, in which each modality has a separate proposal generation network whose outputs are combined together to obtain the final set of proposals. These proposals are classified using separate classification networks for each modality, which are then averaged to obtain the final predictions.
TALNet in Action
As a consequence of these improvements, TALNet achieves state-of-the-art performance for both action proposal and action localization tasks on the
THUMOS'14
detection benchmark and competitive performance on the
ActivityNet
challenge. Now, whenever people save videos to Google Photos, our model identifies these moments and creates animations to share. Here are a few examples shared by our initial testers.
An example of the detected action "sliding down a slide"
An example of the detected actions "jump into the pool" (left), "twirl in a dress" (center) and "feed baby a spoonful" (right).
Next steps
We are continuing work to improve the
precision and recall
of action localization using more data, features and models. Improvements in temporal action localization can drive progress on a large number of important topics ranging from video highlights, video summarization, search and more. We hope to continue improving the state-of-the-art in this domain and at the same time provide more ways for people to reminisce on their memories, big and small.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks Tim Novikoff and Yu-Wei Chao, as well as Bryan Seybold, Lily Kharevych, Siyu Gu, Tracy Gu, Tracy Utley, Yael Marzan, Jingyu Cui, Balakrishnan Varadarajan, Paul Natsev for their critical contributions to this project.
Using Deep Learning to Improve Usability on Mobile Devices
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
Posted by Yang Li, Research Scientist, Google AI
Tapping is the most commonly used gesture on mobile interfaces, and is used to trigger all kinds of actions ranging from launching an app to entering text. While the style of clickable elements (e.g., buttons) in traditional desktop
graphical user interfaces
is often conventionally defined, on mobile interfaces it can still be difficult for people to distinguish tappable versus non-tappable elements due to the diversity of styles. This confusion can lead to
false affordances
(e.g., a feature that could be mistaken for a button) and a lack of discoverability that can lead to user frustration, uncertainty, and errors. To avoid this, interface designers can conduct a study or a visual affordance test to help clarify the tappability of items in their interfaces. However, such studies are time-consuming and their findings are often limited to a specific app or interface design.
In our
CHI'19
paper, "
Modeling Mobile Interface Tappability Using Crowdsourcing and Deep Learning
", we introduced an approach for modeling the usability of mobile interfaces at scale. We crowdsourced a task to study UI elements across a range of mobile apps to measure the perceived tappability by a user. Our model predictions were consistent with the user group at the ~90% level, demonstrating that a machine learning model can be effectively used to estimate the perceived tappability of interface elements in their design without the need for expensive and time consuming user testing.
Predicting Tappability with Deep Learning
Designers often use visual properties such as the color or depth of an element to signify its availability for interaction on interfaces, e.g.,
the blue color and underline of a link
. While these common signifiers are useful, it is not always clear when to apply them in each specific design setting. Furthermore, with design trends evolving, traditional signifiers are constantly being altered and challenged, potentially causing user uncertainty and mistakes.
To understand how users perceive this changing landscape, we analyzed the potential signifiers affecting tappability in real mobile apps—element
type
(e.g., check boxes, text boxes, etc.),
location
,
size
,
color
, and
words
. We started by crowdsourcing volunteers to label the perceived clickability of ~20,000 unique interface elements from ~3,500 apps. With the exception of text boxes,
type
signifiers yielded low uncertainty in user perceived tappability. The
location
signifier refers to the position of a feature on the screen and is informed by the common layout design in mobile apps, as demonstrated in the figure below.
Heatmaps displaying the accuracy of tappable and non-tappable elements by location, where warmer colors represent areas of higher accuracy. Users labeled non-tappable elements more accurately towards the upper center of the interface, and tappable elements towards the bottom center of the interface.
The impact of element
size
was relatively weak, but did indicate confusion in the case of large non-tappable elements. Users showed a tendency to bright
colors
and short
word
counts for tappable elements, though
word
semantics also played a significant role.
We used these labels to train a simple
deep neural network
that predicts the likelihood that a user will perceive an interface element as tappable versus non-tappable. For a given element of the interface, the model uses a range of features, including the spatial context of the element on the screen (
location
), the semantics and functionality of the element (
words
and
type
), and the visual appearance (
size
as well as raw pixels). The neural network model applies a
convolutional neural network
(CNN) to extract features from raw pixels, and uses learned semantic embeddings to represent text content and element properties. The concatenation of all these features are then fed to a fully-connected network layer, the output of which produces a binary classification of an element's tappability.
Evaluation of the Model
The model allowed us to automatically diagnose mismatches between the tappability of each interface element as perceived by a user—predicted by our model—and the intended or actual tappable state of the element specified by the developer or designer. In the example below, our model predicts that there is a 73% chance that a user would think the labels such as "Followers" or "Following" are tappable, while these interface elements are in fact not programmed to be tappable.
To understand how our model behaves compared to human users, particularly when there is ambiguity in human perception, we generated a second, independent dataset by crowdsourcing an effort among 290 volunteers to label each of 2,000 unique interface elements with respect to their perceived tappability. Each element was labeled independently by five different users. We found that more than 40% of the elements in our sample were labeled inconsistently by volunteers. Our model matches this uncertainty in human perception quite well, as demonstrated in the figure below.
The scatterplot of the tappability probability predicted by the model (the Y axis) versus the consistency in the human user labels (the X axis) for each element in the consistency dataset.
When users agree an element's tappability, our model tends to give a more definite answer—a probability close to 1 for tappable and close to 0 for not tappable. When workers are less consistent on an element (towards the middle of the X axis), our model is also less certain about the decision. Overall, our model achieved reasonable accuracy of matching human perception in identifying tappable UI elements with a mean
precision
of 90.2% and
recall
of 87.0%.
Predicting tappability is merely one example of what we can do with machine learning to solve usability issues in user interfaces. There are many other challenges in interaction design and user experience research where deep learning models can offer a vehicle to distill large, diverse user experience datasets and advance scientific understandings about interaction behaviors.
Acknowledgements
This research was a joint work of Amanda Swangson, summer intern at Google, and Yang Li, a Research Scientist in Deep Learning and Human Computer Interaction.
Unifying Physics and Deep Learning with TossingBot
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Posted by Andy Zeng, Student Researcher, Robotics at Google
Though considerable progress has been made in enabling robots to
grasp objects efficiently
,
visually self adapt
or even
learn from real-world experiences
, robotic operations still require careful consideration in how they pick up, handle, and place various objects -- especially in unstructured settings. Consider for example, this
picking robot
which took 1st place in the stowing task of the Amazon Robotics Challenge:
It's an impressive system, built with many design features that kinematically prevent it from dropping objects due to unforeseen dynamics: from its steady and deliberate movements, to its gripper fingers that mechanically constrain the momentum of the object so that it doesn't slip.
This robot, like many others, is designed to tolerate the dynamics of the unstructured world. But instead of just tolerating dynamics, can robots learn to use them advantageously, developing an "intuition" of physics that would allow them to complete tasks more efficiently? Perhaps in doing so, robots can improve their capabilities and acquire complex athletic skills like tossing, sliding, spinning, swinging, or catching, potentially leading to many useful applications, such as more efficient debris clearing robots in disaster response scenarios -- where time is of the essence.
To explore this concept, we worked with researchers at Princeton, Columbia, and MIT to develop TossingBot: a picking robot for our real, random world that learns to grasp and throw objects into selected boxes outside its natural range. We find that by learning to throw, TossingBot is capable of achieving picking speeds that are twice as fast as
previous systems
, with twice the effective placing range. TossingBot jointly learns grasping and throwing policies using an end-to-end neural network that maps from visual observations (RGB-D images) to control parameters for motion primitives. Using overhead cameras to track where objects land, TossingBot improves itself over time through self-supervision. More technical details are available in an early
preprint
on arXiv.
The Challenges
Throwing is a particularly difficult task as it depends on many factors: from how the object is picked up (i.e., "pre-throw conditions"), to the object's physical properties like mass, friction, aerodynamics, etc. For example, if you grasp a screwdriver by the handle near the center of mass and throw it, it would land much closer than if you had grasped it from the metal tip, which would swing forward and land much farther away. Regardless of how you grasped it though, tossing a screwdriver is incredibly different from tossing a ping pong ball, which would land closer due to air resistance. Manually designing a solution that explicitly handles these factors for every random object is nearly impossible.
Throwing depends on many factors: from how you picked it up, to object properties and dynamics.
Through deep learning, however, our robots can learn from experience rather than rely on manual case-by-case engineering. Previously we've shown that our robots can learn to
push
and
grasp
a large variety of objects, but accurately throwing objects requires a larger understanding of projectile physics. Acquiring this knowledge from scratch with only trial-and-error is not only time consuming and expensive, but also generally doesn't work outside of very specific, and carefully set up training scenarios.
Unifying Physics and Deep Learning
A fundamental component of TossingBot is that it learns to throw by integrating simple physics and deep learning, which enables it to train quickly and generalize to new scenarios. Physics provides prior models of how the world works, and we can leverage these models to develop initial controllers for our robots. In the case of throwing, for example, we can use projectile ballistics to provide an estimate for the throwing velocity that is needed to get an object to land at a target location. We can then use neural networks to predict adjustments on top of that estimate from physics, in order to compensate for unknown dynamics as well as the noise and variability of the real world. We call this hybrid formulation Residual Physics, and it enables TossingBot to achieve throwing accuracies of 85%.
At the start of training with randomly initialized weights, TossingBot repeatedly attempts bad grasps. Over time, however, TossingBot learns better ways to grasp objects and simultaneously improves its ability to throw. Occasionally the robot randomly explores what happens if it throws an object at a velocity that it hasn't tried before. When the bin is emptied, TossingBot lifts the boxes to allow objects to slide back into the bin. This way, human intervention is kept at a minimum during training. By 10,000 grasp and throw attempts (or 14 hours of training time), it is capable of achieving throwing accuracies of 85%, with a grasping reliability of 87% in clutter.
TossingBot starts out performing poorly (left), but progressively learns to grasp and toss overnight (right).
Generalizing to New Scenarios
By integrating physics and deep learning, TossingBot is capable of rapidly adapting to never-before-seen throwing locations and objects. For example, after training on objects with simple shapes like wooden blocks, balls, and markers, it can perform reasonably well on new objects such as fake fruit, decorative items, and office objects. On new objects, TossingBot starts out with lower performance, but quickly adapts within a few hundred training steps (i.e., an hour or two) to achieve similar performance as with training objects. We've found that combining physics and deep learning with Residual Physics yields better performance than baseline alternatives (e.g. deep learning without physics). We even tried this task ourselves, and we were pleasantly surprised to learn that TossingBot is more accurate than any of us engineers! Though take that with a grain of salt, as we've yet to test TossingBot against anyone with any
actual
athletic talent.
TossingBot can generalize to new objects, and is more accurate at throwing than the average Googler.
We also test our policies on their ability to generalize to new target locations previously unseen in training. To this end, we train on a set of boxes, then later test on a different set of boxes with entirely different landing areas. In this setting, we find that Residual Physics for throwing helps significantly, since the initial estimates of throwing velocities from projectile ballistics easily generalize to new target locations, while the residuals help make adjustments on top of those estimates to compensate for varying object properties in the real world. This is in contrast to the baseline alternative of using deep learning without physics, which can only handle target locations seen during training.
TossingBot uses Residual Physics to throw objects to unforeseen locations.
Emerging Semantics from Interaction
To explore what TossingBot learns, we place several objects in the bin, capture images, and feed them into TossingBot's trained neural network to extract intermediate pixel-wise deep features. By clustering these features based on similarity and visualizing nearest neighbors as a heatmap (hotter regions indicate more similarity in feature space), we can localize all ping pong balls in the scene. Even though the orange block shares a similar color with the ping pong balls, its features are different enough for TossingBot to make a distinction. Likewise, we can also use the extracted features to localize all marker pens, which share similar shape and mass, but do not share color. These observations suggest that TossingBot likely learns to rely more on geometric cues (e.g. shape) to learn grasping and throwing. It is also possible that the learned features reflect second-order attributes such as physical properties, which can influence how the objects should be thrown.
TossingBot learns deep features that distinguish object categories without explicit supervision.
These emerging features were learned implicitly from scratch without any explicit supervision beyond task-level grasping and throwing. Yet, they seem to be sufficient for enabling the system to distinguish between object categories (i.e., ping pong balls and marker pens). As such, this experiment speaks out to a broader concept related to machine vision: how should robots learn the semantics of the visual world? From the perspective of classic computer vision, semantics are often pre-defined using human-fabricated image datasets and manually constructed class categories. However, our experiment suggests that it is possible to implicitly learn such object-level semantics from physical interactions alone, as long as they matter for the task at hand. The more complex these interactions, the higher the resolution of the semantics. Towards more generally intelligent robots -- perhaps it is sufficient for them to develop their own notion of semantics through interaction, without requiring any human intervention.
Limitations and Future Work
Although TossingBot's results are promising, it does have its limitations. For example, it assumes that objects are robust enough to withstand landing collisions after being thrown -- further work is required to learn throws that account for fragile objects, or possibly train other robots to catch objects in ways that cushion the landing. Furthermore, TossingBot infers control parameters only from visual data -- exploring additional senses (e.g. force-torque or tactile) may enable the system to better react to new objects.
The combination of physics and deep learning that made TossingBot possible naturally leads to an interesting question: what else could benefit from Residual Physics? Investigating how the idea generalizes to other types of tasks and interactions is a promising direction for future research.
You can learn more about this work in the summary video below.
Acknowledgements
This research was done by Andy Zeng, Shuran Song (faculty at Columbia University), Johnny Lee, Alberto Rodriguez (faculty at MIT), and Thomas Funkhouser (faculty at Princeton University), with special thanks to Ryan Hickman for valuable managerial support, Ivan Krasin and Stefan Welker for fruitful technical discussions, Brandon Hurd and Julian Salazar and Sean Snyder for hardware support, Chad Richards and Jason Freidenfelds for helpful feedback on writing, Erwin Coumans for advice on PyBullet, Laura Graesser for video narration, and Regina Hickman for photography. An early
preprint
is available on arXiv.
Simulated Policy Learning in Video Models
Monday, March 25, 2019
Posted by Łukasz Kaiser and Dumitru Erhan, Research Scientists, Google AI
Deep
reinforcement learning
(RL) techniques can be used to learn policies for complex tasks from visual inputs, and have been applied with great success to
classic Atari 2600 games
.
Recent work
in this field has shown that it is possible to get super-human performance in many of them, even in challenging
exploration regimes
such as that exhibited by
Montezuma's Revenge
. However, one of the limitations of many state-of-the-art approaches is that they require a very large number of interactions with the game environment, often much larger than what people would need to learn to play well. One plausible hypothesis explaining why people learn these tasks so much more efficiently is that they are able to predict the effect of their own actions, and thus implicitly learn a model of which action sequences will lead to desirable outcomes. This general idea—building a so-called model of the game and using it to learn a good policy for selecting actions—is the main premise of model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL).
In "
Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Atari
", we introduce the Simulated Policy Learning (SimPLe) algorithm, an MBRL framework to train agents for Atari gameplay that is significantly more efficient than current state-of-the-art techniques, and shows competitive results using only ~100K interactions with the game environment (equivalent to roughly two hours of real-time play by a person). In addition, we have open sourced our
code
as part of the
tensor2tensor
open source library. The release contains a pretrained world model that can be run with a simple command line and that can be played using an Atari-like interface.
Learning a SimPLe World Model
At a high-level, the idea behind SimPLe is to alternate between learning a world model of how the game behaves and using that model to optimize a policy (with model-free reinforcement learning) within the simulated game environment. The basic principles behind this algorithm are
well established
and have been employed in numerous
recent
model-based
reinforcement
learning
methods
.
Main loop of SimPLe. 1) The agent starts interacting with the real environment. 2) The collected observations are used to update the current world model. 3) The agent updates the policy by learning inside the world model.
To train an Atari game playing model we first need to generate plausible versions of the future in
pixel space
. In other words, we seek to predict what the next frame will look like, by taking as input a sequence of already observed frames and the commands given to the game, such as "left", "right", etc. One of the important reasons for training a world model in observation space is that it is, in effect, a form of self-supervision, where the observations—pixels, in our case—form a dense and rich supervision signal.
If successful in training such a model (e.g. a video predictor), one essentially has a learned simulator of the game environment that can be used to generate
trajectories
for training a good policy for a gaming agent, i.e. choosing a sequence of actions such that long-term reward of the agent is maximized. In other words, instead of having the policy be trained on sequences from the
real
game, which is prohibitively intensive in both time and computation, we train the policy on sequences coming from the world model / learned simulator.
Our world model is a
feedforward convolutional network
that takes in four frames and predicts the next frame as well as the reward (see figure above). However, in the case of Atari, the future is non-deterministic given only a horizon of the previous four frames. For example, a pause in the game longer than four frames, such as when the ball falls out of the frame in
Pong
, can lead to a failure of the model to predict subsequent frames successfully. We handle stochasticity problems such as these with a new video model architecture that does much better in this setting, inspired by
previous
work
.
One example of an issue arising from stochasticity is seen when the SimPLe model is applied to
Kung Fu Master
. In the animation, the left is the output of the model, the middle is the groundtruth, and the right panel is the pixel-wise difference between the two. Here the model's predictions deviate from the real game by spawning a different number of opponents.
At each iteration, after the world model is trained, we use this learned simulator to generate rollouts (i.e. sample sequences of actions, observations and outcomes) that are used to improve the game playing policy using the
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)
algorithm. One important detail for making SimPLe work is that the sampling of rollouts starts from the real dataset frames. Because prediction errors typically compound over time and make long-term predictions very difficult, SimPLe only uses medium-length rollouts. Luckily, the PPO algorithm can learn long-term effects between actions and rewards from its internal value function too, so rollouts of limited length are sufficient even for games with sparse rewards like
Freeway
.
SimPLe Efficiency
One measure of success is to demonstrate that the model is highly efficient. For this, we evaluated the output of our policies after 100K interactions with the environment, which corresponds to roughly two hours of real-time game play by a person. We compare our SimPLe method with two state of the art model-free RL methods,
Rainbow
and PPO, applied to 26 different games. In most cases, the SimPLe approach has a sample efficiency more than 2x better than the other methods.
The number of interactions needed by the respective model-free algorithms (left - Rainbow; right - PPO) to match the score achieved using our SimPLe training method. The red line indicates the number of interactions used by our method.
SimPLe Success
An exciting result of the SimPLe approach is that for two of the games, Pong and
Freeway
, an agent trained in the simulated environment is able to achieve the maximum score. Here is a video of our agent playing the game using the game model that we learned for Pong:
For Freeway, Pong and
Breakout
, SimPLe can generate nearly pixel-perfect predictions up to 50 steps into the future, as shown below.
Nearly pixel perfect predictions can be made by SimPLe, on Breakout (top) and Freeway (bottom). In each animation, the left is the output of the model, the middle is the groundtruth, and the right is the pixel-wise difference between the two.
SimPLe Surprises
SimPLe does not always make correct predictions, however. The most common failure is due to the world model not accurately capturing or predicting small but highly relevant objects. Some examples are: (1) in
Atlantis
and
Battlezone
bullets are so small that they tend to disappear, and (2)
Private Eye
, in which the agent traverses different scenes, teleporting from one to the other. We found that our model generally struggled to capture such large global changes.
In Battlezone, we find the model struggles with predicting small, relevant parts, such as the bullet.
Conclusion
The main promise of model-based reinforcement learning methods is in environments where interactions are either costly, slow or require human labeling, such as many robotics tasks. In such environments, a learned simulator would enable a better understanding of the agent's environment and could lead to new, better and faster ways for doing multi-task reinforcement learning. While SimPLe does not yet match the performance of standard model-free RL methods, it is substantially more efficient, and we expect future work to further improve the performance of model-based techniques.
If you'd like to develop your own models and experiments, head to our
repository
and
colab
where you'll find instructions on how to reproduce our work along with pre-trained world models.
Acknowledgements
This work was done in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Warsaw and deepsense.ai. We would like to give special recognition to paper co-authors Mohammad Babaeizadeh, Piotr Miłos, Błażej Osiński, Roy H Campbell, Konrad Czechowski, Chelsea Finn, Piotr Kozakowski, Sergey Levine, Ryan Sepassi, George Tucker and Henryk Michalewski.
Reducing the Need for Labeled Data in Generative Adversarial Networks
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Posted by Mario Lučić, Research Scientist and Marvin Ritter, Software Engineer, Google AI Zürich
Generative adversarial networks
(GANs) are a powerful class of deep generative models.The main idea behind
GANs
is to train two neural networks:
the generator,
which learns how to synthesise data (such as an image), and the
discriminator,
which learns how to distinguish real data from the ones synthesised by the generator. This approach has been successfully used for
high-fidelity natural image synthesis
,
improving learned image compression
, data augmentation, and more.
Evolution of the generated samples as training progresses on ImageNet. The generator network is conditioned on the class (e.g., "great gray owl" or "golden retriever").
For natural image synthesis, state-of-the-art results are achieved by
conditional GANs
that, unlike unconditional GANs, use labels (e.g. car, dog, etc.) during training. While this makes the task easier and leads to significant improvements, this approach requires a large amount of labeled data that is rarely available in practice.
In "
High-Fidelity Image Generation With Fewer Labels
", we propose a new approach to reduce the amount of labeled data required to train state-of-the-art conditional GANs. When combined with recent advancements on large-scale GANs, we match the state-of-the-art in high-fidelity natural image synthesis using
10x fewer labels
. Based on this research, we are also releasing a major update to the
Compare GAN library
, which contains all the components necessary to train and evaluate modern GANs.
Improvements via Semi-supervision and Self-supervision
In conditional GANs, both the generator and discriminator are typically conditioned on class labels. In this work, we propose to replace the hand-annotated ground truth labels with inferred ones. To infer high-quality labels for a large dataset of mostly unlabeled data, we take a two-step approach: First, we learn a feature representation using only the unlabeled portion of the dataset. To learn the feature representations we make use of
self-supervision
in the form of a
recently introduced
approach, in which the unlabeled images are randomly rotated and a deep convolutional neural network is tasked with predicting the rotation angle. The idea is that the models need to be able to recognize the main objects and their shapes in order to be successful on this task.
An unlabeled image is randomly rotated and the network is tasked with predicting the rotation angle. Successful models need to capture semantically meaningful image features which can then be used for other vision tasks.
We then consider the activation pattern of one of the intermediate layers of the trained network as the new feature representation of the input, and train a classifier to recognize the label of that input using the labeled portion of the original data set. As the network was pre-trained to extract semantically meaningful features from the data (on the rotation prediction task), training this classifier is more sample-efficient than training the entire network from scratch. Finally, we use this classifier to label the unlabeled data.
To further improve the model quality and training stability we encourage the discriminator network to learn meaningful feature representations which are not forgotten during training by means of an auxiliary loss we introduced
previously
. These two advancements, combined with large-scale training lead to state-of-the-art conditional GANs for the task of ImageNet synthesis as measured by the
Fréchet Inception Distance
.
Given a latent vector the generator network produces an image. In each row, linear interpolation between the latent codes of the leftmost and the rightmost image results in a semantic interpolation in the image space.
Compare GAN: A Library for Training and Evaluating GANs
Cutting-edge research on GANs is heavily dependent on a well-engineered and well-tested codebase, since even replicating prior results and techniques requires a significant effort. In order to foster open science and allow the research community benefit from recent advancements, we are releasing a major update of the
Compare GAN
library. The library includes loss functions, regularization and normalization schemes, neural architectures, and quantitative metrics commonly used in modern GANs, and now supports:
Training on GPUs and TPUs.
Lightweight configuration via
Gin
(
examples
).
A plethora of data sets via the
TensorFlow datasets
library.
Conclusions and Future Work
Given the growing gap between labeled and unlabeled data sources, it is becoming
increasingly important
to be able to learn from only partially labeled data. We have shown that a simple yet powerful combination of self-supervision and semi-supervision can help to close this gap for GANs. We believe that self-supervision is a powerful idea that should be investigated for other generative modeling tasks.
Acknowledgments
Work conducted in collaboration with colleagues on the Google Brain team in Zürich, ETH Zürich and UCLA. We would like to thank our paper co-authors Michael Tschannen, Xiaohua Zhai, Olivier Bachem and Sylvain Gelly for their input and feedback. We would like to thank Alexander Kolesnikov, Lucas Beyer and Avital Oliver for helpful discussion on
self-supervised learning
and semi-supervised learning. We would like to thank Karol Kurach and Marcin Michalski for their major contributions to the Compare GAN library. We would also like to thank Andy Brock, Jeff Donahue and Karen Simonyan for their insights into training GANs on TPUs. The work described in this post also builds upon our work on “
Self-Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks
” with Ting Chen and Neil Houlsby.
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