Machine Learning – Page 2 – AI in Media and Society

Identifying toxic comments with AI

May 11, 2021May 10, 2021 Mindy McAdams

The basic idea: Immediately detect and remove hateful or dangerous posts in social media and other online forums. With advances in natural language processing (NLP), identification of harmful speech becomes more accurate and more practical.

In this essay published in Scientific American (2021), researchers from the private company Unitary (see their public Detoxify code on GitHub) discuss the challenges in rating the level of toxicity or harmfulness in text content. One aspect is what is considered harmful: profanity is easy to detect; misinformation is complicated. Another aspect: Terms describing gender, race, or ethnicity can be used hatefully or as (non-toxic) self-description.

(I’ve written before about machine learning used in comment moderation, which is a large concern in media companies that permit users to post comments on articles and blog posts.)

Jigsaw, a Google division, “released two public data sets containing over one million toxic and non-toxic comments from Wikipedia and a service called Civil Comments.” Each comment was labeled with a rating such as “Toxic” or “Very Toxic.” The data sets were used as training data in three competitions, hosted by Google, in which AI researchers could enter their trained models and see how they compared to others (and win money). The three “Jigsaw challenges” (one per year):

“We decided to take inspiration from the best Kaggle solutions and train our own algorithms with the specific intent of releasing them publicly.”
— Unitary researchers

The Unitary researchers describe Detoxify, “an open-source, user-friendly comment detection library,” which is intended “to help researchers and practitioners identify potential toxic comments.” The library includes three separate models, one for each Jigsaw challenge. These models can be fine-tuned using additional data sets.

One particular limitation pointed out by the researchers is that a high toxicity score does not always indicate actually toxic content: “As an example, the sentence ‘I am tired of writing this stupid essay’ will give a toxicity score of 99.7 percent, while removing the word ‘stupid’ will change the score to 0.05 percent.”

There’s still a long way to go before harmful comments and social media posts can be instantly removed from platforms.

AI in Media and Society by Mindy McAdams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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‘Ground truth’ and labeled data

May 4, 2021 Mindy McAdams

Cassie Kozyrkov, who wrote this article, is head of decision intelligence at Google. It starts out with what looks like a standard explanation of an image-recognition system — which she deprecatingly refers to as the “the cat/not-cat task.” But don’t be fooled — Kozyrkov communicates with clear, sharp precision, and very quickly she asks us to consider circumstances in which we would want a tiger to be considered a cat and those in which we would want it to be not-cat.

This leads to a discussion of ground truth. This is “an ideal expected result” — but for whom? Well, for the people who originally built the system. Kozyrkov notes that ground truth is NOT an objective, perfect truth like something studied in a philosophy class (Truth with a capital T). It’s whether a tiger is a cat in your reality or not-cat in mine.

I am reminded of one of my favorite lines in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar: “But what is truth? Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?”

“When such a dataset is used to train ML/AI systems, systems based on it will inherit and amplify the implicit values of the people who decided what the ideal system behavior looked like to them.”
— Cassie Kozyrkov

It also brings to mind the practice of testing for intercoder reliability — standard practice in research that relies on qualitative data. (More about that here.)

Say you are using an existing labeled dataset — not one you yourself have created — which is often the case. The labels attached to the data items are the ground truth for that dataset. If it’s a dataset of images, and some labels applied to photos of people are racist, then that’s the ground truth in that dataset. If it’s a dataset for sentiment analysis, and a lot of toxic comments are labeled “not toxic,” then that’s the ground truth you’re adopting.

It’s essential for developers to test systems extensively to uncover these flaws in ground truth.

“You wouldn’t want to fall victim to a myopic fraud detection system with sloppy definitions of what financial fraud looks like, especially if such a system is allowed to falsely accuse people without giving them an easy way to prove their innocence.”
— Cassie Kozyrkov

In a video embedded in the same article, Kozyrkov pithily proclaims: “There are only actually two real lines there. Here’s what they are: This objective. That data set.” (At 9:16.) Of course there’s a ton more code than that (she’s talking about the programming of the system that creates the model), but in terms of what you want the system to be able to do, that’s it in a nutshell: How have you framed your objective? And what’s in your dataset? More important, in many cases, is what’s NOT in your dataset.

She says this is where the core danger in AI lies, because in traditional programming “it might take 10,000 lines of code, a hundred thousand lines of code maybe, and some human being has to worry about every single one of those lines, agonize over it.” With supervised machine learning, you’ve only got the objective and the (gigantic) dataset, and the question is, Have enough people with expertise really agonized over each of those things?

My other favorite bits from the video:

“A system that is built and designed for one purpose may not work for a different purpose.” (6:17)
“Remember that the objective is subjective.” (6:31)
“And if you take those two parts really seriously, that is how you are going to build a safe and effective and kind AI system.” (20:16)

Image recognition in medicine: MS subtypes

April 13, 2021 Mindy McAdams

Machine learning systems for image recognition aren’t always perfect — and neither are AI systems marketed for medical use, whether they use image recognition or not. But here’s an example of image recognition used in a medical context where the system appears to have succeeded at something significant — and it’s something humans can’t do, or at least can’t do well.

“Researchers used the AI tool Subtype and Stage Inference (SuStaIn) to scan the MRI brain scans of 6,322 patients with MS, letting SuStaIn train itself unsupervised. The AI identified 3 previously unknown patterns …” (Pharmacy Times). The model was then tested on MRIs from “a separate independent cohort of 3,068 patients” and successfully identified the three new MS subtypes in them.

Subtype and Stage Inference (SuStaIn) was introduced in this 2018 paper. It is an “unsupervised machine-learning technique that identifies population subgroups with common patterns of disease progression” using MRI images. The original researchers were studying dementia.

Why does it matter? Identifying the subtype of the disease multiple sclerosis (MS) enables doctors to pursue different treatments for them, which might lead to better results for patients.

“While further clinical studies are needed, there was a clear difference, by subtype, in patients’ response to different treatments and in accumulation of disability over time. This is an important step towards predicting individual responses to therapies,” said Dr. Arman Eshaghi, the lead researcher (EurekAlert).

Sources: Artificial Intelligence Weekly newsletter, from The Wall Street Journal; Pharmacy Times; EurekAlert.

A blast from the AI past: Perceptrons

October 29, 2020January 30, 2021 Mindy McAdams

I had not been all that interested to learn about perceptrons, even though the perceptron is known as an ancestor of present-day machine learning.

That changed when I read an account that said the big names in AI in the 1960s were convinced that symbolic AI was the road to glory — and their misplaced confidence smothered the development of the first systems that learned and modified their own code.

Symbolic AI is built with strictly programmed rules. Also known as “good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI, the main applications you can produce with symbolic AI are expert systems.

The original perceptron was conceived and programmed by Frank Rosenblatt, who earned his Ph.D. in 1956. A huge IBM computer running his code was touted by the U.S. Office of Naval Research in 1958 as “capable of receiving, recognizing and identifying its surroundings without any human training or control,” according to a New York Times article published on July 8, 1958. That was hype, but the perceptron actually did receive visual information from the environment and learn from it, in much the same way as today’s ML systems do.

“At the time, he didn’t know how to train networks with multiple layers. But in hindsight, his algorithm is still fundamental to how we’re training deep networks today.”
—Thorsten Joachims, professor, computer science, quoted in the Cornell Chronicle

After leading AI researchers Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, both of MIT, published a book in 1969 that essentially said perceptrons were a dead end, all the attention — and pretty much all the funding — went to symbolic AI projects and research. Symbolic AI was the real dead end, but it took 50 years for that truth to be fully accepted.

Frank Rosenblatt died in a boating accident on his 43rd birthday, according to his obituary in The New York Times. It was 1971. Had he lived, he might have trained dozens of AI researchers who could have gone on to change the field much sooner.

An excellent article about Rosenblatt’s work is Professor’s perceptron paved the way for AI — 60 years too soon, published by Cornell University in 2019.

AI building blocks: What are models?

October 14, 2020June 3, 2021 Mindy McAdams

Descriptions of machine learning are often centered on training a model. Not having a background in math or statistics, I was puzzled by this the first time I encountered it. What is the model?

This 10-minute video first describes how you select labeled data for training. You examine the features in the data, so you know what’s available to you (such as color and alcohol content of beers and wines). Then the next step is choosing the model that you will train.

In the video, Yufeng Guo chooses a small linear model without much explanation as to why. For those of us with an impoverished math background, this choice is completely mysterious. (Guo does point out that some models are better suited for image data, while others might be better suited for text data, and so on.) But wait, there’s help. You can read various short or long explanations about the kinds of models available.

It’s important for the outsider to grasp that this is all code. The model is an algorithm, or a set of algorithms (not a graph). But this is not the final model. This is a model you will train, using the data.

What are you doing while training? You are — or rather, the system is — adjusting numbers known as weights and biases. At the outset, these numbers are randomly selected. They have no meaning and no reason for being the numbers they are. As the data go into the algorithm, the weights and biases are used with the data to produce a result, a prediction. Early predictions are bad. Wine is called beer, and beer is called wine.

The output (the prediction) is compared to the “correct answer” (it is wine, or it is beer). The weights and biases are adjusted by the system. The predictions get better as the training data are run again and again and again. Running all the data through the system once is called an epoch; the weights and biases are not adjusted until after all the data have run through once. Then the adjustment. Then run the data again. Epoch 2: adjust, repeat. Many epochs are required before the predictions become good.

After the predictions are good for the training data, it’s time to evaluate the model using data that were set aside and not used for training. These “test data” (or “evaluation data”) have never run through the system before.

The results from the evaluation using the test data can be used to further fine-tune the system, which is done by the programmers, not by the code. This is called adjusting the hyperparameters and affects the learning process (e.g., how fast it runs; how the weights are initialized). These adjustments have been called “a ‘black art’ that requires expert experience, unwritten rules of thumb, or sometimes brute-force search” (Snoek et al., 2012).

And now, what you have is a trained model. This model is ready to be used on data similar to the data it was trained on. Say it’s a model for machine vision that’s part of a robot assembling cars in a factory — it’s ready to go into all the robots in all the car factories. It will see what it has been trained to see and send its prediction along to another system that turns the screw or welds the door or — whatever.

And it’s still just — code. It can be copied and sent to another computer, uploaded and downloaded, and further modified.

Can AI ‘see’ what you draw?

October 2, 2020October 1, 2020 Mindy McAdams

For Friday AI Fun, let’s look at an oldie but goodie: Google’s Quick, Draw!

You are given a word, such as whale, or bandage, and then you need to draw that in 20 seconds or less.

*Screenshot 1 from Google’s Quick, Draw!*

*Screenshot 2 from Google’s Quick, Draw!*

Thanks to this game, Google has labeled data for 50 million drawings made by humans. The drawings “taught” the system what people draw to represent those words. Now the system uses that “knowledge” to tell you what you are drawing — really fast! Often it identifies your subject before you finish.

It is possible to stump the system, even though you’re trying to draw what it asked for. My drawing of a sleeping bag is apparently an outlier. My drawings of the Mona Lisa and a rhinoceros were good enough — although I doubt any human would have named them as such!

*Screenshot 3 from Google’s Quick, Draw!*

Google’s AI thought my sleeping bag might be a shoe, or a steak, or a wine bottle.

*Screenshot 4 from Google’s Quick, Draw!*

The system has “learned” to identify only 345 specific things. These are called its categories.

You can look at the data the system has stored — for example, here are a lot of drawings of beard.

*Screenshot 5 from Google’s Quick, Draw!*

You can download the complete data (images, labels) from GitHub. You can also install a Python library to explore the data and retrieve random images from a given category.

How machine learning works :)

September 25, 2020September 24, 2020 Mindy McAdams

It’s time for Friday AI Fun!

The more I learn about machine learning, the more true this seems to be.

Using Super Mario to understand neural networks

September 17, 2020September 26, 2020 Mindy McAdams

I doubt I will ever program a neural network, but I’m trying to understand how they work — and how they are trained — well enough to make assumptions about how the systems work. What I want to be able to do is raise questions when I hear about a new-to-me AI system. I don’t want to take it on faith that a system is safe and likely to function well.

Ultimately I want to help my journalism and communications students understand this too.

Last week I discussed here a video about how neural networks work. Some time before I found that video, I had watched this one a couple of times. It’s from 2015 and it’s only 6 minutes long. It’s been viewed on YouTube more than 9 million times. In fact, it’s pretty close to 1 billion views!

Video game designer Seth Bling demonstrates a fully trained neural network that plays Mario expertly. Then he shows us how the system looks at the start, when the Mario character just stands in one place and dies every time. This is the untrained neural network, when it “knows” nothing.

Unlike the example in my earlier post — where the input to the neural network was an image of a handwritten number, and the output was the number (thereby “reading” the image) — here the input is the game state, which changes by the split second. The game state is a simplified digital representation of the Mario character, the surfaces he can run on or jump to, and any obstacles or rewards that are present. The output is which button should be pressed — holding down right continuously makes Mario run toward the right without stopping.

So the output layer in this neural network is the set of all possible actions Mario can take. For a human playing the game, these would be the buttons on the game controller.

In the training, Mario has a “fitness level,” which is a number. When Mario is dying all the time, that number stays around 2. When Mario reaches the end of the level without dying (but without scoring extra points), his fitness is 528. So by “looking at” the fitness level, the neural net assesses success. If the number has increased, then keep doing the same thing.

“The more lines and neurons you have, the more nuanced the decisions can be.”
—Seth Bling

Of course there are more actions than only moving right. Training the neural net to make Mario jump and perform more actions required many generations of neural nets, and only the best-performing ones were selected for the next generation. After 34 generations, the fitness level reached 4,000.

One thing I especially like about this video is the simultaneous visual of real Mario running in the real game level, along with a representation of the neural net showing its pathways in green and red. There is no code and no math in this video, and so while watching it, you are only thinking about how the connections come to be made and reinforced.

The method used is called NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT), which I’ve read almost nothing about — but apparently it enables the neural net to grow itself, essentially. Which is kind of mind blowing.

Bling shared his code here; it’s written in the Lua language.

What’s the use of machine learning?

September 16, 2020September 18, 2020 Mindy McAdams

I’m interested in applications of machine learning in journalism. This is natural, as my field is journalism. In the field of computer science, however, accolades and honors tend to favor research on new algorithms or procedures, or new network architectures. Applications are practical uses of algorithms, networks, etc., to solve real-world problems — and developing them often doesn’t garner the acclaim that researchers need to advance their careers.

Hannah Kerner, a professor and machine learning researcher at the University of Maryland, wrote about this in the MIT Technology Review. Her essay is aptly titled “Too many AI researchers think real-world problems are not relevant.”

“The first image of a black hole was produced using machine learning. The most accurate predictions of protein structures, an important step for drug discovery, are made using machine learning.”
—Hannah Kerner

Noting that applications of machine learning are making real contributions to science in fields outside computer science, Kerner (who works on machine learning solutions for NASA’s food security and agriculture program) asks how much is lost because of the priorities set by the journals and conferences in the machine learning field.

She also ties this focus on ML research for the sake of advancing ML to the seepage of bias out from widely used datasets into the mainstream — the most famous cases being in face recognition, with systems (machine learning models) built on flawed datasets that disproportionately skew toward white and male faces.

“When studies on real-world applications of machine learning are excluded from the mainstream, it’s difficult for researchers to see the impact of their biased models, making it far less likely that they will work to solve these problems.”
—Hannah Kerner

Machine learning is rarely plug-and-play. In creating an application that will be used to perform useful work — to make new discoveries, perhaps, or to make medical diagnoses more accurate — the machine learning researchers will do substantial new work, even when they use existing models. Just think, for a moment, about the data needed to produce an image of a black hole. Then think about the data needed to make predictions of protein structures. You’re not going to handle those in exactly the same way.

I imagine the work is quite demanding when a number of non–ML experts (say, the biologists who work on protein structures) get together with a bunch of ML experts. But either group working separately from the other is unlikely to come up with a robust new ML application. Kerner linked to this 2018 news report about a flawed cancer-detection system — leaked documents said that “instead of feeding real patient data into the software,” the system was trained on data about hypothetical patients. (OMG, I thought — you can’t train a system on fake data and then use it on real people!)

Judging from what Kerner has written, machine learning researchers might be caught in a loop, where they work on pristine and long-used datasets (instead of dirty, chaotic real-world data) to perfect speed and efficiency of algorithms that perhaps become less adaptable in the process.

It’s not that applications aren’t getting made — they are. The difficulty lies in the priorities for research, which might dissuade early-career ML researchers in particular from work on solving interesting and even vital real-world problems — and wrestling with the problems posed by messy real-world data.

I was reminded of something I’ve often heard from data journalists: If you’re taught by a statistics professor, you’ll be given pre-cleaned datasets to work with. (The reason being: She just wants you to learn statistics.) If you’re taught by a journalist, you’ll be given real dirty data, and the first step will be learning how to clean it properly — because that’s what you have to do with real data and a real problem.

So the next time you read about some breakthrough in machine learning, consider whether it is part of a practical application, or instead, more of a laboratory experiment performed in isolation, using a tried-and-true dataset instead of wild data.

What is a neural network and how does it work?

September 10, 2020June 3, 2021 Mindy McAdams

The most wonderful thing about YouTube is you can use it to learn just about anything.

One of the 10,000 annoying things about YouTube is finding a good, satisfying version of the lesson you want to learn can take hours of searching. This is especially true of videos about technical aspects of machine learning. Of course there are one- and two-hour recordings of course lectures by computer science professors. But I’ve been seeking out shorter videos with more animations and illustrations of concepts.

Understanding what a neural network is and how it processes data is necessary to demystifying machine learning. Data goes in, results come out — but in between is a “black box” consisting of code and hardware. It sort of works like a human brain, and yet, it really doesn’t.

So here at last is a painless, math-free video that walks us through a neural network. The particular example shown uses the MNIST dataset, which consists of 70,000 images of handwritten digits, 0–9. So the task being performed is the recognition of those digits. (This kind of system can be used to sort mail using postal codes, for example.)

What you’ll see is how the first layer (a vertical line of circles on the left side) represents the input. If each of the MNIST images is 28 pixels wide by 28 pixels high, then that first layer has to represent 784 pixels and each of their color values — which is a number. (One image is the input — only one at a time.)

The final vertical layer, all the way to right side, is the output of the neural network. In this example, the output tells us which digit was in the input — 0, 1, 2, etc. To see the value in this, go back to the mail-sorting idea. If a system can read postal codes, it recognizes several numbers and then transmits them to another system that “knows” which postal code goes to which geographical location. My letter gets sorted into the Florida bin and yours into the bin for your home.

In between the input and the output are the vertical “hidden” layers, and that’s where the real work gets done. In the video you’ll see that the number of circles — often called neurons, but they can also be called just units — in a hidden layer might well be less than the number of units in the input layer. The number of units in the output layer can also differ from the numbers in other layers.

When the video describes edge detection, you might recall an earlier post here.

Beautifully, during an animation, our teacher Grant Sanderson explains and shows that the weights exist not in or on the units (the “neurons”) but in fact in or on the connections between the units.

Okay, I lied a little. There is some math shown here. The weight assigned to the connection is multiplied by the value of the unit to the left. The results are all summed, for all left-side units, and that sum is assigned to the unit to the right (meaning the right side of that one connection).

The video bogs down just a bit between the Sigmoid squishification function and applying the bias, but all you really need to grasp is that the value of the right-side unit shows whether or not that little region of the image (in this case, it’s an image) has a significant difference. The math is there to determine if the color, the amount of color, is significant enough to count. And how much it should count.

I know — math, right?

But seriously, watch the video. It’s excellent.

“And that’s a lot to think about! With this hidden layer of 16 neurons, that’s a total of 784 times 16 weights, along with 16 biases. And all of that is just the connections from the first layer to the second.”
—Grant Sanderson, But what is a neural network? (video)

Sanderson doesn’t burden us with the details of the additional layers. Once you’ve seen the animations for that first step — from the input layer through the connections to the first hidden layer — you’ll have a real appreciation for what’s happening under the hood in a neural network.

In the final 6 minutes of this 19-minute video, you’ll also learn how the “learning” takes place in machine learning when a neural net is involved. All those weights and bias values? They are not determined by humans.

“Digging into what the weights and biases are doing is a good way to challenge your assumptions and really expose the full space of possible solutions.”
—Grant Sanderson, But what is a neural network? (video)

I confess it does get rather mathy at the end, but hang on through the parts that are beyond your personal math background and listen to what Sanderson is telling us. You can get a lot out of it even if the equation itself is like hieroglyphics to you.

The video content ends at 16:26, followed by the usual “subscribe to my channel” message. More info about Sanderson and his excellent videos is on his website, 3Blue1Brown.