From Zero To State Of The Art NLP Part I - Attention mechanism

There has been some really amazing advances in natural language processing (NLP) in the last couple of years. Back in November 2018, Google released https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/open-sourcing-bert-state-of-art-pre.html, which is based on attention mechanisms in Attention Is All You Need. In this two part series, I will assume you know nothing about NLP, have some understanding about neural networks, and take you from the start to end of understanding how transformers work. Natural language processing is the art of using machine learning techniques in processing language. [Read More]

Variational inference, the art of approximate sampling

In the spirit of looking at fancy word topics, this post is about variational inference. Suppose you granted me one super power and I chose the ability to sample from any distribution in a fast and accurate way. Now, you might think that’s a crappy super-power, but that basically enables me to fit any model I want and provide uncertainty estimates. To make the problem concrete, lets suppose you are trying to sample from a distribution \(p(x)\). [Read More]