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Computer Scientists Are Astir After Baidu Team Is Barred from A.I. Competition
- phreeza 11y agoAs a former glider pilot I had serious trouble parsing the headline because of the all caps and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grob_G102_Astir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grob_G102_Astir
- amelius 11y agoAnother solution would have been to allow other researchers unlimited access to the test server as well.
- mertd 11y agoThat would turn the competition into an exercise in overfitting.
- gnoway 11y agoWhy not weight results by the number of training attempts, and publish the number of attempts along with the results? You wouldn't have to disqualify anyone, but over-submitting would embarrass the cheater and hurt their score.
- solve 11y agoIt wouldn't, because final scores are only evaluated against the "validation" set. As for turning current contests into an exercise in overfitting the "test" set - we already reached that point long ago. Test vs validation scores often diverge wildly in these contests. Edit - Replying to arnsholt: Completely true. The huge problem I see, is that all the classic NLP tagging corpuses are created from the very narrow domain of news articles, and a few good corpuses now appearing for biology texts, and that's about it. Want to do, e.g. NER for product reviews or chat logs? - Incredibly bad results. There's a huge corpus problem in NLP today.
- arnsholt 11y agoNot to mention out-of-domain performance. I'm not familiar with computer vision, but in NLP taggers are hovering around human-level performance, and parsers are quickly approaching that level. But if you take a state-of-the-art system and test it on a slightly different corpus (even something as simple as text from the same newspaper, but a year later!) performance drops by a lot.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kailuowang 11y agoA major company spending so much, even risk their reputation, on a competition in a field where computer already achieved better than human performance. I start to feel that maybe the industry should start looking more on other new application of deep neural network (e.g. reinforce learning by deepmind). There is still a long way to go before we can achieve a thinking machine.
- ohitsdom 11y agoWe only recently (and barely) passed the performance level of a human. There's still a lot to be gained from competitions like this.
- trway 11y agoIn a globalized world, institutions need to tighten up their safeguards against cheating, fraud and dishonesty. In much of the world, cultural attitudes toward cheating are a lot more relaxed than some of us presume. There was a story about Indian students' rampant cheating at US colleges, that was presumably flag-killed off HN despite the horror stories that were emerging from academics. I've read about Australian universities basically selling degrees to foreigners who can't speak English and get admitted fraudulently. There is a currrent story about fraudulent admissions to US colleges by Chinese students as a result of massive SAT cheating. I'm not picking on Asians: Switzerland seems to have its fair share of scoundrels, as the FIFA scandal reminds us. We need to acknowledge that gloablization sometimes brings unwanted side-effects and deal with these head-on.
- rayiner 11y agoIn my opinion, tightening up the safeguards isn't the right approach. Rather, institutions, particularly educational institutions, need to fulfill their obligation to inculcate the right values in people. Cheating and petty corruption culture is an existential threat and the solution isn't to catch the cheaters, its acculturate them to follow the rules. Educational institutions, however, have totally abandoned this obligation. Shocking cheating behavior will merit just a note in someone's record, if administrators are even willing to take it that far. Cheating isn't publicized, shamed, and punished in the way necessary to have any impact on the cheaters' values. Instead, everyone gets to save face.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI totally agree with your opinion here, and especially that "cheating and petty corruption" - and the breakdown of public trust that follows - is an actual existential threat, something that may ultimately lead to a collapse of technological civilization. The current trend of trying to figure out trustless solutions for everything actually worries me.
- bkcooper 11y agoThe current trend of trying to figure out trustless solutions for everything actually worries me. If you're worried about breakdown in the face of loss of trust, then these sorts of solutions seem like very important things to be looking at. Do we have any good ideas about how to create trust at the institutional level? I agree with your concerns. I think they are representative of a broader theme - the acceleration of technical change seems like it will eventually (if it hasn't already) bring us to a point where the rate of cultural change is too slow to catch up to properly adapt to what is now possible.
- solve 11y agoBackground: The technique is actually pretty fascinating. This is something that's been well understood by the cryptography community for decades, but is somehow just recently being fully appreciated by the ML community. See here: http://blog.mrtz.org/2015/03/09/competition.html http://blog.mrtz.org/2015/03/09/competition.html https://www.kaggle.com/c/restaurant-revenue-prediction/forums/t/13950/our-perfect-submission https://www.kaggle.com/c/restaurant-revenue-prediction/forum... Summary - Submitting guesses to a system that gives you back scores for your guesses, will quickly leak out enough information that you can reverse engineer a huge number of hidden numbers/labels in surprisingly few iterations, e.g. 700 iterations to covertly extract 10,000+ real numbers with high precision. This surprisingly rapid convergence is a bit reminiscent of the birthday paradox. Further, this not only lets you win the against the "test" dataset, as apposed to the final "validation" set, but this allows you to significantly increase the data available to you to train your model on, since now you can train your model against both the "test" and "training" datasets. Layman summary - ML breaks datasets into 3 partitions "test", "train", and "validation". In cases where they're evenly split, this technique can double the training data you have access to, which is a massive advantage in ML competitions where scores differ by tiny amounts. Moral judgement - My opinion, this moral argument is misdirecting the attention from where it needs to be. Yes, it's bad what occurred here. But at this point, in 2015, and with tools readily available to crack this problem effortlessly, it's inexcusable for contests to allow so many scoring reports against their validation sets anymore. It's no longer a question of whether contestants will do it, but how many of them will. We'd might as well just let people self-report their scores on an honor system, if we're going to be this overly trusting. Try creating a contest system like this in the cryptography field any time in the past 3 decades and you'd be insulted and laughed out. Allowing so many scoring reports against the validation set is fundamentally flawed. The only solution is to globally limit calls to the scoring api. Another proposed solution - Allowing everyone to see everyone else's guesses & resulting scores against the "test" set, so that everyone is on equal ground for reverse engineering the "test" set, and then globally limiting the number of scoring attempts so that the test set isn't reverse engineered too significantly. Overfitting the "validation" set actually is not a problem either way, because none of these contests are dumb enough to let anyone score against the validation set at all until the contest submission deadline is over.
- travelhead 11y agoWhat's more important, winning a competition or improving AI for the entire world? Do the ends justify the means? I Don't think we should be too hard on Baidu, considering they are attempting to improve their algorithm for the interest of humanity (or evil AI that will bring an end to mankind, depending on how you look at it).
- komaromy 11y agoThey could have used an alternative data set as I assume all the other competitors are doing.
- netheril96 11y ago> I Don't think we should be too hard on Baidu, considering they are attempting to improve their algorithm for the interest of humanity They are not improving the algorithm for the interest of humanity. They submitted and obtained test results much more frequently than allowed. With that information, they can tune parameters to more closely fit the test data. Basically it is like scoring higher on an exam where some of the questions have been leaked. It does not suggest you now have a better understanding of the subject.
- squigs25 11y agoIf they are building an algorithm which overfits to training data, their algorithm will lose performance on in the actual validation test. It is NOT like looking at leaked answers. It's like re-reading the textbook more than everyone else. Definitely an unfair advantage however.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- varelse 11y agoYou misunderstand. They're using repeated attempts on the test set to improve their network. That is equivalent to training on the test set and that is unequivocably cheating.
- aminorex 11y agoThe PLA appears to have taken down the NYT story.
- ohitsdom 11y agoHuh? Link works fine for me.
- an_ko 11y agoPLA = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army I think that was intended to humorously imply that the link appears down when accessed from China.
- chvid 11y agoNY Times has been blocked for years in China.
- seanmcdirmid 11y agoFor a couple of years. WSJ has been blocked for less than a year. CNN is still up, though I guess its just a matter of time.
- nl 11y agoSome background: This competition (the "Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge" aka "ImageNet") isn't just some random competition. This is the competition that gave rise to the recent explosion in interest in Neural Networks. In recent years Google, Microsoft and Baidu have been one-upping each other to the point now where they are getting very close to better-than-human performance (ie, humans disagree with other humans more often than their systems disagree with the average human rating)[0]. Andrew Ng went to Baidu to start their team. I don't believe he is still involved in this challenge. Baidu has been getting close and close to Google's performance. Every year so far Google has topped it at the right time, but Baidu has later passed the Google benchmark that year. There were reasons to think that this could be the year they finally beat them. [1] is a story from January about the system that Baidu had built then. Now this. [0] http://karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from-competing-against-a-convnet-on-imagenet/ http://karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from-com... [1] https://gigaom.com/2015/01/14/baidu-has-built-a-supercomputer-for-deep-learning/ https://gigaom.com/2015/01/14/baidu-has-built-a-supercompute...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- the8472 11y ago> ie, humans disagree with other humans more often than their systems disagree with the average human rating[0]. I wonder why google has that new image categorization captcha when it's a task where computers fare better than humans.
- heartbreak 11y agoHow do you suppose they obtain the data to know how humans fare?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- the8472 11y agoSure, it's great for training/testing their AIs. But if the result is AIs better than humans at the task then it doesn't make a great captcha anymore.
- programmer_dude 11y agoFunny for a moment I thought some one submitted a headline with an Indian word in it. Asthir in Hindi/Bengali means unstable, not stationary or worked up (remotely connected to Astir?)
- dalke 11y agoMy thought is that the "a-" prefix in this sense probably comes from the Germanic use "to show a state, condition, or manner"; http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a-#Etymology_2 http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a-#Etymology_2 . It's no longer used to make new words, but the "a-" form remains in many words, including abloom, aflame, and abuzz. The first known use of the word "astir" is from 1765, says Merriam-Webster at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/astir http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/astir . This is what I would expect if "stir" was a word, "a-" was a possible mechanism to create new words, and eventually people started to use "astir. Etymonline gives a first known use as 1823: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=astir&searchmode=none http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&searc... : > "up and about," 1823, from phrase on the stir, or from Scottish asteer; from stir. Old English had astyrian, which yielded Middle English ben astired "be stirred up, excited, aroused." The root "stir" has a longer heritage. Etymonline at http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=stir&allowed_in_frame=0 http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=stir&allowed_in_fra... says: > Old English styrian "to stir, move; rouse, agitate, incite, urge" (transitive and intransitive), from Proto-Germanic * sturjan (cognates: Middle Dutch stoeren, Dutch storen "to disturb," Old High German storan "to scatter, destroy," German stören "to disturb"), from PIE * (s)twer- (1) "to turn, whirl" (see storm (n.)). Hindi is another descendant of Proto Indo-European, so that may be where there's a connection to "asthir". However, do bear in mind that the surface similarity is false - astyrian would be linguistically closer to the Hindi than astir.
- programmer_dude 11y agoThanks for the informative post! However I think asthir may be a false friend in this case. The a- prefix is used to negate sthir in asthir. Sthir in Indian languages means stable, stationary, motionless etc. Kind of like the a- prefix in English sometimes (social, asocial etc.) But it is not uncommon for word meanings to change in such a way that they take on a meaning exactly opposite of what they used to mean (see for example the meaning of the word nice: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nice&allowed_in_frame=0 http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nice&allowed_in_fra...). I wonder if there is a name for this phenomenon.
- vdnkh 11y agoJust some anectdotal evidence, but at work I had to implement a clone of our Google Maps application in Baidu Maps for our customers in China. The only reason I was able to use their API was because they copied Google's interfaces, in some cases, word for word.
- IshKebab 11y agoEvidence for what? Sounds like a good thing that they used the same API as Google for their maps to me. Like how Google used Sun's API for Java.
- logicchains 11y agoOr how Microsoft and Oracle used IBM's SQL API.
- Zigurd 11y agoGoogle uses the APIs from Java 6 and back for the "boring" bits. Android Java is the de facto client Java today because Google abandoned the UI APIs in Java 6 and created their own. Sun's, then Oracle's argument is that Google is "harming" Java by breaking the standard.
- virmundi 11y agoI think there is subtile difference. Java was, is and shall be a standard. To say you had a Java implementation meant that you supported the Java APIs. It was a legal definition. Google had Java-like runtime that they promoted as a Java runtime. This led to the question of API protections and reasonableness. Using Google's API for your own competitive product API is different. Google has not set a standard for map APIs. At least not officially. It might be THE standard for maps, but that is neither here nor there. At this point you could call it cheating. They took intellectual property and appropriated it for a clone. Plus side, we now have an implied standard. Downside, theft of intellectual property.
- Zigurd 11y ago
- chvid 11y agoWhy is the competition designed in such a way that it is an advantage for a competitor to "run test versions of their programs twice weekly ahead of a final submission"? How does it work? You submit your classifier to some server and it is run against what? The data set that determines your final score - hopefully not.
- solve 11y ago> Why is the competition designed in such a way that it is an advantage See my comment & links at the bottom of this page. For some reason HN always puts my comments near the bottom, even when they're getting many upvotes. (I'm guessing that HN has a comment-editing penalty from editing my comments too many times, but I'm not sure, or maybe it's from times I must have insulted the mods here.) Edit: I constantly get "submitting too fast", so I'll reply here. Thanks for the info kefka. Yeah, I'll happily agree with that linked comment, that the childish crude moderation techniques used here have been hurting a once great community. It was the exact same scenario for me as for that guy. Seems I got rank-banned immediately after confronting dang about the trends of excessive downvoting and increasing side-project criticizing on HN.
- nl 11y ago(For some reason HN always puts my comments near the bottom, even when they're getting many upvotes I think it's because you don't have many upvoted comments in total (maybe?). I upvoted you here, though.)
- kefka 11y agoIt's called being rankbanned. A mod did that to you. See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9165780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9165780
- chvid 11y agoIs it correctly understood that in "Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge" the competitor's biweekly runs ahead of the final submission is against the set that actually determines the final result of the contest?!
- jokoon 11y agoI began watching Andrew Ng's course just this morning. I had also watched some part of the courses by Pedro Domingo at the Washington University a few months ago. Having never been employed but having coded for 8, I wish I could get myself educated in this field.
- McElroy 11y agoIs training of the Google AI the reason that reCAPTCHA is now showing pictures and asking users to select all images of a certain kind?
- squigs25 11y agoThis is clearly cheating. HOWEVER, the goal of these contests should be to promote the most accurate and powerful image recognition algorithms that will transform the world as we know it. Limiting access to training data makes it more difficult to test changes to an algorithm. These rules do not make sense to me, and I would advocate against them.
- sigzero 11y agoYet, those are the rules as they currently stand. Baidu knew it and chose to cheat.
- sweezyjeezy 11y agoTwo things - firstly you need to understand the concept of overfitting : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting . If teams were allowed to train on the full dataset, it would be possible to get a 100% score, yet still not have a model that was useful on any images that were not in the training set. Furthermore, if you allowed infinite submissions, teams could just train a million models with slightly different hyperparameters, and submit the one that did best (which may be what Baidu was trying to do here). This is a problem because now there is the possibility that you are overfitting the test data - there would be no way to tell if the accuracy generalised to other images without coming up with more labelled data, i.e. making a new test set. Second of all, cross validation : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_%28statistics%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-validation_%28statistics%.... You don't HAVE to submit to the test set to get a feel of how well your model is performing. On datasets this large, cross validation should be effective, if more time consuming method (unless your model is extremely unstable).
- squigs25 11y agoWas there a training set made available and distributed? I got the impression that there was not.
- sweezyjeezy 11y ago
- jordigh 11y agoCheating is pretty entrenched in Chinese culture. Sometimes I even wonder if they consider it's cheating at all or if it's just cleverness and they should be rewarded for it. I believe they feel that way about infringing copyrights too: why should they follow someone else's rules that puts them at a disadvantage when they can instead demonstrate cleverness and break those rules? There was an interesting story recently about how a disproportionate amount of Chinese students are expelled from US universities for cheating. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/05/29/u-s-schools-expelled-8000-chinese-students-for-poor-grades-cheating/ http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/05/29/u-s-schools-ex... The problem is so entrenched that some students rioted when they were prevented from cheating, because they felt that this put them at an unfair disadvantage compared to other schools where cheating was tolerated: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10132391/Riot-after-Chinese-teachers-try-to-stop-pupils-cheating.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/1013239...
- peter303 11y agoIts pretty entrenched in US culture too. Example one, downloading "free" stuff off the Internet that used to have to pay for in a store. People make all kinds of rationalizations why this is not stealing. Example two is just about any US high school or college. The US Air Force Academy graduated a 20% smaller class than normal his year because so many were expelled in cheating scandals. A major sociology paper was just retracted in Science, on of the worlds leading journals, because a grad student faked the data.
- kazinator 11y ago> People make all kinds of rationalizations why this is not stealing. Arguments that it is stealing are also nothing more than rationalizations. That's what both sides wield: it's a war of rationalizations. (I tend to be more convinced by the "it's not stealing" rationalizations myself, simply because stealing an object makes it unavailable. If someone stole my bicycle, I'd be upset. If they cloned it in a Star-Trek-style "replicator" and took the copy, I couldn't care less. If you lend a book or DVD or SD card or whatever to someone, upon it being returned, you have no way to test the hypothesis "a copy of this was retained by the borrower". Not testable is not real, for all practical purposes.)
- peter303 11y agoIn science and technology cheating is often self-correcting. Your result is not reproducible or your product defective if you cheat too much. Everyone will know.
- dekhn 11y agoOne important thing to recognize here is that this isn't just unfair play (in the sense of trying to win a competition by submitting multiple entries). It's a loss for all players. The point of having distinct test and training sets, and not training on the test set, is to ensure that your system can generalize (IE, work on things it wasn't trained on). If you don't do that, you're not making progress, just memorizing examples. Example memorization is fine on its own, but it's not really a true improvement.
- protomyth 11y agoWho wrote that headline. It makes it sound like they were barred for no reason and the community is mad. A more accurate headline would be "Baidu Team barred from A.I. Competition for cheating". Its like they are trying not to get censored or something.
- ilaksh 11y agoIt is odd that there is such a significant cultural difference. On the other hand, the difference in culture may be more subtle than we realize. For this test, they should have had an automated way to enforce that rule, if possible. Look at the actual levels of piracy in the US versus China. In the US, you will get some people who say they are worried it might be wrong or that they will get caught. But most people will say something like 'watching this free stream doesn't hurt anyone'. In the US, we have no problem with high end shoes that look similar to one another, or low-end similar to high-end. But there is a subtle distinction -- there must be some way to claim that this is not copying the other. But maybe it more often comes down to taking a different attitude towards the same thing. E.g. "cheap Chinese knock-offs" versus "inexpensive sensible alternative to overpriced designer brand". Its also perfectly fine in general for companies to copy a successful business model. But we insist that there must be some distinction. However the difference between these companies may only be slightly greater or mainly surface-level, and so when you get down to the fine analysis, I thinj the real difference between the cultures is smaller than people want to admit.
- thansharp 11y agoI'm not an expert, so apologies if my question is stupid. Why can't the competition have the same test data each week across all participants? So that no matter how many accounts you create, you will train with the same images everyone else gets to train with.