We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has little memory requirements, is invariant to diagonal rescaling of the gradients, and is well suited for problems that are large in terms of data and/or parameters. The method is also appropriate for non-stationary objectives and problems with very noisy and/or sparse gradients. The hyper-parameters have intuitive interpretations and typically require little tuning. Some connections to related algorithms, on which Adam was inspired, are discussed. We also analyze the theoretical convergence properties of the algorithm and provide a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework. Empirical results demonstrate that Adam works well in practice and compares favorably to other stochastic optimization methods. Finally, we discuss AdaMax, a variant of Adam based on the infinity norm. * Equal contribution. Author ordering determined by coin flip over a Google Hangout.

One of the main challenges in Zero-Shot Learning of visual categories is gathering semantic attributes to accompany images. Recent work has shown that learning from textual descriptions, such as Wikipedia articles, avoids the problem of having to explicitly define these attributes. We present a new model that can classify unseen categories from their textual description. Specifically, we use text features to predict the output weights of both the convolutional and the fully connected layers in a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). We take advantage of the architecture of CNNs and learn features at different layers, rather than just learning an embedding space for both modalities, as is common with existing approaches. The proposed model also allows us to automatically generate a list of pseudoattributes for each visual category consisting of words from Wikipedia articles. We train our models end-to-end using the Caltech-UCSD bird and flower datasets and evaluate both ROC and Precision-Recall curves. Our empirical results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms previous methods.

Motivation: High-content screening (HCS) technologies have enabled large scale imaging experiments for studying cell biology and for drug screening. These systems produce hundreds of thousands of microscopy images per day and their utility depends on automated image analysis. Recently, deep learning approaches that learn feature representations directly from pixel intensity values have dominated object recognition challenges. These tasks typically have a single centered object per image and existing models are not directly applicable to microscopy datasets. Here we develop an approach that combines deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with multiple instance learning (MIL) in order to classify and segment microscopy images using only whole image level annotations.Results: We introduce a new neural network architecture that uses MIL to simultaneously classify and segment microscopy images with populations of cells. We base our approach on the similarity between the aggregation function used in MIL and pooling layers used in CNNs. To facilitate aggregating across large numbers of instances in CNN feature maps we present the Noisy-AND pooling function, a new MIL operator that is robust to outliers. Combining CNNs with MIL enables training CNNs using whole microscopy images with image level labels. We show that training end-to-end MIL CNNs outperforms several previous methods on both mammalian and yeast datasets without requiring any segmentation steps.Availability and implementation: Torch7 implementation available upon request.Contact: oren.kraus@mail.utoronto.ca

Existing computational pipelines for quantitative analysis of high‐content microscopy data rely on traditional machine learning approaches that fail to accurately classify more than a single dataset without substantial tuning and training, requiring extensive analysis. Here, we demonstrate that the application of deep learning to biological image data can overcome the pitfalls associated with conventional machine learning classifiers. Using a deep convolutional neural network (DeepLoc) to analyze yeast cell images, we show improved performance over traditional approaches in the automated classification of protein subcellular localization. We also demonstrate the ability of DeepLoc to classify highly divergent image sets, including images of pheromone‐arrested cells with abnormal cellular morphology, as well as images generated in different genetic backgrounds and in different laboratories. We offer an open‐source implementation that enables updating DeepLoc on new microscopy datasets. This study highlights deep learning as an important tool for the expedited analysis of high‐content microscopy data.

The ability to act in multiple environments and transfer previous knowledge to new situations can be considered a critical aspect of any intelligent agent. Towards this goal, we define a novel method of multitask and transfer learning that enables an autonomous agent to learn how to behave in multiple tasks simultaneously, and then generalize its knowledge to new domains. This method, termed "Actor-Mimic", exploits the use of deep reinforcement learning and model compression techniques to train a single policy network that learns how to act in a set of distinct tasks by using the guidance of several expert teachers. We then show that the representations learnt by the deep policy network are capable of generalizing to new tasks with no prior expert guidance, speeding up learning in novel environments. Although our method can in general be applied to a wide range of problems, we use Atari games as a testing environment to demonstrate these methods.