[HN Gopher] SynJax: Jax library for efficient probabilistic mode... ___________________________________________________________________ SynJax: Jax library for efficient probabilistic modeling of structured objects Author : pizza Score : 52 points Date : 2023-08-08 14:24 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (twitter.com) (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com) | lordofgibbons wrote: | Could anyone please explain what this would be used for? Does | this project define NNs that are designed for datasets with a | known structure? | Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: | It's useful when you're modeling a structure, e.g., P(x, y) or | P(x | y), rather than a distribution. This is helpful in | situations where generating samples is bad (CRFs) or your data | imposes dependent features (HMMs). It appears from the README | (and the authors' previous work) this is useful for arbitrary | structures too. | gh02t wrote: | The things in SynJax aren't neural nets themselves as far as I | see poking around, it's a bunch of different [complicated] | probability distributions that you might encounter when | modeling neural nets or related tasks stochastically. More of a | toolbox of components implemented in JAX for advanced | statistical modeling inside of a NN. Could also be useful apart | from NNs, too. | nextos wrote: | Yes, that is confusing as the intro in the README says | "SynJax is a neural network library for JAX structured | probability distributions". | | However, contrary to my expectations after reading that, they | do not have lots primitives to mix neural and probabilistic | models. | | They seem to be heading in that direction, with e.g. | connectionist temporal classification (CTC). | | Still very interesting library, seems to provide massive | efficiency gains for difficult generative models such as | PCFGs. | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: | This is probably a good start | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_model | | It's traditionally fairly challenging to implement a relatively | straightforward graphical model, but automatic differentiation | changed that. Some people are working on getting the best of | graphical models and black box models (like neural networks), | which is where things like this come in. | | Because it's jax, you get autograd and gpu/tpu acceleration for | free, which further lets you stick these things in with other | models, including black box models like NNs. | | An example application is in sentence part of speech tagging | (noun, adjective, etc). You could model each word's part of | speech as a separate prediction, but you know that "noun-verb- | noun" is more common than "noun-noun-noun" so you know your | predictions should influence each other. Stuff like this makes | that easier. | | edit: | | The authors of this library also put a paper on arxiv | describing it https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.03291.pdf The abstract | gives a good sense of what they're going after: | | > The development of deep learning software libraries enabled | significant progress in the field by allowing users to focus on | modeling, while letting the library to take care of the tedious | and time-consuming task of optimizing execution for modern | hardware accelerators. However, this has benefited only | particular types of deep learning models, such as Transformers, | whose primitives map easily to the vectorized computation. The | models that explicitly account for structured objects, such as | trees and segmentations, did not benefit equally because they | require custom algorithms that are difficult to implement in a | vectorized form. SynJax directly addresses this problem by | providing an efficient vectorized implementation of inference | algorithms for structured distributions covering alignment, | tagging, segmentation, constituency trees and spanning trees. | | > With SynJax we can build large-scale differentiable models | that explicitly model structure in the data. The code is | available at https://github.com/deepmind/synjax. | uoaei wrote: | Link should go to: https://github.com/deepmind/synjax | | The repo isn't even linked in the X post, which is strange. | sdfghswe wrote: | It's not an "X post", it's a tweet. | [deleted] | sampo wrote: | > The repo isn't even linked in the X post | | It's a thread of 4 tweets. Twitter has a limit of 280 | characters per tweet, so usually people split their text into | multiple tweets. The link is in the 4th one, as you might | expect. | | https://nitter.net/milosstanojevic/status/168889655879052083... | uoaei wrote: | I'm logged out and have adblockers on. I used to be able to | see the posts that come after, but now I only see the first | one. Maybe that's a new change. | | Thanks for the nitter link. | zote wrote: | For anyone else not in the know, Twitter(X?) now limits | your view to only the tweet a link points to, if you're not | logged in. | throwaway290 wrote: | > Twitter has a limit of 280 characters per tweet | | I have seen much longer posts on there, like a full screen of | text... how come? | Iwan-Zotow wrote: | I think if you pay, you'll get more ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-08-10 23:01 UTC)