sparklyr 1.4: Weighted Sampling, Tidyr Verbs, Robust Scaler, RAPIDS, and more

Sparklyr 1.4 is now available! This release comes with delightful new features such as weighted sampling and tidyr verbs support for Spark dataframes, robust scaler for standardizing data based on median and interquartile range, spark_connect interface for RAPIDS GPU acceleration plugin, as well as a number of dplyr-related improvements.

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Interfaces for Explaining Transformer Language Models

Interfaces for exploring transformer language models by looking at input saliency and neuron activation. Explorable #1: Input saliency of a list of countries generated by a language model Tap or hover over the output tokens: Explorable #2: Neuron activation analysis reveals four groups of neurons, each is associated with generating a certain type of token Tap or hover over the sparklines on the left to isolate a certain factor: The Transformer architecture has been powering a number of the recent advances in NLP. A breakdown of this architecture is provided here . Pre-trained language models based on the architecture, in both its auto-regressive (models that use their own output as input to next time-steps and that process tokens from left-to-right, like GPT2) and denoising (models trained by corrupting/masking the input and that process tokens bidirectionally, like BERT) variants continue to push the envelope in various tasks in NLP and, more recently, in computer vision. Our understanding of why these models work so well, however, still lags behind these developments. This exposition series continues the pursuit to interpret and visualize the inner-workings of transformer-based language models. We illustrate how some key interpretability methods apply to transformer-based language models. This article focuses on auto-regressive models, but these methods are applicable to other architectures and tasks as well. This is the first article in the series. In it, we present explorables and visualizations aiding the intuition of: Input Saliency methods that score input tokens importance to generating a token. Neuron Activations and how individual and groups of model neurons spike in response to inputs and to produce outputs. The next article addresses Hidden State Evolution across the layers of the model and what it may tell us about each layer’s role.

PyMC Open Source Development

In this episode of Open Source Directions, we were joined by Thomas Wiecki once again who talked about the work being done with PyMC. PyMC3 is a Python package for Bayesian statistical modeling and Probabilistic Machine Learning focusing on advanced Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI) algorithms. Its flexibility and extensibility make it applicable to a large suite of problems.

Julia Open Source Development

In this episode of Open Source Directions we were joined by Jeff Bezanson and Katie Hyatt who talk about the work they have been doing with Julia. Julia is a programming language that was designed from the beginning for high performance. It programs compile to native code for multiple platforms via LLVM. Julia is dynamically typed, feels like a scripting language, and has good support for interactive use.