Vaclav Kosar's

Software & Machine Learning Blog

Vaclav Kosar's Software & Machine Learning Blog

Learn about machine learning and software engineering, investing, and business.

I am a ML engineer at GLAMI, a fashion search engine, where I develop a systems that performs 40 million detections of product features (e.g. product category) each month. We publish resources which you for machine learning research and education. For example, we recently published a GLAMI-1M dataset together with a Colab notebook combining of texts which are in multiple languages and images. You easily classify products using image and text, and you can find similar products just using images and so on.

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Created on 30 Oct 2017. Updated on: 27 Dec 2022.

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Latest posts

Applying David Deutsch's Principles in Life and Business

Exploring principles of Fallibilism, Optimism, Explanations, Conjecture and Refutation, and Evolution in daily work.

Symbolic vs Connectionist Machine Learning

Reason without hallucinations in large language models by hybridizing neural networks with code.

Fill Versions From Python Environment

Script that fills in versions into your requirements file

Cooking with Psyllium Fiber to Reduce Sugar Spikes

My month-long experience using this plant-based fiber ingredient.

Neural Network Pruning Explained

Reduce on-CPU prediction and model storage costs by zeroing-out weights while minimally increasing the loss.

Tokenization in Machine Learning Explained

Tokenization is splitting the input data into a sequence of meaningful parts e.g. pice data like a word, image patch, document sentence.

Embeddings in Machine Learning Explained

Embedding is a task specific lower dimensional vector representation of data like a word, image, document, or an user.

Multimodal Image-text Classification

Understand the top deep learning image and text classification models CMA-CLIP, CLIP, CoCa, and MMBT used in e-commerce.

Strong Static Typing vs Weak Dynamic Typing

Master programmers Carmack, Blow, Fowler, and Uncle Bob on strong static typing in contrast to weak dynamic typing.

Python functools.cmp_to_key Explained

Understand the functools' comparison function to key function conversion quickly.

Transformer Positional Embeddings and Encodings

How transformers encode information about token positions?

Transformer Embeddings and Tokenization

How transformers convert text and other data to vectors and back using tokenization, positional encoding, embedding layers.

Bits-Per-Byte and Bits-Per-Character

BPB and BPC are metrics used in compression and language modelling related to compression ratio.

Neural Data Compression

Lossless bit reduction with machine learning by minimizing cross-entropy. Examples: NNCP and TRACE models.

How Computers Understood Humans

Catch on with this 7-slide introduction to deep natural language processing of 2022, featuring TF-IDF, Word2vec, knowledge graphs, and transformers.

OpenAI's DALL-E 2 and DALL-E 1 Explained

Compare of text-to-image generation models DALL-E 1, 2, and understand related models VQ-VAE, CLIP, and GLIDE

Google's Pathways Language Model and Chain-of-Thought Prompting

PaLM, the largest model as of early 2022, outperforms average human on grade school logic and math (BIG-bench) by simulating reasoning steps.

Word Alignment for Sentence Similarity

Semantic similarity increases with similar semantic units of similar semantic contexts in the monolingual word alignment.

Sparse Matrix Why and When?

Sparce matrix formats like CSR, LOL, COO compress and speed up certain operations on mostly zero matrices

MassiveText Dataset introduced for pre-training of DeepMind's Gopher

Private diverse 10-lingual textual dataset composed of web, Github, news, Wikipedia, Books, C4.

Transformer's Self-Attention Mechanism Simplified

How transformer models like BERT and GPT work?

SRU++ Model Speeds Up Transformer with Simple Recurrent Unit

Reducing compute by combining RNN with self-attention from Transformer architecture.

7 Powers' Moats Through the Lens of DiBello's Business Mental Model

An insight into Helmer's enterprise moats via dimensions of demand, supply, and capital.

DeepMind's RETRO Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer

Retrieval-Enhanced Language Model cross-attends trillions of tokens for SoTA on Wikitext103 and The Pile with 25x fewer parameters.

Cross-Attention in Transformer Architecture

Merge two embedding sequences regardless of modality, e.g., image with text in Stable Diffusion U-Net.

Ten Commandments for Business Failure Book Summary

With a foreword from Warren Buffett, this short book is worthy of skimming.

Manipulate Item Attributes via Disentangled Representation

Using attribute-specific embedding subspaces for image manipulation retrieval, outfit completion, conditional similarity retrieval.

ELECTRA - How to Train BERT 4x Cheaper

Reducing training flops 4x by GAN-like discriminative task compared to RoBERTa-500K transformer model.

Expire-Span: Scaling Transformer by Forgetting

Reducing computational costs by differentiably dropping memorized embeddings from self-attention context.

Scout Mindset Book Summary

Galef on clear thinking by avoiding soldier mindset, self-awareness, no-illusions, changing mind.

Quilt Data Versioning Review & How-to

How to version data using Quilt data for Python on AWS S3 for machine learning.

Wav2vec: Semi-supervised and Unsupervised Speech Recognition

Word2vec for audio quantizes phonemes, transforms, GAN trains on text and audio from Facebook AI.

PID Controller: A Simple Control Loop Mechanism

Proportional–integral–derivative controller calculates feedback to reduce the error in the next step.

DreamCoder: Wake & Sleep Program Learning

Learning to code by growing function library, fantasising coding tasks, and training neural search.

Google Product Taxonomy Viewer

Interactively explore Google Shopping's and Shopify's categories to configure products in your feed.

Automatically Expanding Taxonomy

Pinterest's Arborist model finds parents for unseen textual nodes using triplet-loss, StarSpace embeddings, & shortest path.

Submodularity in Ranking, Summarization, and Self-attention

Diminishing returns with a budget constraint in problems of coverage and results diversification.

Feed-Forward, Self-Attention & Key-Value

Feed-forward (MLP) layer is similar to cross-attention as observed in SwiGLU and All-attention.

Lambda Networks Transform Self-Attention

Is Lambda Layer similar to self-attention in a Transformer? What gives LambdaNet its power? LambdaResNet beats EfficientNet but does it loose to Performer?

Performers FAVOR+ Faster Transformer Attention

The Performer model attention approximation has linear complexity in contrast to square and outperforms Linformer.

Double Descent Contrary to Bias-Variance Trade-Off

Increasing parameter count leads to multiple test loss peaks and a global minima in the overparameterized regime.

To What Python Number Types Does json.loads Parse?

JSON specifies only a number value, so how to infer the correct type between int and float? How are NaN and Infinity handled?

Brutalist and Modernist Architectures Collide at Sunshine Plaza

Take a tour of the surprising merge of a modern and soviet era design on a Prague's public square with this photo album.

Word Mover's Embedding: Cheap WMD For Documents

What is Word Mover's Embedding for documents and how it approximates Word Mover's Distance between documents.

Transfigure Stress into Energy by Drawing on Research

Your pounding heart and blush will announce a flashing opportunity instead of an impending fight or flight after applying research from this post.

OpenAI's Glow - Flow-Based Model Teardown

Interpretable latent representations by composing non-linear invertible functions and maximizing the exact log-likelihood.

BentoML vs Cortex - ML Serving Showdown

To find the best model serving tool, compare open-source MLOps platforms BentoML and Cortex.

StarSpace - Embeddings For Documents, Users, and Words

Create vectors of various entities in a single space with this general-purpose embedding model from Facebook AI.

Thinkpad P52 Disassembly For Repaste, RAM Upgrade, Or Anything Else

Repaste, max RAM, or install antenna into Thinkpad P52 with these links and tips for full disassembly.

Python Context Manager Exception Handling and Retrying

Wrap your resource into a context manager with-statement to catch, handle exceptions, and close the resource.

Result Diversification in Web Search and Recommenders

Increase coverage in web search and recommendation via re-ranking diversification factor

I read papers on a podcast

To improve my pronunciation and speech, I read mostly Machine Learning scientific papers on a podcast.

Learn faster with a generated quiz

Reduce your effort of creating and revising learning material using a free AI-powered tool.

Thinkpad P53 vs P52 Thermals: Any Improvement?

Is Thinkpad P53 the cooler brother of P52?

Constant 1D Kalman Filter Is Exponential Or Cumulative Average

Understand the Kalman filter with a simple one-dimensional example. It converges to cumulative or exponential average in case of constant measurement uncertainty and process noise.

FastText Word Embeddings

How FastText works, word embeddings, n-grams, OOV words, and visualize embedding norms.

Highly Compressed Richard Hamming's Lectures

Get inspired by Hamming's lectures compressed into tiny downloadable files.

Thinkpad P52 vs ZBook 15 G5 vs Precision 7530

My experience with the best mobile workstation of 2019 with specs matching Thinkpad P52 and ZBook 15 G5 and P1000 GPU.

Spline: Data Lineage For Spark Structure Streaming (2018)

Vaclav Kosar and Marek Novotny presentation at Spark N AI Summit 2018 of a POC of Structured Streaming data lineage tool.

Debounce In Bash To Fix Lenovo Touchpad And Trackpoint Lost Sync

Another functional programming tip for Bash.

My First Contribution To A Major OSS Project Apache Spark

Finally my rather small pull request was merged into master of Apache Spark!

How To Create Custom Ubuntu Web Link App

Turn any web page into an Ubuntu application and prevent the web owner from tracking you around the web.

Modern Config Injection In Maven Plugins

Maven Mojo constructor injection of config parameters via Guice JSR-330 support.

Walking Desk: Cheap And Tiny

A review of my motor-less walking desk setup.

Boundary Control Entity Architecture Pattern

BCE is a source code structure pattern sometimes called ECB, EBC, Hexagonal, Onion, or Clean architecture.

Spring Integration Highlights - message driven architecture

Get familiar with Spring Integration implementation of Enterprise Integration Patterns and compare it to Java 8 Streams and RxJS.

Fish Roe vs Fish Oil

Healthiness and price of a salty delicacy versus oily softgels. EPA, DHA, Neu5Gc.

Restore Missing Punctuation with Keras Convolutional Text Punctuator

Simple neural network android app for restoring punctuation in text e.g. YouTube subtitles.

Easy Online Independence: Mail Backup, File Synchronization

Cheap way to increase your independence from the online giants with Syncthing, mbsync, Thunderbird.

Generic Class Name Signals Low Cohesion

Why and how to avoid non-specific class names like util, utils, or helper?

How to Structure Code

Localize Related, Inline over Extract, Specific over Generic. My view partially based on Carmack, Jonathan Blow, and Adam Bien's posts.

Is $15 USB Microscope Enough For You?

See yeast cells and pond water critters paying just $15 for an USB microscope.

Linux Text To Speech Comparison: Flite Vs Pico2Wave Vs Festival

Comparison of open-source text to speech (TTS) software in terms of pleasantness, comprehensibility, and modularity.

Try This Sped-Up Classical Music Attuned For Today's Sped-Up Age

Are you attracted to complexity and nobility of classical music, but deterred by its slow pace?

Drone Detecting White Marker for Stabilization

On a hackathon I implemented trivial image processing algorithm to locate white piece of paper on grey carpet floor to be used for drone horizontal stabilization.

Functional ForEach In Bash

Don't you hate verbosity of Bash's while-do statements when writing in-line scripts? No worries, you can improve on that!

Obsolete Git Branch Remover Maven Plugin

Having many branches left behind, abandoned, never deleted? How do you deal with them? We had same problem and I developed a automated DevOps solution.

How To Boost Your Jog Morale Using Military Cadence And Run Farther

Run beyond your max with this professional mind hack.

GitFlow Incremental Builder - Speed up your multi-module Maven build

Build only modules that changed compared to the master branch, plus their dependents. Java!

Hamiltonians with constant spectral intervals and time-dependent perturbation

On quantum systems determined by time-dependent Hamilton operators. Family of quantum systems, whose Hamilton operators take form H(t) = H 0 + V (t), where V (t) is perturbation and H 0 is self-adjoint with pure-point spectrum and constant gaps between eigenvalues in spectrum σ(H 0 ).

Feynman summation in finite-dimensional quantum mechanics

A summary and enhancement of existing literature regarding finite-dimensional quantum mechanics. In the later parts Feynman’s path summation is discussed.

Simulation of Soft Photon Calorimeter

Understand how an electromagnetic calorimeter works presented at Dubna JINR 2011.

Transverse momentum spectra and correlations in the blast wave model with resonances

This work provides a review of theories of properties of high energy density matter originating in heavy-ion high energy collisions (GeV/nucleus).

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