This Week in MLC@Home
Notes for Sep 8 2020
A weekly summary of news and notes for MLC@Home

A little late after the long weekend in the US, and in general, a lot of work behind the scenes. It was a relatively quiet week in the forums.

The biggest news is that there's been a hitch with Dataset 3 WUs, in that we're having trouble generating data that the networks can learn. As a refresher, Datasets 1 and 2 are what are being computed now and are nearing completion. Dataset 3 is supposed to train similar RNN networks, but go "wide" instead of "deep" (100 different training sets, only 100-ish examples of each vs. 5 training sets and 10000 of each). As such instead of mimic-ing the 5 simple machines Datasets 1 and 2 are computing, we would instead use 100 randomly generated deterministic finite automata, and train networks to mimic the behavior of these automata. Surprisingly, we're having trouble learning these automata using the networks we have, which we suspect is a bug in our data generation code we're still tracking down and taking us a lot longer than planned.

Because of this, we're pushing up work on Dataset 4. Dataset 4 will be the first to train Convolutional networks (CNNs) on variants of MNIST, specifically those used by the TrojAI project and the "BadNets" paper. The hope is that with enough examples of each network, we can show the same weight-space separation we're able to show with Dataset 1 and 2 on simple RNNs is *also* present on CNN networks, showing greater application of weight space analysis for identifying training data. An updated client for Dataset 4 support is already underway, and should take too long. Hopefully this week, but given the unforeseen issues with Dataset 3, we're hesitant to state a deadline.

Meanwhile, work on debugging Dataset 3 continues. As does paper writing for a conference deadline at the end of the month.

News:

• Dataset 3 debugging continues
  
• Client changes for Dataset 4 underway.
  
• Client application issues have settled down after a few weeks of turmoil.
  
• We'll do an official release of a preliminary dataset (1+2) once we have at least 1000 examples of each machine type, and we're getting closer!
  
• We can now confirm the new server is ordered and in process.
  
• We haven't forgotten about badges! We're just focused on the paper and new WU generation at the moment. That said, if volunteers would like to offer potential designs for badges, head on over the the forums and join the discussion.
  

Project status snapshot:

Tasks
Tasks ready to send 19271
Tasks in progress 19684
Users
With credit 661
Registered in past 24 hours 65
Hosts
With recent credit 1874
Registered in past 24 hours 33
Current GigaFLOPS 27494.27

Dataset 1 and 2 progress:

SingleDirectMachine      10002/10004
EightBitMachine           9962/10006
SingleInvertMachine      10001/10003
SimpleXORMachine         10000/10002
ParityMachine              537/10005
ParityModified              90/10005
EightBitModified          3729/10006
SimpleXORModified        10005/10005
SingleDirectModified     10004/10004
SingleInvertModified     10002/10002 

Last week's TWIM Notes: Aug 31 2020

Thanks again to all our volunteers!

-- The MLC@Home Admins

Thanks for the update! I am stoked to dive directly into the new datasets which I find frame a much more compelling research question :)
Hopefully we have some creative people amongst this project's community that can help with drafting badges ...

Good luck on the paper and debugging.

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