With two releases every year, you may find it challenging to keep up with the latest features.* In fact, some people who work here feel the same way! This release, I asked the Product Managers about the new features related to deep learning that they think you should know about in release 20a. Here are their responses:
Deep Learning
Starting with Deep Learning Toolbox, there are three new features to get excited about in 20a.
- Experiment Manager (new) - A new app that keeps track all conditions when training neural networks. This can be extremely helpful to keep track of all training parameters, data and accuracy of each iteration of the network. More to come on this feature in future posts!
- Deep Network Designer (updates) - Generate MATLAB code from the app, and train networks directly in the app.
- Post-Training Quantization (new) - This new video describes the quantization workflow in MATLAB.
There are new examples which highlight these new features:
Code Generation
GPU Coder
- Support for quite a few new networks, including SSD, bidirectional & stateful LSTMs, DarkNet, Inception-ResNet-v2, NASNet-Large, and NASNet-Mobile
- New examples include:
MATLAB Coder
- Support for new networks including:
- LSTM for ARM CPUs
- DarkNet-19, DarkNet-53, DenseNet-201, Inception-ResNet-v2, NASNet-Large, NASNet-Mobile, ResNet-18, and Xception for Intel & ARM CPUs
Signal and Audio
Signal Processing
Audio Processing
- New example showing how to train and evaluate GANs for generating synthetic audio. This highlights the recently released API in Deep Learning Toolbox, which includes custom training loops
- New example discussing the use of I-vectors for Speaker Verification. I-vectors are a very popular modern feature often used on audio signals. They are used with deep networks as well as with more traditional machine learning algorithms in lightweight embedded systems
- New detectSpeech function to automatically detect and annotate regions of speech in audio recordings
- New text2speech function to generate pre-labeled synthetic speech data using web services, including Google's very popular Wavenet
- GPU acceleration for mfcc and melSpectrogram. mfcc now also supports generating CUDA code.
Image Processing
There’s a
new style transfer demo available in Image Processing Toolbox. This demo will walk through the entire process of creating a network designed to take an image and transform it into the style of a reference image. Now you can create images in the style of Picasso, van Gogh, or your favorite artist. The incorporation of custom training loops (
Advanced Deep Learning: Key Terms) makes techniques like style transfer relatively intuitive to implement.
For Computer Vision, there is a new example describing how to
create a single shot detector (SSD).
Reinforcement Learning
20a release of Reinforcement Learning Toolbox comes with a new agent, Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3), additional support for continuous action spaces from existing agents (Policy Gradient, Actor Critic and Proximal Policy Optimization agent) and new examples that showcase how to build custom training algorithms and imitation learning.
- Train DDPG Agent with Pretrained Actor Network
Reinforcement learning is a data hungry technique that requires many simulations for training. This example shows how to reduce training time, by initializing the neural network policy using existing data and supervised learning.
- Train Reinforcement Learning Policy Using Custom Training Loop
While Reinforcement Learning Toolbox includes a variety of popular algorithms to train your system, you may want to customize these algorithms or create your own. This example shows the steps you need to follow to create a custom training algorithm with Reinforcement Learning Toolbox.
Radar & Comms
20a release is exciting for the Radar/Comms area primarily because we have 4 new shipping examples. Here are the latest examples and features available in 20a:
RF Fingerprinting:
5G Channel estimation:
Log-likelihood estimation for comms channels
According to Product Manager, Rick Gentile, "My personal favorites are the examples in links 1 and 2 because we have been getting so many requests for this type of application (RF Fingerprinting). It is a hot topic because it is used to prevent comms network spoofing. The 2
nd example highlights the work we did with synthesized data using data we collected from a radio."
That's it for this post. Hopefully we highlighted new features and examples you weren't aware of. What do you think of the list? Anything to add - leave a comment below!
*You may also be aware that 20a was released in March, so I clearly find it challenging to keep up with the latest features! I've finally upgraded, and you should too!
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