21 Most Cited Machine Learning Papers

To come up with this list, we have used Google Scholar. In there we have done some extensive search and found the machine learning most cited papers. Usually the more a paper is cited the more impact and importance it has. What we see in this blog post is a list of the 21 most cited papers in machine learning. For each paper, we include its authors, number of citations, publication year and location, as well as a summary. We have also ploted the citation trend for each paper that shows if the paper popularity has grown or declined over time.

1. DEEP RESIDUAL LEARNING FOR IMAGE RECOGNITION

Authors: Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, Jian Sun
Published in: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016
Number of citations: 151,914
Summary: Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset, we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers—8x deeper than VGG nets but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves a 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present an analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are the foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions, where we also won 1st place on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

2. ADAM: A METHOD FOR STOCHASTIC OPTIMIZATION

Authors: Diederik P. Kingma, Jimmy Lei Ba
Published in: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2014
Number of citations: 135,894
Summary: We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has little memory requirements, is invariant to diagonal rescaling of the gradients, and is well suited for problems that are large in terms of data and/or parameters. The method is also appropriate for non-stationary objectives and problems with very noisy and/or sparse gradients. The hyper-parameters have intuitive interpretations and typically require little tuning. Some connections to related algorithms, on which Adam was inspired, are discussed. We also analyze the theoretical convergence properties of the algorithm and provide a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework. Empirical results demonstrate that Adam works well in practice and compares favorably to other stochastic optimization methods. Finally, we discuss AdaMax, a variant of Adam based on the infinity norm.

3. IMAGENET CLASSIFICATION WITH DEEP CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Authors: Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey E Hinton
Published in: Advances in neural information processing systems, 2012
Number of citations: 126,795
Summary: We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5% and 17.0% which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully-connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overfitting in the fully-connected layers we employed a recently-developed regularization method called “dropout” that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% achieved by the second-best entry.

4. RANDOM FORESTS

Author: Leo Breiman
Published in: Machine learning 45, 2001
Number of citations: 103,134
Summary: Random forests are a combination of tree predictors such that each tree depends on the values of a random vector sampled independently and with the same distribution for all trees in the forest. The generalization error for forests converges a.s. to a limit as the number of trees in the forest becomes large. The generalization error of a forest of tree classifiers depends on the strength of the individual trees in the forest and the correlation between them. Using a random selection of features to split each node yields error rates that compare favorably to Adaboost (Y. Freund & R. Schapire, Machine Learning: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International conference, ***, 148–156), but are more robust with respect to noise. Internal estimates monitor error, strength, and correlation and these are used to show the response to increasing the number of features used in the splitting. Internal estimates are also used to …

5. VERY DEEP CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORKS FOR LARGE-SCALE IMAGE RECOGNITION

Authors: Karen Simonyan, Andrew Zisserman
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2015
Number of citations: 95,218
Summary: In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

6. SCIKIT-LEARN: MACHINE LEARNING IN PYTHON

Authors: Fabian Pedregosa, Gaël Varoquaux, Alexandre Gramfort, Vincent Michel, Bertrand Thirion, Olivier Grisel, Mathieu Blondel, Peter Prettenhofer, Ron Weiss, Vincent Dubourg, Jake Vanderplas, Alexandre Passos, David Cournapeau, Matthieu Brucher, Matthieu Perrot, Edouard Duchesnay
Published in: The Journal of machine Learning research, 2011
Number of citations: 68,584
Summary: Scikit-learn is a Python module integrating a wide range of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms for medium-scale supervised and unsupervised problems. This package focuses on bringing machine learning to non-specialists using a general-purpose high-level language. Emphasis is put on ease of use, performance, documentation, and API consistency. It has minimal dependencies and is distributed under the simplified BSD license, encouraging its use in both academic and commercial settings. Source code, binaries, and documentation can be downloaded from http://scikit-learn.sourceforge.net.

7. DEEP LEARNING

Authors: Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton
Published in: Nature, 2015
Number of citations: 60,460
Summary: Deep learning allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction. These methods have dramatically improved the state-of-the-art in speech recognition, visual object recognition, object detection and many other domains such as drug discovery and genomics. Deep learning discovers intricate structure in large data sets by using the backpropagation algorithm to indicate how a machine should change its internal parameters that are used to compute the representation in each layer from the representation in the previous layer. Deep convolutional nets have brought about breakthroughs in processing images, video, speech and audio, whereas recurrent nets have shone light on sequential data such as text and speech.

8. SUPPORT-VECTOR NETWORKS

Authors: Corinna Cortes, Vladimir Vapnik
Published in: Machine learning 20, 1995
Number of citations: 58,015
Summary: The support-vector network is a new learning machine for two-group classification problems. The machine conceptually implements the following idea: input vectors are non-linearly mapped to a very high-dimension feature space. In this feature space a linear decision surface is constructed. Special properties of the decision surface ensures high generalization ability of the learning machine. The idea behind the support-vector network was previously implemented for the restricted case where the training data can be separated without errors. We here extend this result to non-separable training data. High generalization ability of support-vector networks utilizing polynomial input transformations is demonstrated. We also compare the performance of the support-vector network to various classical learning algorithms that all took part in a benchmark study of Optical Character Recognition.

9. GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETS

Authors: Ian Goodfellow, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio
Published in: Advances in neural information processing systems 27, 2014
Number of citations: 55,028
Summary: We propose a new framework for estimating generative models via an adversarial process, in which we simultaneously train two models: a generative model G that captures the data distribution, and a discriminative model D that estimates the probability that a sample came from the training data rather than G. The training procedure for G is to maximize the probability of D making a mistake. This framework corresponds to a minimax two-player game. In the space of arbitrary functions G and D, a unique solution exists, with G recovering the training data distribution and D equal to 1/2 everywhere. In the case where G and D are defined by multilayer perceptrons, the entire system can be trained with backpropagation. There is no need for any Markov chains or unrolled approximate inference networks during either training or generation of samples. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework through qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the generated samples.

10. FASTER R-CNN: TOWARDS REAL-TIME OBJECT DETECTION WITH REGION PROPOSAL NETWORKS

Authors: Shaoqing Ren, Kaiming He, Ross Girshick, Jian Sun
Published in: Advances in neural information processing systems, 2015
Number of citations: 54,317
Summary: State-of-the-art object detection networks depend on region proposal algorithms to hypothesize object locations. Advances like SPPnet and Fast R-CNN have reduced the running time of these detection networks, exposing region proposal computation as a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce a Region Proposal Network (RPN) that shares full-image convolutional features with the detection network, thus enabling nearly cost-free region proposals. An RPN is a fully-convolutional network that simultaneously predicts object bounds and objectness scores at each position. RPNs are trained end-to-end to generate highquality region proposals, which are used by Fast R-CNN for detection. With a simple alternating optimization, RPN and Fast R-CNN can be trained to share convolutional features. For the very deep VGG-16 model, our detection system has a frame rate of 5fps (including all steps) on a GPU, while achieving state-of-the-art object detection accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007 (73.2% mAP) and 2012 (70.4% mAP) using 300 proposals per image. Code is available at https://github. com/ShaoqingRen/faster_rcnn.

11. LIBSVM: A LIBRARY FOR SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINES

Authors: Chih-Chung Chang, Chih-Jen Lin
Published in: ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 2011
Number of citations: 53,118
Summary: LIBSVM is a library for Support Vector Machines (SVMs). We have been actively developing this package since the year 2000. The goal is to help users to easily apply SVM to their applications. LIBSVM has gained wide popularity in machine learning and many other areas. In this article, we present all implementation details of LIBSVM. Issues such as solving SVM optimization problems theoretical convergence multiclass classification probability estimates and parameter selection are discussed in detail.

12. GRADIENT-BASED LEARNING APPLIED TO DOCUMENT RECOGNITION

Authors: Yann LeCun, Léon Bottou, Yoshua Bengio, Patrick Haffner
Published in: Proceedings of the IEEE, 1998
Number of citations: 52,044
Summary: Multilayer neural networks trained with the back-propagation algorithm constitute the best example of a successful gradient based learning technique. Given an appropriate network architecture, gradient-based learning algorithms can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns, such as handwritten characters, with minimal preprocessing. This paper reviews various methods applied to handwritten character recognition and compares them on a standard handwritten digit recognition task. Convolutional neural networks, which are specifically designed to deal with the variability of 2D shapes, are shown to outperform all other techniques. Real-life document recognition systems are composed of multiple modules including field extraction, segmentation recognition, and language modeling. A new learning paradigm, called graph transformer networks (GTN), allows …

13. IMAGENET: A LARGE-SCALE HIERARCHICAL IMAGE DATABASE

Authors: Jia Deng, Wei Dong, Richard Socher, Li-Jia Li, Kai Li, Li Fei-Fei
Published in: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, 2009
Number of citations: 49,614
Summary: The explosion of image data on the Internet has the potential to foster more sophisticated and robust models and algorithms to index, retrieve, organize and interact with images and multimedia data. But exactly how such data can be harnessed and organized remains a critical problem. We introduce here a new database called “ImageNet”, a large-scale ontology of images built upon the backbone of the WordNet structure. ImageNet aims to populate the majority of the 80,000 synsets of WordNet with an average of 500-1000 clean and full resolution images. This will result in tens of millions of annotated images organized by the semantic hierarchy of WordNet. This paper offers a detailed analysis of ImageNet in its current state: 12 subtrees with 5247 synsets and 3.2 million images in total. We show that ImageNet is much larger in scale and diversity and much more accurate than the current image datasets …

14. GOING DEEPER WITH CONVOLUTIONS

Authors: Christian Szegedy, Wei Liu, Yangqing Jia, Pierre Sermanet, Scott Reed, Dragomir Anguelov, Dumitru Erhan, Vincent Vanhoucke, Andrew Rabinovich
Published in: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, 2015
Number of citations: 47,812
Summary: We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed Inception that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC2014). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. By a carefully crafted design, we increased the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation of this architecture, GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, was used to assess its quality in the context of object detection and classification.

15. LATENT DIRICHLET ALLOCATION

Authors: David M. Blei, Andrew Y. Ng, Michael I. Jordan
Published in: Journal of Machine Learning Research 3, 2003
Number of citations: 45,728
Summary: We describe latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a generative probabilistic model for collections of discrete data such as text corpora. LDA is a three-level hierarchical Bayesian model, in which each item of a collection is modeled as a finite mixture over an underlying set of topics. Each topic is, in turn, modeled as an infinite mixture over an underlying set of topic probabilities. In the context of text modeling, the topic probabilities provide an explicit representation of a document. We present efficient approximate inference techniques based on variational methods and an EM algorithm for empirical Bayes parameter estimation. We report results in document modeling, text classification, and collaborative filtering, comparing to a mixture of unigrams model and the probabilistic LSI model.

16. BATCH NORMALIZATION: ACCELERATING DEEP NETWORK TRAINING BY REDUCING INTERNAL COVARIATE SHIFT

Authors: Sergey Ioffe, Christian Szegedy
Published in: International conference on machine learning, 2015
Number of citations: 44,295
Summary: Training Deep Neural Networks is complicated by the fact that the distribution of each layer’s inputs changes during training, as the parameters of the previous layers change. This slows down the training by requiring lower learning rates and careful parameter initialization, and makes it notoriously hard to train models with saturating nonlinearities. We refer to this phenomenon as internal covariate shift, and address the problem by normalizing layer inputs. Our method draws its strength from making normalization a part of the model architecture and performing the normalization for each training mini-batch. Batch Normalization allows us to use much higher learning rates and be less careful about initialization, and in some cases eliminates the need for Dropout. Applied to a stateof-the-art image classification model, Batch Normalization achieves the same accuracy with 14 times fewer training steps, and beats the original model by a significant margin. Using an ensemble of batch-normalized networks, we improve upon the best published result on ImageNet classification: reaching 4.82% top-5 test error, exceeding the accuracy of human raters.

17. TENSORFLOW: A SYSTEM FOR LARGE-SCALE MACHINE LEARNING

Authors: Martín Abadi, Paul Barham, Jianmin Chen, Zhifeng Chen, Andy Davis, Jeffrey Dean, Matthieu Devin, Sanjay Ghemawat, Geoffrey Irving, Michael Isard, Manjunath Kudlur, Josh Levenberg, Rajat Monga, Sherry Moore, Derek G Murray, Benoit Steiner, Paul Tucker, Vijay Vasudevan, Pete Warden, Martin Wicke, Yuan Yu,Xiaoqiang Zheng
Published in: 12th {USENIX} symposium on operating systems design and implementation ({OSDI}, 2016
Number of citations: 43,523
Summary: TensorFlow is a machine learning system that operates at large scale and in heterogeneous environments. Tensor-Flow uses dataflow graphs to represent computation, shared state, and the operations that mutate that state. It maps the nodes of a dataflow graph across many machines in a cluster, and within a machine across multiple computational devices, including multicore CPUs, general-purpose GPUs, and custom-designed ASICs known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). This architecture gives flexibility to the application developer: whereas in previous “parameter server” designs the management of shared state is built into the system, TensorFlow enables developers to experiment with novel optimizations and training algorithms. TensorFlow supports a variety of applications, with a focus on training and inference on deep neural networks. Several Google services use TensorFlow in production, we have released it as an open-source project, and it has become widely used for machine learning research. In this paper, we describe the TensorFlow dataflow model and demonstrate the compelling performance that Tensor-Flow achieves for several real-world applications.

18. DROPOUT: A SIMPLE WAY TO PREVENT NEURAL NETWORKS FROM OVERFITTING

Authors: Nitish Srivastava, Geoffrey Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Published in: The journal of machine learning research, 2014
Number of citations: 40,815
Summary: Deep neural nets with a large number of parameters are very powerful machine learning systems. However, overfitting is a serious problem in such networks. Large networks are also slow to use, making it difficult to deal with overfitting by combining the predictions of many different large neural nets at test time. Dropout is a technique for addressing this problem. The key idea is to randomly drop units (along with their connections) from the neural network during training. This prevents units from co-adapting too much. During training, dropout samples from an exponential number of different “thinned” networks. At test time, it is easy to approximate the effect of averaging the predictions of all these thinned networks by simply using a single unthinned network that has smaller weights. This significantly reduces overfitting and gives major improvements over other regularization methods. We show that dropout improves the performance of neural networks on supervised learning tasks in vision, speech recognition, document classification and computational biology, obtaining state-of-the-art results on many benchmark data sets.

19. IMAGENET LARGE SCALE VISUAL RECOGNITION CHALLENGE

Authors: Olga Russakovsky, Jia Deng, Hao Su, Jonathan Krause, Sanjeev Satheesh, Sean Ma, Zhiheng Huang, Andrej Karpathy, Aditya Khosla, Michael Bernstein, Alexander C Berg, Li Fei-Fei
Published in: International journal of computer vision, 2015
Number of citations: 35,8216br>
Summary: The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge is a benchmark in object category classification and detection on hundreds of object categories and millions of images. The challenge has been run annually from 2010 to present, attracting participation from more than fifty institutions. This paper describes the creation of this benchmark dataset and the advances in object recognition that have been possible as a result. We discuss the challenges of collecting large-scale ground truth annotation, highlight key breakthroughs in categorical object recognition, provide a detailed analysis of the current state of the field of large-scale image classification and object detection, and compare the state-of-the-art computer vision accuracy with human accuracy. We conclude with lessons learned in the 5 years of the challenge, and propose future directions and improvements.

20. MAPREDUCE: SIMPLIFIED DATA PROCESSING ON LARGE CLUSTERS

Authors: Jeffrey Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat
Published in: Communications of the ACM 51, 2008
Number of citations: 34,813
Summary: MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large datasets that is amenable to a broad variety of real-world tasks. Users specify the computation in terms of a map and a reduce function, and the underlying runtime system automatically parallelizes the computation across large-scale clusters of machines, handles machine failures, and schedules inter-machine communication to make efficient use of the network and disks. Programmers find the system easy to use: more than ten thousand distinct MapReduce programs have been implemented internally at Google over the past four years, and an average of one hundred thousand MapReduce jobs are executed on Google’s clusters every day, processing a total of more than twenty petabytes of data per day.

21. BAGGING PREDICTORS

Author: Leo Breiman
Published in Machine learning Journal, 1996
Number of citations: 32,179
Summary: Bagging predictors is a method for generating multiple versions of a predictor and using these to get an aggregated predictor. The aggregation averages over the versions when predicting a numerical outcome and does a plurality vote when predicting a class. The multiple versions are formed by making bootstrap replicates of the learning set and using these as new learning sets. Tests on real and simulated data sets using classification and regression trees and subset selection in linear regression show that bagging can give substantial gains in accuracy. The vital element is the instability of the prediction method. If perturbing the learning set can cause significant changes in the predictor constructed, then bagging can improve accuracy.