SOTA in Artificial Intelligence
What is SOTA in Artificial Intelligence?
Nakul Singh
What is SOTA?
SOTA is an acronym for State-Of-The-Art. In the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it refers to "The best models that can be used for achieving the results in a AI-specific task". SOTA models can be applied in many ways in AI. It could either be applied to –
(a) Machine Learning (ML) tasks
(b) Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) tasks
(c) Natural Language Processing (NLPs) [this is a subset of deep neural networks]
(d) Generic tasks
How does SOTA help in AI?
Using SOTA models in AI has many benefits of its own. The primary benefits are;
Increases Task Precision
First of all, you should check which parameters define your SOTA Model. These parameters could be the recall or the precision, or the area under the curve (AUC). It could be any metric you choose. After that, you could determine the value of the SOTA for each of the chosen metrics. If these metrics get a high score (about 90%-95%) in performance accuracy, then it is labelled as a SOTA. Now it is pretty obvious that these models score high on accuracy, so the AI task will be as close to what the users need to do.
Increases Reliability
Since the precision of the SOTA models is high, as mentioned above, the reliability of the AI task also increases. If it is a machine learning task or deep neural network task, then be assured that the results are pretty much what they are supposed to be. They can be trusted and not be considered a random test of sorts. But how do you know that the SOTA is trustworthy?
So, here’s a suggestion. While you are building the SOTA test, it would be better if you ran noise experiments on the SOTA model. It will help you in measuring the standard deviation in the many identical tests runs that you are subjecting the model to. You can use this measurable deviation as a sort of shift or tolerance, and then you can compare the original SOTA result and the reproduced result. Testing the results will help you in verifying the features that are required in the algorithm in the future.
Ensures Reproducibility
If you want your AI product to be agile and lean, then you will be able to ship the minimal viable product (MVP or a minimal version of your envisioned product) quickly to all your customers. You can then proceed to get user feedback and improve iteratively. Therefore, reproducibility in your SOTA model can be considered to be a good practice. This will help you in making compromises in your algorithm. You can also ship your algorithm quickly. And yes, about the customer feedback you have collected, you can use it as a guide for all your efforts in future product improvements.
Reduces Generation Time
Since the SOTA model helps you in reproducibility of the algorithm or the product, it also helps you in saving time when you put the entire process on the conveyor belt. That means you can make a saleable product from a prototype in less time than when you made the same product from scratch. All you need is to reproduce the algorithm on the parameters on which it needs to be tested are already in possession, so yes, you save a lot of time in the generation of the product.
When should you run a SOTA test?
You should run SOTA tests as frequently as possible. Frequent SOTA tests are a rule of thumb in AI. But it is advisable to run them once a week. You should also run the SOTA tests when you are incorporating important changes. It is advisable to run the SOTA tests should be run on a cloud virtual machine using a good pipeline like Jenkins.
Where can the SOTA models be used?
SOTA models are used in various artificial intelligence activities –
(a) Object detection by deep neural networks
(b) Single shot multi box detectors
(c) Self-adaptive tasks like choosing variable patterns
This list is not exhaustive as the possibility of using SOTA encompasses many branches of AI. Be on the lookout for future blogs to know more about SOTA and its applications in every subset of AI.
To sum up, SOTA models have played a crucial role in advancing AI and ML technologies. It has introduced structural efficiency that has boosted performance. Now, developers run various SOTA tests using the virtual GPUs, which further streamlines the process and reduce the upfront infrastructure costs, and E2E Networks is making it possible with cloud GPUs.
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