Google Updated Professional-Machine-Learning-Engineer Exam Questions and Answers by prince

• Option A is incorrect because distributing the dataset with tf.distribute.Strategy.experimental_distribute_dataset is not the most effective way to decrease the training time. This method allows you to distribute your dataset across multiple devices or machines, by creating a tf.data.Dataset instance that can be iterated over in parallel1. However, this option may not improve the training time significantly, as it does not change the amount of data or computation that each device or machine has to process. Moreover, this option may introduce additional overhead or complexity, as it requires you to handle the data sharding, replication, and synchronization across the devices or machines1.
• Option B is incorrect because creating a custom training loop is not the easiest way to decrease the training time. A custom training loop is a way to implement your own logic for training your model, by using low-level TensorFlow APIs, such as tf.GradientTape, tf.Variable, or tf.function2. A custom training loop may give you more flexibility and control over the training process, but it also requires more effort and expertise, as you have to write and debug the code for each step of the training loop, such as computing the gradients, applying the optimizer, or updating the metrics2. Moreover, a custom training loop may not improve the training time significantly, as it does not change the amount of data or computation that each device or machine has to process.
• Option C is incorrect because using a TPU with tf.distribute.TPUStrategy is not a valid way to decrease the training time. A TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) is a custom hardware accelerator designed for high-performance ML workloads3. A tf.distribute.TPUStrategy is a distribution strategy that allows you to distribute your training across multiple TPUs, by creating a tf.distribute.TPUStrategy instance that can be used with high-level TensorFlow APIs, such as Keras4. However, this option is not feasible, as Vertex AI Training does not support TPUs as accelerators for custom training jobs5. Moreover, this option may require significant code changes, as TPUs have different requirements and limitations than GPUs.
• Option D is correct because increasing the batch size is the best way to decrease the training time. The batch size is a hyperparameter that determines how many samples of data are processed in each iteration of the training loop. Increasing the batch size may reduce the training time, as it reduces the number of iterations needed to train the model, and it allows each device or machine to process more data in parallel. Increasing the batch size is also easy to implement, as it only requires changing a single hyperparameter. However, increasing the batch size may also affect the convergence and the accuracy of the model, so it is important to find the optimal batch size that balances the trade-off between the training time and the model performance.

References:

• tf.distribute.Strategy.experimental_distribute_dataset
• Custom training loop
• TPU overview
• tf.distribute.TPUStrategy
• Vertex AI Training accelerators
• [TPU programming model]
• [Batch size and learning rate]
• [Keras overview]
• [tf.distribute.MirroredStrategy]
• [Vertex AI Training overview]
• [TensorFlow overview]

Vertex AI Pipelines is a service that allows you to orchestrate and automate your machine learning (ML) workflows using pipelines1. A pipeline is a description of an ML workflow, including all of the components in the workflow, how the components are connected as a graph, and the runtime parameters that the pipeline accepts1. Vertex AI Pipelines helps you manage the end-to-end lifecycle of your ML projects, from data preprocessing to model deployment1.

Vertex AI Feature Store is a service that enables you to serve, share, and reuse ML features across different models and projects2. A feature is a measurable property or characteristic of an entity, such as the age of a person or the price of a product2. Vertex AI Feature Store helps you reduce data duplication, ensure data consistency, and improve model performance2.

Vertex AI Experiments is a service that helps you track and compare the performance of different versions of your models3. You can use Vertex AI Experiments to run multiple training jobs with different hyperparameters, architectures, or data sources, and then compare the results using metrics, visualizations, and reports3. Vertex AI Experiments helps you identify the best model for your use case and optimize your model performance3. References:

• Vertex AI Pipelines | Google Cloud
• Vertex AI Feature Store | Google Cloud
• Vertex AI Experiments | Google Cloud

The best option to ensure real-time ingestion of the user activity data into BigQuery is to run a Dataflow streaming job to ingest the data into BigQuery. Dataflow is a fully managed service that can handle both batch and stream processing of data, and can integrate seamlessly with BigQuery and other Google Cloud services. Dataflow can also use Apache Beam as the programming model, which provides a unified and portable API for developing data pipelines. By using Dataflow, you can avoid the complexity and overhead of managing your own infrastructure, and focus on the logic and transformation of your data. Dataflow can also handle various types of data, such as structured, unstructured, or binary data, and can apply windowing, aggregation, and other operations on the data streams.

The other options are not optimal for the following reasons:

• A. Configuring Pub/Sub to stream the data into BigQuery is not a good option, as Pub/Sub is a messaging service that can publish and subscribe to data streams, but cannot perform any transformation or processing on the data. Pub/Sub can be used as a source or a sink for Dataflow, but not as a standalone solution for ingesting data into BigQuery.
• B. Running an Apache Spark streaming job on Dataproc to ingest the data into BigQuery is not a good option, as it requires setting up and managing your own cluster of virtual machines, which can increase the cost and complexity of your solution. Moreover, Apache Spark is not natively integrated with BigQuery, and requires using connectors or intermediate storage to write data to BigQuery, which can introduce latency and inefficiency.
• D. Configuring Pub/Sub and a Dataflow streaming job to ingest the data into BigQuery is not a bad option, but it is not necessary, as Dataflow can directly read data from the mobile applications without using Pub/Sub as an intermediary. Using Pub/Sub can add an extra layer of abstraction and reliability, but it can also increase the cost and complexity of your solution, and introduce some delay in the data ingestion.

References:

• Professional ML Engineer Exam Guide
• Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Machine Learning Engineer Professional Certificate
• Google Cloud launches machine learning engineer certification
• Dataflow documentation
• BigQuery documentation

The best option to build a comprehensive system that recommends images to users that are similar in appearance to their own uploaded images is to download a pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN), and use the model to generate embeddings of the input images. Embeddings are low-dimensional representations of high-dimensional data that capture the essential features and semantics of the data. By using a pretrained CNN, you can leverage the knowledge learned from large-scale image datasets, such as ImageNet, and apply it to your own domain. A pretrained CNN can be used as a feature extractor, where the output of the last hidden layer (or any intermediate layer) is taken as the embedding vector for the input image. You can then measure the similarity between embeddings using a distance metric, such as cosine similarity or Euclidean distance, and recommend images that have the highest similarity scores to the user’s uploaded image. Option A is incorrect because downloading a pretrained CNN and fine-tuning the model to predict hashtags based on the input images may not capture the visual similarity of the images, as hashtags may not reflect the appearance of the images accurately. For example, two images of different breeds of dogs may have the same hashtag #dog, but they may not look similar to each other. Moreover, fine-tuning the model may require additional data and computational resources, and it may not generalize well to new images that have different or missing hashtags. Option B is incorrect because retrieving image labels and dominant colors from the input images using the Vision API may not capture the visual similarity of the images, as labels and colors may not reflect the fine-grained details of the images. For example, two images of the same breed of dog may have different labels and colors depending on the background, lighting, and angle of the image. Moreover, using the Vision API may incur additional costs and latency, and it may not be able to handle custom or domain-specific labels. Option C is incorrect because using the provided hashtags to create a collaborative filtering algorithm may not capture the visual similarity of the images, as collaborative filtering relies on the ratings or preferences of users, not the features of the images. For example, two images of different animals may have similar ratings or preferences from users, but they may not look similar to each other. Moreover, collaborative filtering may suffer from the cold start problem, where new images or users that have no ratings or preferences cannot be recommended. References:

• Image similarity search with TensorFlow
• Image embeddings documentation
• Pretrained models documentation
• Similarity metrics documentation