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Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

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101–110 of 139 posts

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#101

The implication that any software is "mysterious" is problematic - there is no "woo" here - the exact state of the machine running the software may be determined at every cycle. The exact instruction and the data it executed with may be precisely determined, as can the next instruction. The entire mythos of any software being a "black box" is just so much advertising jargon, perpetuated by tech bros who want to belie…

I don't know any serious programmer who thinks that, just because each operation is simple, the operation of the whole thing can't be mysterious.

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#103
post #14

I wish I had the time to try this: 1.) Grab many GBs of text (books, etc). 2.) For each word, for each next $N words, store distance from current word, and increment count for word pair/distance. 3.) For each word, store most frequent word for each $N distance. [a] 4.) Create a prediction algorithm that determines the next word (or set of words) to output from any user input. Basically this would compare word pairs/d…

Claude Shannon was interested in this kind of thing and had a paper on the entropy per letter or word of English. He also has a section in his famous "A Mathematical Theory of Communication that has experiments using the conditional probability of the next word based on the previous n=1,2 words from a few books. I wonder if the conditional entropy approaches zero as n increases assuming ergodicity. But the number of entries in the conditional probability table blows up exponentially. The trick of combining multiple n=1 of different distances sounds interesting, and reminds me a bit of contrastive prediction ml methods.

Anyway the experiments in Shannon's paper sound similar to what you describe but with less data and distance, so it should give some idea of how it would look: From the text:

* 5. First-order word approximation. Rather than continue with tetragram, : : : , n-gram structure it is easier and better to jump at this point to word units. Here words are chosen independently but with their appropriate frequencies.

REPRESENTING AND SPEEDILY IS AN GOOD APT OR COME CAN DIFFERENT NAT- URAL HERE HE THE A IN CAME THE TO OF TO EXPERT GRAY COME TO FURNISHES THE LINE MESSAGE HAD BE THESE.

6. Second-order word approximation. The word transition probabilities are correct but no further structure is included.

THE HEAD AND IN FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH WRITER THAT THE CHAR- ACTER OF THIS POINT IS THEREFORE ANOTHER METHOD FOR THE LETTERS THAT THE TIME OF WHO EVER TOLD THE PROBLEM FOR AN UNEXPECTED *

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#104

If anyone wants to delve into machine learning, one of the superb resources I have found is, Stanfords "Probability for computer scientists"( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MuDZIAzBMY&list=PLoROMvodv4... ). It delves into theoretical underpinnings of probability theory and ML, IMO better than any other course I have seen. (Yeah, Andrew Ng is legendary, but his course demands some mathematical familarity with linear…

Apparently the word “delve” is the biggest indicator of the use of ChatGPT according to Paul Graham.

Absolutely, here’s why.

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#105
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please formulate your critique instead of simply labeling it with negative words.

Sure. "Preprint" implies prior to printing, which means that there's a reasonable expectation for this paper to be submitted, accepted, and printed in a scholarly journal. What we have here is little more than a tongue-in-cheek submission which carries an aesthetic of "hot-take" throughout the paper. This is unbecoming of one committed to scholarly pursuits and all but guarantees rejection from journals committed to…

This is still just name calling. You are just using negatively charged adjectives without quoting or arguing the substance or even the style. Is your crique only about the presentation or the substance of the ideas too?

What makes it unprofessional? To me it looks much better than a substantial chunk of my review stacks at ML conferences and journals. Are you an ML researcher? Maybe you're used to a different research community that's more "uptight"?

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#106

If anyone wants to delve into machine learning, one of the superb resources I have found is, Stanfords "Probability for computer scientists"( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MuDZIAzBMY&list=PLoROMvodv4... ). It delves into theoretical underpinnings of probability theory and ML, IMO better than any other course I have seen. (Yeah, Andrew Ng is legendary, but his course demands some mathematical familarity with linear…

Caltech's learning from data was really good too, if someone is looking for theoretical understanding of ML topics. https://work.caltech.edu/telecourse

I highly recommend the course you've mentioned (by Yaser Abu-Mostafa). In fact I still recommend it for picking up the basics; very good mix of math and intuition, Abu-Mostafa himself is a terrific teacher, and he is considerate and thoughtful in responding to questions at the end of his presentations. The last part is important if you're a beginner: it builds confidence in you that its probably ok to ask what you might consider a simple question - it still deserves a good answer. The series is a bit dated now in terms of what it covers, but still solid as a foundational course.

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#107
post #14

I wish I had the time to try this: 1.) Grab many GBs of text (books, etc). 2.) For each word, for each next $N words, store distance from current word, and increment count for word pair/distance. 3.) For each word, store most frequent word for each $N distance. [a] 4.) Create a prediction algorithm that determines the next word (or set of words) to output from any user input. Basically this would compare word pairs/d…

Every thing has meaning in precise relation to the frequency of cooccurrence to every other thing.

I, too, have been mulling this. Word to word, paragraph to paragraph. Even letter to letter.

Also what if you processed text in signal space? I keep wondering if that’s possible. Then you get it all at once rather than windows. Use a derivative of change for every page, so the phase space is the signal end to end.

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#108

If anyone wants to delve into machine learning, one of the superb resources I have found is, Stanfords "Probability for computer scientists"( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MuDZIAzBMY&list=PLoROMvodv4... ). It delves into theoretical underpinnings of probability theory and ML, IMO better than any other course I have seen. (Yeah, Andrew Ng is legendary, but his course demands some mathematical familarity with linear…

Apparently the word “delve” is the biggest indicator of the use of ChatGPT according to Paul Graham.

Nonsense. Chatgpt uses the word a lot precisely because people used it a lot.

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#109
post #14

I wish I had the time to try this: 1.) Grab many GBs of text (books, etc). 2.) For each word, for each next $N words, store distance from current word, and increment count for word pair/distance. 3.) For each word, store most frequent word for each $N distance. [a] 4.) Create a prediction algorithm that determines the next word (or set of words) to output from any user input. Basically this would compare word pairs/d…

Pretty sure this wouldn't produce anything useful. Pretty sure this would generate incoherent gibberish that looks and sounds like English but makes no sense. This ignores perhaps the most important element of LLM's, the attention mechanism.

And, the attention mechanism scales quadratically with context length. This is where all of the insane memory bandwidth requirements come from.

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct, and the term you're looking for is "regularisation". There are two common ways of doing this: * L1 or L2 regularisation: penalises models whose weight matrices are complex (in the sense of having lots of large elements) * Dropout: train on random subsets of the neurons to force the model to rely on simple representations that are distributed robustly across its weights

Dropout is roughly equivalent to layer-specific L2 regularization, and it's easy to see why: asymptotically, dropping out random neurons will achieve something similar to shrinking weights towards zero proportional to their (squared) magnitude. Trevor Hastie's Elements of Statistical Learning has a nice proof that (for linear models) L2 regularization is also semi-equivalent to dimensionality reduction, which you cou…

Wow! I think I dimly intuited your first paragraph already; I directionally get why your second might be true (although I'd have thought L1 was even more so, since it encourages zeros which is kind of like choosing a subspace).

Your third paragraph took me ages to get an intuition for - is the idea that regularisation penalises having "sharp elbows" at the join points of your hyper-spline thing? That's mind blowing and such an interesting way to think about what a ReLU layer is doing.

Thanks so much for a thought provoking comment, that's incredibly cool.

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