Live data from Hacker News

Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

arxiv.org

111–120 of 139 posts

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#111

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.

It does kind of go with "deep" though when Deep Learning is the topic. Delve into the depths.

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#112
Well it's not called Mysterious Learning or Different Learning for a reason.

In fact, with how many misnomers there are in the world, I think Deep Learning is actually a pretty great name, all things considered.

It properly communicates (imo) that the training data and resulting weights are complex enough that just looking at the learning/training process on its own is not sufficient to understand the resulting system (vs other "less deep" machine learning where it mostly is).

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched the 3b1b series on neural nets years ago, and it still accounts for 95% of my understanding of AI in general. I’m not an ML person, but still. That guy has a serious gift for explaining stuff. His video on the uncertainty principle explained stuff to me that my entire undergrad education failed to!

> That guy has a serious gift for explaining stuff I'd like to challenge this idea. I don't believe he's more gifted than other people. I strongly believe that the point is he spent a lot of time and effort to get better at explaining stuff. He contemplated feedback and improved his explanations throughout the years. His videos are excellent because he poured himself into making them excellent, not because he has a g…

To be very good at something it is necessary, but not sufficient, to have a talent for it. The other 85% is hard work. You aren't going to pull just anyone off the street and have the same level of instruction, no matter how motivated they are.

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#114
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first two links don't work

That's because they posted them somewhere else (easy mistake to make.. HN doesn't show you the full link in a comment, so copy/paste just copies the ellipsis) https://chrispiech.github.io/probabilityForComputerScientist... https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Data-Yaser-S-Abu-Mostafa/dp/...

Thanks. Sorry for the oversight.

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#115

Well it's not called Mysterious Learning or Different Learning for a reason. In fact, with how many misnomers there are in the world, I think Deep Learning is actually a pretty great name, all things considered. It properly communicates (imo) that the training data and resulting weights are complex enough that just looking at the learning/training process on its own is not sufficient to understand the resulting syste…

[deleted]

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched the 3b1b series on neural nets years ago, and it still accounts for 95% of my understanding of AI in general. I’m not an ML person, but still. That guy has a serious gift for explaining stuff. His video on the uncertainty principle explained stuff to me that my entire undergrad education failed to!

> That guy has a serious gift for explaining stuff I'd like to challenge this idea. I don't believe he's more gifted than other people. I strongly believe that the point is he spent a lot of time and effort to get better at explaining stuff. He contemplated feedback and improved his explanations throughout the years. His videos are excellent because he poured himself into making them excellent, not because he has a g…

You're probably reading too much into previous poster's choice of the word "gift".

Most likely it is a slightly misused idiom rather than intending to convey that the teaching ability was obtained without effort.

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your claim is that there are instructions, data, or both that are unable to be determined in what, is by definition, a fully deterministic machine?

By an individual person, yes. I claim that there exists no single human capable of fully understanding the totality of the software and hardware down to the individual transistor level.

I agree and never claimed that "a single person" could - but just because something is too complex for a single person to fully understand does not make it "mysterious" or a "black box". So what is the claim you are making? Anything beyond the complexity of a single person to understand = magic?

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched the 3b1b series on neural nets years ago, and it still accounts for 95% of my understanding of AI in general. I’m not an ML person, but still. That guy has a serious gift for explaining stuff. His video on the uncertainty principle explained stuff to me that my entire undergrad education failed to!

> That guy has a serious gift for explaining stuff I'd like to challenge this idea. I don't believe he's more gifted than other people. I strongly believe that the point is he spent a lot of time and effort to get better at explaining stuff. He contemplated feedback and improved his explanations throughout the years. His videos are excellent because he poured himself into making them excellent, not because he has a g…

it could one or the other or be both,

gifted and spending time to get it right are not mutually exclusive

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#119
A decade ago the paper "Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization" [0] was published. The submission is a response to that paper and subsequent literature.

Deep neural nets are notable for their strong generalization performance: despite being highly overparametrized they do not seem to overfit the training data. They still perform well on hold-out data and very often on out of distribution data "in the wild". The paper [0] noted a particularly odd feature of neural net training: one can train neural nets on standard datasets to fit random labels. There does not seem to be an inductive bias strong enough to rule out bad overfitting. It is in principle possible to train a model which performs perfectly on the training data but gives nonsense on the test data. But this doesn't seem to happen in practice.

The submission argues that this is unsurprising, and fits within standard theoretical frameworks for machine learning. In section 4 it is claimed that this kind of thing ("benign overfitting") is common to any learning algorithm with "a flexible hypothesis space, combined with a loss function that demands we fit the data, and a simplicity bias: amongst solutions that are consistent with the data (i.e., fit the data perfectly), the simpler ones are preferred".

The fact that the third of these conditions is satisfied, however, is non-trivial, and in my opinion is still not well understood. The results of [0] are reproducible with a wide variety of architectures, with or without any form of explicit regularization. If there is an inductive bias toward "simpler solutions" in fitting deep neural nets it has to come either from SGD itself or from some bias which is very generic in architecture. It's not something like "CNNs generalize well on image data because of an inductive bias toward translation invariant features." While there is some work on implicit smoothing by SGD, for example, in my opinion this is not sufficient to explain the phenomena observed in [0]. What I would find satisfying is a reproducible ablation study of neural net training that removed benign overfitting (+), so that it was clear what exactly are the necessary and sufficient conditions for this behavior in the context of neural nets. As far as I know this still has never been done, because it is not known what this would even entail.

(+) To be clear, I think this would not look like "the fit model still generalizes, but we can no longer fit random labels" but rather "the fit model now gives nonsense on holdout data".

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.03530

Re: Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By an individual person, yes. I claim that there exists no single human capable of fully understanding the totality of the software and hardware down to the individual transistor level.

I agree and never claimed that "a single person" could - but just because something is too complex for a single person to fully understand does not make it "mysterious" or a "black box". So what is the claim you are making? Anything beyond the complexity of a single person to understand = magic?

We're just using different definitions for "black box".

My definition is that it's something unknown, yours is that it's something unknowable.

Post reply on HN