Live data from Hacker News

Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

googleresearch.blogspot.com

71–80 of 166 posts

Re: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

#71
Some comments seem to be appreciating (or getting disgusted by) the aesthetics but I think the "inceptionism" part should not be ignored:

We're essentially peeking inside a very rudimentary form of consciousness: a consciousness that is very fragile, very dependent, very underdeveloped, and full of "genetic errors". Once you have a functioning deep learning neural network, you have the assembly language of consciousness. Then you start playing with it (as this paper did), you create a hello world program, you solve the factorial function recursively, and so on. Somewhere in that universe of possible programs, is hidden a program (or a set of programs) that will be able to perform the thinking process a lot more accurately.

Re: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

#72
post #2

This appears to be the source of the mysterious image that showed up on Reddit's /r/machinelearning the other day too: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/3a1ebc/ima...

That image is very unpleasant.

I get creeps from fractals, but now my whole body is itching. Humans are weird.

Re: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

#73

This is one of the most astounding things I've ever seen. Some of these images look positively like art. And not just art, but good art.

I'm blown away by this "guided hallucination" technique. It's not a big oversimplification to describe to the layperson as: enter images into neural network; receive as output artwork representing the essence of the images.

Re: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

#74
post #41

Am I the only one who found those images somewhat disturbing? I wonder if they're triggering something similar to http://www.reddit.com/r/trypophobia

I'm only mildly trypophobic but those images did have a minor effect - and I have a possible hypothesis for why it happens: what these images and trypophobia-triggering ones all have in common is a huge number of edges of various shapes and sizes, and it's this "edge overload" stimulating many more neurons than usual that's causing the disturbance. I find that the repetitive, but not-quite-the-same patterns like (organic) holes or other curvy shapes have the greatest effect; in contrast, straight lines don't do much. This makes sense since straight lines probably only trigger neurons that detect one direction, but curves have many "directions" to them.

Re: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

#75
post #51

While I think this is beautiful, conceptually, I really am a bit terrified of the potential of this in reverse (the neural network for processing/understanding an image). With Google releasing their 'Photos' app, this network is about to get a direct pipeline for machine learning imagery to accelerate everything – my main fear would be the potential for this technology to be employed by weaponized drones able to scan…

This will happen for sure. Such super-perceptive computers will oversee our every movement.

Computers can already understand our emotions in writing, voice and from the expression on our faces, they can also estimate pose and understand your movements. They can label thousands of kinds of objects. And they're just starting.

They can also build neural nets 10x smaller by compressing a larger neural net while maintaining most of accuracy. That means once a problem such as vision or speech has been solved with a huge net, it can be transferred in a smaller, more efficient net.

Re: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

#76
post #29

The reason they look so 'fractal-like' (e.g. trippy!) is because they actually are fractals! In the same way a normal fractal is a recursive application of some drawing function, this is a recursive application of different generation or "recognition -> generation" drawing functions built on top of the CNN. So I believe that, given a random noise image, these networks don't generate the crazy trippy fractal patterns…

These hair features that get re-interpreted as legs are particularly uncanny.

Re: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

#77
post #38

Worth reading the comments too. One from Vincent Vanhoucke: "This is the most fun we've had in the office in a while. We've even made some of those 'Inceptionistic' art pieces into giant posters. Beyond the eye candy, there is actually something deeply interesting in this line of work: neural networks have a bad reputation for being strange black boxes that that are opaque to inspection. I have never understood those…

Perhaps the argument should be steelmanned in that we should generally avoid using algorithms which are so complex that they aren't glass boxes. I doubt the idea to "simply follow gradients" can prove neural networks to be glass boxes because the output of that is still too complex. And we are clearly onto something here. If we can generate artificially hallucinated pictures today, it is not unreasonable to assume that computers will be able to hallucinate entire action sequences (including motor programs and all kinds of modalities) in a decade or two. Combining such a hallucination technique with reinforcement learning might be a key to general intelligence. I think it is highly unethical that there is almost no democratic control over what is being developed at Google, Facebook et al. in secrecy. The most recent XKCD comic is quite relevant: http://xkcd.com/1539/

Re: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

#78
post #5

Tweak image urls for bigger images: Ibis: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4Uj3hPFupok/VYIT6s_c9OI/AAAAAAAAAl... Seurat: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PK_bEYY91cw/VYIVBYw63uI/AAAAAAAAAl... Clouds: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FPDgxlc-WPU/VYIV1bK50HI/AAAAAAAAAl... Buildings: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XZ0i0zXOhQk/VYIXdyIL9kI/AAAAAAAAAm... I'd love to experiment with this and video. I predict a nerdy music video soon, and a pop video…

Had me sitting down. Felt mesmerizing, like a weird resonnance with my mind. This is how I imagined my brain working, patching bits of stimulus to recreate complex shapes fractally... Seeing it in pictures is ... just amazing.

Re: Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

#80
I don't understand what kind of NN they used on the painting and the photo of the antelopes(?). What was it pre-trained to recognise?

EDIT: in clarification, to pick out abstract features of an image, it must obviously be trained on many images. I'm curious about how it picked out seemingly unique characteristics of the painting, and what images it was trained on to get there.

Post reply on HN