5 ms·

Edit: hmm not sure why this comment is getting downvoted. Backprop isn't just a leaky abstraction. There's not really any evidence yet that biological neural n

by geuis 10y ago

Edit: hmm not sure why this comment is getting downvoted. Backprop isn't just a leaky abstraction. There's not really any evidence yet that biological neural networks use anything like backprop. So its important that students be taught the low-level aspects of the current state of the art so that better architectures can be invented in the future. (Note: at the very end of this comment, I am leaving a link to one hypothesis about how something like backprop may happen at the dendritic level.) I've been doing a deep dive on ML and bio neurons in the last week or so to try and get up to speed. The feedforward networks with backprop that are doing such awesome work right now share almost nothing in common with actual neurons. Just some differences: (neuron == bio, node == artificial) Terms: Neuron resting potential is about -70mV. Action potential (threshold) is about -55mV. 1) Neurons are spikey and don't have weights. A neuron sums all of its inputs to reach a threshold. When that threshold is reached, an electric current (action potential) is spread equally to all synaptic terminals. A node has a weight value for each input node that it multiplies by the value received from the input node. All of these values are then summed and passed to the connected nodes in the next layer. 2) There are multiple types of neurons, but for simplification there are 2 types that called "excitatory" and "inhibatory". A neuron can mostly only emit "positive" or "negative" signals via the synapse. There are different neurotransmitters that either add or subtract to the voltage potential for each dendritic input. The total sums work together to cross the threshold voltage. I say mostly because there is some evidence for a minority of neurons to be able to release neurotransmitters from both groups. 3) Artificial networks are generally summation based with no inclusion of time. Bio networks use summation and summation over time together to determine if they should fire or not. If I recall correctly, a neuron can repeatedly fire about 300 times per second. A dendritic input can last for up to 1.5 milliseconds. So if a neuron gets enough positive inputs at the same time, or collects enough over time, it will fire. I haven't found any hypotheses or experiments that try to explain how reinforcement learning takes place in neurons yet in the absence of back propagation. Pretty sure that information is out there but I haven't run across it. Overall I think that there will be multiple engineering approaches to AI, just like there are to construction and flight. We understand how birds and bees fly, but we don't build planes the same way. Its important to remember than cognition is based in physics just like any other physical system. When the principles are well understood, there are multiple avenues to using them. Here is a short collection of links that I've been finding helpful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotransmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotransmission http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s1/introduction.html http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s1/introduction.html https://www.quora.com/Can-a-synapse-change-from-being-inhibitory-to-excitatory-What-is-the-mechanism-behind-it https://www.quora.com/Can-a-synapse-change-from-being-inhibi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_backpropagation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_backpropagation

mattkrause 10y ago
In terms of big picture stuff, you're absolutely right that many DNNs are more "inspired by" the brain and less a faithful model of it. However, a lot of the things mentioned in your post are either overstated or outright wrong. For example: 1. Neurons, or more specifically, connections between neurons ("synapses"), absolutely do have weights, and the "strength" of synapses can be adjusted by a variety of properties that act on a scale of seconds to hours or days. At the "semi-permanent" end of the spectrum, the location of a synapse matters a lot: input arriving far from the cell body has much less influence the cell's spiking. The number (and location?) of receptors on the cell surface can also affect the relative impact of a given input. Receptors can be trafficked to/from the membrane (a fairly slow process), or switched on and off more rapidly by intracellular processes. You may want to read up on long-term potentiation/depression (LTP/LTD), which are activity-dependent changes in synaptic strength. There are a whole host of these processes, and even some (limited) evidence that the electric fields generated by nearby neurons can "ephaptically" affect nearby neurons, even without making direct contact, which would allow for millisecond-scale changes. 2. While you can start by dividing neurons in excitatory and inhibitory populations, there's a lot more going on. On the glutamate (excitatory) side, AMPA receptors let glutamate rapidly excite a cell and make it more likely to fire. However, it also controls NMDA channels that, under certain circumstances, allow calcium into a cell. These calcium ions are involved in all sorts of signaling cascades (and are involved--we think--in tuning synaptic weights). GABA typically hyperpolarizes cells (i.e., makes them less likely to fire) and is secreted by cells called interneurons . However, there's a huge diversity of interneurons. Some seem to "subtract" from excitatory activity, others can affect it more strongly in a divisive sort of way or even cancel it completely. Furthermore, there's a whole host of other neurotransmitters. Dopamine, which is heavily involved in reward, can have excitatory or inhibitory effects, depending on whether it activates D1 or D2 receptors 3. While the textbook feed-forward neural networks certainly have "instant" signal propagation, there are lots of other computational models that do include time. Time-delay neural networks are essentially convnets extended over time instead of space. Reservoir computing methods like liquid state machines also handle time, but in a much more complicated way. 4. I chuckled at the idea of finding a biological correlate analog for reinforcement learning, since reinforcement learning was initially inspired by the idea of reinforcement in psychology/animal behavior. People have shown that brain areas--and individual neurons within them--encode action values, state estimates, and other building blocks of reinforcement learning. Clearly, we have a lot to discover still, but the general idea isn't at all implausible. Finally, some people are fairly skeptical that the fields have much to learn from each other; Jürgen Schmidhuber said this a lot at NIPS last year. However, other, equally-smart people (e.g., Geoff Hinton) seem to think that there may be a common mechanism, or at least a useful source of inspiration there. But, if you want to work on something like this (and it is awesomely interesting), it really helps to have a solid grounding in both.

by geuis 10y ago

mattkrause 10y ago

In terms of big picture stuff, you're absolutely right that many DNNs are more "inspired by" the brain and less a faithful model of it. However, a lot of the things mentioned in your post are either overstated or outright wrong. For example: 1. Neurons, or more specifically, connections between neurons ("synapses"), absolutely do have weights, and the "strength" of synapses can be adjusted by a variety of properties that act on a scale of seconds to hours or days. At the "semi-permanent" end of the spectrum, the location of a synapse matters a lot: input arriving far from the cell body has much less influence the cell's spiking. The number (and location?) of receptors on the cell surface can also affect the relative impact of a given input. Receptors can be trafficked to/from the membrane (a fairly slow process), or switched on and off more rapidly by intracellular processes. You may want to read up on long-term potentiation/depression (LTP/LTD), which are activity-dependent changes in synaptic strength. There are a whole host of these processes, and even some (limited) evidence that the electric fields generated by nearby neurons can "ephaptically" affect nearby neurons, even without making direct contact, which would allow for millisecond-scale changes. 2. While you can start by dividing neurons in excitatory and inhibitory populations, there's a lot more going on. On the glutamate (excitatory) side, AMPA receptors let glutamate rapidly excite a cell and make it more likely to fire. However, it also controls NMDA channels that, under certain circumstances, allow calcium into a cell. These calcium ions are involved in all sorts of signaling cascades (and are involved--we think--in tuning synaptic weights). GABA typically hyperpolarizes cells (i.e., makes them less likely to fire) and is secreted by cells called interneurons . However, there's a huge diversity of interneurons. Some seem to "subtract" from excitatory activity, others can affect it more strongly in a divisive sort of way or even cancel it completely. Furthermore, there's a whole host of other neurotransmitters. Dopamine, which is heavily involved in reward, can have excitatory or inhibitory effects, depending on whether it activates D1 or D2 receptors 3. While the textbook feed-forward neural networks certainly have "instant" signal propagation, there are lots of other computational models that do include time. Time-delay neural networks are essentially convnets extended over time instead of space. Reservoir computing methods like liquid state machines also handle time, but in a much more complicated way. 4. I chuckled at the idea of finding a biological correlate analog for reinforcement learning, since reinforcement learning was initially inspired by the idea of reinforcement in psychology/animal behavior. People have shown that brain areas--and individual neurons within them--encode action values, state estimates, and other building blocks of reinforcement learning. Clearly, we have a lot to discover still, but the general idea isn't at all implausible. Finally, some people are fairly skeptical that the fields have much to learn from each other; Jürgen Schmidhuber said this a lot at NIPS last year. However, other, equally-smart people (e.g., Geoff Hinton) seem to think that there may be a common mechanism, or at least a useful source of inspiration there. But, if you want to work on something like this (and it is awesomely interesting), it really helps to have a solid grounding in both.