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While I appreciate people trying to publish their own explanations of how various NN/Deep Learning architectures work, I think a fully coded article would be mu

While I appreciate people trying to publish their own explanations of how various NN/Deep Learning architectures work, I think a fully coded article would be much better for the people these are aimed at. It's like with research papers: The intuitive part isn't that hard to grok (sometimes they are remarkably intuitive) - it's the translation from equations to working code. I have one friend that's trying to learn ML, and he has a solid mathematical background, but mostly on a theoretical level (i.e not applied). He could explain perfectly well how various neural networks worked, but he really, really struggled with coding them. In fact, I wish every researcher would put a link to their code repository

jsinai 8y ago
It depends on where you are in terms of your learning and background. Some people will find value in intuitive blogposts which complement research papers. Others can “grok” this as you say and will find more value in code. Yet others can “grok” the code if only they had the intuitive understanding. You can see where I am getting: everyone has different backgrounds and needs and different articles will appeal to different audiences. There is no one audience to appeal to. On the note of code: this tends to be more subjective than the maths in a paper. There are lots of design decisions that can affect the overall structure of the code. Then there is the trade off between readability and performance. Readable code for blogs is probably not the code you would use in practice. Personally I find it easier to establish the ground truth in the mathematics than to try and figure out the underlying truth from the code. And if you can’t do it yourself, then that’s where the intuitive blogposts help. After that you can choose your own libraries, frameworks, programming design decisions and teachers (including other blogposts) to help you get the code.
marviel 8y ago
You would probably enjoy https://paperswithcode.com https://paperswithcode.com :)
xrd 8y ago
I agree and for that reason really enjoyed Joel Grus live coding a neural network. https://youtu.be/o64FV-ez6Gw https://youtu.be/o64FV-ez6Gw

jsinai 8y ago

It depends on where you are in terms of your learning and background. Some people will find value in intuitive blogposts which complement research papers. Others can “grok” this as you say and will find more value in code. Yet others can “grok” the code if only they had the intuitive understanding. You can see where I am getting: everyone has different backgrounds and needs and different articles will appeal to different audiences. There is no one audience to appeal to. On the note of code: this tends to be more subjective than the maths in a paper. There are lots of design decisions that can affect the overall structure of the code. Then there is the trade off between readability and performance. Readable code for blogs is probably not the code you would use in practice. Personally I find it easier to establish the ground truth in the mathematics than to try and figure out the underlying truth from the code. And if you can’t do it yourself, then that’s where the intuitive blogposts help. After that you can choose your own libraries, frameworks, programming design decisions and teachers (including other blogposts) to help you get the code.

marviel 8y ago

You would probably enjoy https://paperswithcode.com https://paperswithcode.com :)

xrd 8y ago

I agree and for that reason really enjoyed Joel Grus live coding a neural network. https://youtu.be/o64FV-ez6Gw https://youtu.be/o64FV-ez6Gw