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Gary Marcus here again to throw cold water on anything deep learning. The negative tone when not succeeding in tasks it wasn't designed or advertised for contin

Gary Marcus here again to throw cold water on anything deep learning. The negative tone when not succeeding in tasks it wasn't designed or advertised for continues to be disappointing. > To the extent that the goal is to develop artificial intelligence that can be trusted in safety-critical applications (Marcus & Davis, 2019), a much higher standard must be applied. I have seen no mention of that being the intended use of DALL-E (2). In fact, the most common use case I've seen described is in replacing Fiverr-type tasks: quick graphic design. That said, the results are actually encouraging given that it _wasn't_ designed to succeed here: > Nevertheless, for 5 out of the 14 prompts, at least one of the ten images fully satisfied our requests. Some of the authors' interpretations could be argued against, as well. For instance, in example 10, "An old man is talking to his parents": > In none of these images did DALL-E successfully infer that image should show an old man with two even older people Several of the images appear to show exactly that? How is the author judging "even older"?

garymarcus 4y ago
How quickly they forget. 45 minutes after the DALL-E n release, Sam Altmann tweeted “AGI is gonna get wild”; Greg Brockman posted multiple tweets around the idea of AGI and walls broken. That invites a critical analysis. Ad hominem against me won’t remedy the limitations that we and others have observed.
- awillen 4y ago
  This doesn't seem like an ad hominem attack at all. It's a criticism of criteria you're using to analyze DALL-E in this paper. You're talking about safety-critical applications, but nobody is expecting DALL-E to be used for those. Even your examples are just people tweeting generally about the future of AGI (the obvious context being that this is a big demonstrable step forward, not that DALL-E is an AGI that society is going to rely on for critical tasks). Sure, if you analyze it based on the criteria you've set out, it fails. The point is that nobody else cares if it fails based on that criteria, because nobody else thinks that criteria is relevant.
rel2thr 4y ago
I didn’t get a negative tone from the paper, it seemed mostly positive to me , just calling out a handful of areas ( like relative positioning ) where Dall-e fails .
- joshcryer 4y ago
  For me, I read the introduction and how they discuss how impressive DALL-E 2 is, and then they show very simple mistakes it makes and I want to be protective of DALL-E 2. I want to say "you did a good job!" That the paper provides "a clearer picture of what remains to be done" is very hard to accept, as all it does is show edge cases which are subjective at best. If anything the picture is less clear as they don't even try to form a hypothesis why DALL-E makes mistakes like these. One thing in particular I have noticed is that DALL-E has trouble producing action images. It may be because it has no sense of temporality and in those cases it could serve to run the parameters a bit longer using the same scene. But I am not an AI scientist so what do I know.
- vletal 4y ago
  > ... it is reasonable to question whether DALL-E 2 constitutes progress toward solving the deep challenges of commonsense reasoning, comprehension, reliability, and so forth that would be needed for a truly general-purpose AI ... I like how they pose this question as a bait to the abstract yet they do not even attempt to answer it. Instead they focus on general shortcomings of the model. Moreover, there is no proper conclusion which would discuss the findings. Given how outspoken Gary Marcus is on Twitter - criticising current advances in DL I would expected him to do a much better job publishing a document about it.
  - garymarcus 4y ago
    i would be glad to do if given proper access, but had into very limited indirect access.
- soraki_soladead 4y ago
  Many of the perceived failures of DALL-E 2 are subjective and ambiguous (by the author's own interpretation in some cases!) and speak to the author's negative biases which are well known outside of this publication. To be clear, I'm not defending DALL-E 2. I'm criticizing a poorly written paper that was published to Arxiv to lend further credibility for a Twitter audience to substantiate a claim that the DALL-E 2 authors have not made but that Gary Marcus has a vested interest in perpetuating: > How much does DALL-E have to do with AGI? Maybe not so much, after all… A lesson in caveat emptor: - https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1521120022298464256 https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1521120022298464256 This should have been a blog post or Twitter thread like the dozen or so other experimentations people have done with the system.
ravi-delia 4y ago
As annoying as the constant goalpost moving is in AI, it's also true that how these models fail is much more interesting than how they succeed. That's where all the information is. Dalle-2 is better at some things than others. Why? What's a limitation of the model, and what's an accident of architecture? I'm reminded of GPT-3's difficulty rhyming and doing math, which seems to be a result of the tokens it was trained on, compared with trailing off and inconsistency which may be more foundational.
- visarga 4y ago
  > Why? What's a limitation of the model, and what's an accident of architecture? The limitation is caused by the CLIP model they used to encode text and images. It's a separate model only generating an embedding, it's not using attention and pairwise interactions on the whole sequence. This causes Dalle2 to be bad at handling multiple objects with multiple attributes. There is no reason the complete prompt could not be related to the generated image instead of an embed, thus correctly stacking the coloured cubes and assigning the right age to each person mentioned in the prompt.
  - ravi-delia 4y ago
    I was actually gonna say something like that, but I believe that the full prompt is also made available to the GLIDE portion. Even still, GLIDE isn't a language model it simply can't understand the full relational content of the caption. With changes running from minor tweaks to major upsizes that's probably fixable.
- garymarcus 4y ago
  what goalposts changed? i pointed out same limits in 2001, 2012, 2018, 2019, 2020. please actually read my work and please don’t make stuff up.
  - ravi-delia 4y ago
    I think you'll find if you reread my comment I was defending your paper here! We agree on little, but your insights are appreciated.
hervature 4y ago
I think you are being disingenuous by omitting the preceding claim. > Whether results of this kind should be considered as successes for the program – what is the proper measure to use in evaluating success – depends on the intended use of the program. If the goal is to generate candidate images that a graphic artist will choose from, or choose from and edit, then the system can reasonably be measured in terms of the quality of the best result out of ten or out of one hundred. They basically admit your Fiverr use case is valid. But say, that it should not be used "in safety-critical applications" which is neither a grand claim nor controversial. It is probably the most blasé claim because, as you point out, no one is expecting this to be used in safety-critical applications. From an economics point of view, the Fiverr use case seems pretty strained to me. If you've ever watched street art, some dazzling things can be done in under 10 minutes. Unless the DALL-E gets it correct on the first shot +99% of the time, someone sifting through images is probably just as costly as paying for Fiverr. What this paper elucidates to me is that even historical figures are off-limits which, in my expectation, is a non-trivial use case.
- soraki_soladead 4y ago
  If someone says, "Cars may be great at transportation to and from work but we should be cautious to use them as a counterbalance for a trebuchet." I don't think it's disingenuous to take issue with the second part of the claim and to not give the author credit for the first part of the claim.
  - hervature 4y ago
    Right, unless the creator of the car's mission is to use it as a counterbalance for a trebuchet. From [1]: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. [1] - https://openai.com/about/ https://openai.com/about/
    - nomel 4y ago
      I think that's an unfair perspective. > Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Saying that DALL-E isn't achieving their mission of beneficial AGI is like getting mad at NASA for pointing their test rockets sideways when trying to go to the moon. All technology known, biological or man made, was created with incremental improvements, with the early iterations almost alway being unhelpful, and sometimes creating a burden. For example, the construction/invention of the first plow was completely unhelpful, and nothing but a distraction, from that years crop. The incremental improvements after now have it where the majority of humanity would perish within a year if you were to remove modern plows from existence. There's no instantaneous way to achieve their mission. The incremental steps to achieve their mission don't have to individually achieve that mission. That's not realistic or a rational expectation. Disregard the above if your perspective is that all technology is bad for man, which I've seen rationally discussed.

garymarcus 4y ago

How quickly they forget. 45 minutes after the DALL-E n release, Sam Altmann tweeted “AGI is gonna get wild”; Greg Brockman posted multiple tweets around the idea of AGI and walls broken. That invites a critical analysis. Ad hominem against me won’t remedy the limitations that we and others have observed.

awillen 4y ago
This doesn't seem like an ad hominem attack at all. It's a criticism of criteria you're using to analyze DALL-E in this paper. You're talking about safety-critical applications, but nobody is expecting DALL-E to be used for those. Even your examples are just people tweeting generally about the future of AGI (the obvious context being that this is a big demonstrable step forward, not that DALL-E is an AGI that society is going to rely on for critical tasks). Sure, if you analyze it based on the criteria you've set out, it fails. The point is that nobody else cares if it fails based on that criteria, because nobody else thinks that criteria is relevant.

rel2thr 4y ago

I didn’t get a negative tone from the paper, it seemed mostly positive to me , just calling out a handful of areas ( like relative positioning ) where Dall-e fails .

joshcryer 4y ago
For me, I read the introduction and how they discuss how impressive DALL-E 2 is, and then they show very simple mistakes it makes and I want to be protective of DALL-E 2. I want to say "you did a good job!" That the paper provides "a clearer picture of what remains to be done" is very hard to accept, as all it does is show edge cases which are subjective at best. If anything the picture is less clear as they don't even try to form a hypothesis why DALL-E makes mistakes like these. One thing in particular I have noticed is that DALL-E has trouble producing action images. It may be because it has no sense of temporality and in those cases it could serve to run the parameters a bit longer using the same scene. But I am not an AI scientist so what do I know.
vletal 4y ago
> ... it is reasonable to question whether DALL-E 2 constitutes progress toward solving the deep challenges of commonsense reasoning, comprehension, reliability, and so forth that would be needed for a truly general-purpose AI ... I like how they pose this question as a bait to the abstract yet they do not even attempt to answer it. Instead they focus on general shortcomings of the model. Moreover, there is no proper conclusion which would discuss the findings. Given how outspoken Gary Marcus is on Twitter - criticising current advances in DL I would expected him to do a much better job publishing a document about it.
- garymarcus 4y ago
  i would be glad to do if given proper access, but had into very limited indirect access.
soraki_soladead 4y ago
Many of the perceived failures of DALL-E 2 are subjective and ambiguous (by the author's own interpretation in some cases!) and speak to the author's negative biases which are well known outside of this publication. To be clear, I'm not defending DALL-E 2. I'm criticizing a poorly written paper that was published to Arxiv to lend further credibility for a Twitter audience to substantiate a claim that the DALL-E 2 authors have not made but that Gary Marcus has a vested interest in perpetuating: > How much does DALL-E have to do with AGI? Maybe not so much, after all… A lesson in caveat emptor: - https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1521120022298464256 https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus/status/1521120022298464256 This should have been a blog post or Twitter thread like the dozen or so other experimentations people have done with the system.

ravi-delia 4y ago

As annoying as the constant goalpost moving is in AI, it's also true that how these models fail is much more interesting than how they succeed. That's where all the information is. Dalle-2 is better at some things than others. Why? What's a limitation of the model, and what's an accident of architecture? I'm reminded of GPT-3's difficulty rhyming and doing math, which seems to be a result of the tokens it was trained on, compared with trailing off and inconsistency which may be more foundational.

visarga 4y ago
> Why? What's a limitation of the model, and what's an accident of architecture? The limitation is caused by the CLIP model they used to encode text and images. It's a separate model only generating an embedding, it's not using attention and pairwise interactions on the whole sequence. This causes Dalle2 to be bad at handling multiple objects with multiple attributes. There is no reason the complete prompt could not be related to the generated image instead of an embed, thus correctly stacking the coloured cubes and assigning the right age to each person mentioned in the prompt.
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  I was actually gonna say something like that, but I believe that the full prompt is also made available to the GLIDE portion. Even still, GLIDE isn't a language model it simply can't understand the full relational content of the caption. With changes running from minor tweaks to major upsizes that's probably fixable.
garymarcus 4y ago
what goalposts changed? i pointed out same limits in 2001, 2012, 2018, 2019, 2020. please actually read my work and please don’t make stuff up.
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  I think you'll find if you reread my comment I was defending your paper here! We agree on little, but your insights are appreciated.

hervature 4y ago

I think you are being disingenuous by omitting the preceding claim. > Whether results of this kind should be considered as successes for the program – what is the proper measure to use in evaluating success – depends on the intended use of the program. If the goal is to generate candidate images that a graphic artist will choose from, or choose from and edit, then the system can reasonably be measured in terms of the quality of the best result out of ten or out of one hundred. They basically admit your Fiverr use case is valid. But say, that it should not be used "in safety-critical applications" which is neither a grand claim nor controversial. It is probably the most blasé claim because, as you point out, no one is expecting this to be used in safety-critical applications. From an economics point of view, the Fiverr use case seems pretty strained to me. If you've ever watched street art, some dazzling things can be done in under 10 minutes. Unless the DALL-E gets it correct on the first shot +99% of the time, someone sifting through images is probably just as costly as paying for Fiverr. What this paper elucidates to me is that even historical figures are off-limits which, in my expectation, is a non-trivial use case.

soraki_soladead 4y ago
If someone says, "Cars may be great at transportation to and from work but we should be cautious to use them as a counterbalance for a trebuchet." I don't think it's disingenuous to take issue with the second part of the claim and to not give the author credit for the first part of the claim.
- hervature 4y ago
  Right, unless the creator of the car's mission is to use it as a counterbalance for a trebuchet. From [1]: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. [1] - https://openai.com/about/ https://openai.com/about/
  - nomel 4y ago
    I think that's an unfair perspective. > Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Saying that DALL-E isn't achieving their mission of beneficial AGI is like getting mad at NASA for pointing their test rockets sideways when trying to go to the moon. All technology known, biological or man made, was created with incremental improvements, with the early iterations almost alway being unhelpful, and sometimes creating a burden. For example, the construction/invention of the first plow was completely unhelpful, and nothing but a distraction, from that years crop. The incremental improvements after now have it where the majority of humanity would perish within a year if you were to remove modern plows from existence. There's no instantaneous way to achieve their mission. The incremental steps to achieve their mission don't have to individually achieve that mission. That's not realistic or a rational expectation. Disregard the above if your perspective is that all technology is bad for man, which I've seen rationally discussed.