6 ms·

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 'Inceptioni

by davedx 11y ago

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 charges: any other model (GMM, SVM, Random Forests) of any sufficient complexity for a real task is completely opaque for very fundamental reasons: their non-linear structure makes it hard to project back the function they represent into their input space and make sense of it. Not so with backprop, as this blog post shows eloquently: you can query the model and ask what it believes it is seeing or 'wants' to see simply by following gradients. This 'guided hallucination' technique is very powerful and the gorgeous visualizations it generates are very evocative of what's really going on in the network."

svantana 11y ago
That's not really fair though, since any deterministic function can be "back-propagated" using the chain rule (or even automatic differentiation), even though it's not really necessary for simpler models such as GMM and SVM since there are much easier ways of inspecting them. Also, I don't feel single input/output pairs really describe the function itself -- knowing cos(0) = 1 doesn't reveal much about the cosine function, even though it's a local maximum. Maybe one could extend the technique to show transitions (morphing) between classes as video?
- fugyk 11y ago
  https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliattX4OUCj_8EP65_cTVnBmS1jnYgsGQAieQUc1VQWdgQ/photo/AF1QipOlM1yfMIV0guS4bV9OHIvPmdZcCngCUqpMiS9U?key=aVBxWjhwSzg2RjJWLWRuVFBBZEN1d205bUdEMnhB https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliat...
  - sophcw 11y ago
    hey, where'd you get that?
- Houshalter 11y ago
  Here's it applied to each frame of a video https://plus.google.com/photos/+MikeJurney/albums/6161722239914893009/6161722247093825010?pid=6161722247093825010&oid=106407083336743953802 https://plus.google.com/photos/+MikeJurney/albums/6161722239...
  - RangerScience 11y ago
    I would absolutely love access to this, but it's showing as locked.
    - Houshalter 11y ago
      Looks like they didn't intend to release it to the public. Should have saved it at the time. It was a reaction gif where each frame they applied that algorithm. It was super creepy, with eyeballs appearing and disappearing everywhere. Perhaps they want to keep it private because they plan to announce more later. So we might see it again.
    - Houshalter 11y ago
      There is now a live stream of it producing video: http://www.twitch.tv/317070 http://www.twitch.tv/317070
rndn 11y ago
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/ http://xkcd.com/1539/
- sangnoir 11y ago
  > 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/ http://xkcd.com/1539/ I consider myself to be very Left of center, but, I can't imagine what form of 'democratic control' you think is necessary over the research that Google and Facebook does. I do not fault Google or Facebook for planning on time-scales longer than most governments. Governments ought to be doing this level of long-term planning, but are not (at least publicly)
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    It's a tricky ethical area. The Google post cites several research papers that seemt o provide more than enough information to replicate these results or get similar ones, which is good, because I think everyone should be able to explore these tools - I stick by my view from yesterday that this may be a scientific breakthrough. At the same time, I can see the basis for some anxiety, because it's not hard to imagine proprietary research going a few steps farther and developing some sort of general intelligence or even a limited but extremely high-powered intelligence that would confer an overwhelming commercial advantage, and/or a political one. Suppose, as an exercise, that one developed an algorithm to maximize persuasiveness by first leading readers/listeners into a quiescent, semi-hypnotic state and then making your commercial or political pitch. There's certainly a potential for abuse. In Europe this sort of thing tends to bring up the precautionary principle, the idea that you shouldn't do something without oversight and demonstrated minimization of risk. I think that's highly limiting, but expect some pushback against Google over this. Of course, I don't think democracy is all that wonderful either but then I'm a bit of a misanthrope.
pault 11y ago
I can't really put my finger on it, but this is the most exciting thing that I've seen on HN in years.

by davedx 11y ago

svantana 11y ago

That's not really fair though, since any deterministic function can be "back-propagated" using the chain rule (or even automatic differentiation), even though it's not really necessary for simpler models such as GMM and SVM since there are much easier ways of inspecting them. Also, I don't feel single input/output pairs really describe the function itself -- knowing cos(0) = 1 doesn't reveal much about the cosine function, even though it's a local maximum. Maybe one could extend the technique to show transitions (morphing) between classes as video?

fugyk 11y ago
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliattX4OUCj_8EP65_cTVnBmS1jnYgsGQAieQUc1VQWdgQ/photo/AF1QipOlM1yfMIV0guS4bV9OHIvPmdZcCngCUqpMiS9U?key=aVBxWjhwSzg2RjJWLWRuVFBBZEN1d205bUdEMnhB https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliat...
- sophcw 11y ago
  hey, where'd you get that?
Houshalter 11y ago
Here's it applied to each frame of a video https://plus.google.com/photos/+MikeJurney/albums/6161722239914893009/6161722247093825010?pid=6161722247093825010&oid=106407083336743953802 https://plus.google.com/photos/+MikeJurney/albums/6161722239...
- RangerScience 11y ago
  I would absolutely love access to this, but it's showing as locked.
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    Looks like they didn't intend to release it to the public. Should have saved it at the time. It was a reaction gif where each frame they applied that algorithm. It was super creepy, with eyeballs appearing and disappearing everywhere. Perhaps they want to keep it private because they plan to announce more later. So we might see it again.
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    There is now a live stream of it producing video: http://www.twitch.tv/317070 http://www.twitch.tv/317070

rndn 11y ago

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/ http://xkcd.com/1539/

sangnoir 11y ago
> 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/ http://xkcd.com/1539/ I consider myself to be very Left of center, but, I can't imagine what form of 'democratic control' you think is necessary over the research that Google and Facebook does. I do not fault Google or Facebook for planning on time-scales longer than most governments. Governments ought to be doing this level of long-term planning, but are not (at least publicly)
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  It's a tricky ethical area. The Google post cites several research papers that seemt o provide more than enough information to replicate these results or get similar ones, which is good, because I think everyone should be able to explore these tools - I stick by my view from yesterday that this may be a scientific breakthrough. At the same time, I can see the basis for some anxiety, because it's not hard to imagine proprietary research going a few steps farther and developing some sort of general intelligence or even a limited but extremely high-powered intelligence that would confer an overwhelming commercial advantage, and/or a political one. Suppose, as an exercise, that one developed an algorithm to maximize persuasiveness by first leading readers/listeners into a quiescent, semi-hypnotic state and then making your commercial or political pitch. There's certainly a potential for abuse. In Europe this sort of thing tends to bring up the precautionary principle, the idea that you shouldn't do something without oversight and demonstrated minimization of risk. I think that's highly limiting, but expect some pushback against Google over this. Of course, I don't think democracy is all that wonderful either but then I'm a bit of a misanthrope.

pault 11y ago

I can't really put my finger on it, but this is the most exciting thing that I've seen on HN in years.