10 msΒ·
Handwriting Generation with Recurrent Neural Networks
- Aqueous 11y agoIn both this demonstration and the demonstration by Google of image generation by neural networks (http://www.popsci.com/these-are-what-google-artificial-intelligences-dreams-look http://www.popsci.com/these-are-what-google-artificial-intel...) you can see hints of organic, naturalistic behavior emerging from artificial networks. Is there any doubt that such networks can simulate even more complex aspects of our cognition? Isn't the writing on the wall (no joke intended) with regard to the Strong AI hypothesis? Or at least a stronger weak hypothesis.
- why-el 11y agoAre we sure what is being simulated here is cognitive? It seems to me merely mechanical. Not to deride the achievement of course.
- iaw 11y agoI think we may be reaching a point where the line between mechanical and cognitive get blurred slightly. While I feel that this falls into the mechanical end of the spectrum because I understand how the model was created, RNN's demonstrate some very fascinating emergent behaviors that will become more complex as computational power increases. I wouldn't say that this is cognitive but it definitely learns to perform a skill in a similar fashion to intelligent beings which is remarkable. Extrapolating that behavior to self-awareness isn't likely however (of course this could lead to a philosophical debate)
- Aqueous 11y agoWouldn't this be an example of motor cognition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_cognition)? Isn't this essentially what motor cognition does when we write?
- ericjang 11y agoMechanical vs. Cognitive are good adjectives! Maybe cognition is more mechanical than not.
- Aqueous 11y agoCouldn't this be seen as a kind of motor cognition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_cognition)? Isn't this essentially what motor cognition does when we write? Perhaps this is more low-level than that, but it seems to me this neural network embodies the 'muscle memory' we develop when we practice handwriting.
- justonepost 11y agoAre we sure cognition isn't merely mechanical? Neural networks are pretty basic and yet they provide compelling products.
- romaniv 11y agoCognition is not "merely mechanical" by definition. If it was mechanical, there would be no special word to distinguish it from other reactions of the natural world.
- baddox 11y agoThat's certainly not true. The term "cognitive" could refer to a proper subset of the set of "mechanical" things. Terms for subsets are still useful.
- romaniv 11y agoSo I guess you're fine with calling books "merely paper" because they are a "subset" of paper-based products? And you're fine with calling people "merely animals" because they're a "subset" of animals? Human language is not based on set theory. There is a huge difference in connotations here.
- eidyia 11y agoHe said "Terms for subsets are still useful.", so I would guess no he is not fine
- baddox 11y agoContext is important, and the word "merely" can be interpreted in multiple ways. In the first case in this thread, I understood "merely mechanical" to mean "only mechanical," i.e containing nothing that is not mechanical. Using that definition, then humans are merely animals, because they're not something that's not an animal. Books are a bad example, because they do have things other than paper (like ink, glue, maybe a plastic or leather cover). You seem to be using "merely" to mean "nothing more specific than," which is a very different meaning that would not be appropriate when talking about things which are subsets of other things.
- ericjang 11y agoThe "organic" behavior you see is replaying the natural statistics of actual handwriting trajectories. I suspect that generative models that "compress & replay" human data in order to mimic humans will lead to more complex AI systems, but capturing the statistics of "internal" processes like cognition and consciousness are still far away (and may require advancements in cognitive neuroscience first).
- heygrady 11y agohttp://www.technologyreview.com/view/518006/how-a-fly-brain-detects-motion/ http://www.technologyreview.com/view/518006/how-a-fly-brain-... I'm not an expert but... Fly brains and human brains already have have neural networks for common tasks, like sensing motion, baked into our genetics. Evolution has already trained these networks to an extent. Training a computer-simulated neural network seems to yield similar results to what nature has done. My personal uninformed opinion is that we'll start to see how much human experience and expression is driven by our brain wiring. That we'll discover how similar we all are to each other based our wiring. And that we'll find that approximating advanced cognition will be the result of putting that wiring into a computer model -- and having a computer powerful enough to run it.
- romaniv 11y agoMy personal uninformed opinion is that we'll start to see how much human experience and expression is driven by our brain wiring. In other words, we will start thinking about people as if they are mere things. Complex things, but things nevertheless.
- heygrady 11y agoAnd, at the very least, thinking about the human mind as an object will lead to greater advances in artificial intelligence. IMO. My mind will change when my brain does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
- cristianpascu 11y agoMachine learning is reproducing the result of a process but not the process. It's easy to be confused about it, and many are. Just like when we call "thoughts" to be patterns of some sort, so then any sort of pattern is a thought. The logical error in this should punch you and any sentient being right in the stomach and leave you breathless for a few good seconds.
- tmalsburg2 11y agoMany chat bots display very human-like behaviour. Does that imply that the underlying technology will solve strong AI? Of course not. Such extrapolations are almost guaranteed to be incorrect. There have been some very eye opening articles recently about the limitations of deep neural networks which I highly recommend. AI is still an incredibly difficult problem and that is not going to change anytime soon. Deep neural networks are a decent step forward but we shouldn't get carried away.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago> There have been some very eye opening articles recently about the limitations of deep neural networks which I highly recommend. I'm not exactly a deep-learning fan, but could you post the links?
- gambler 11y agohttp://www.evolvingai.org/fooling http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoThank you. It's quite interesting, actually, how the easy-to-compute discriminative models can be fooled so easily, while they hypothesize that generative models (which are much more general, and closer to our best models of human cognition), despite being much slower, ultimately provide better performance at the boundaries of the classification region. I'd go on to venture that our minds probably use discriminative models for "intuitive" judgements, while reasoning that can explain the variance in percepts uses generative models, thus obtaining better performance where necessary despite using more energy. Or possibly, the generative models can be used to train the intuitive discriminative ones, slowly allowing the less intensive part of the mind's processing to adjust its class boundaries to suit what's really known.
- tmalsburg2 11y agoAlso http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard-sofa.html http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard-sofa.ht...
- fossuser 11y agoI'm starting to think that consciousness emerges out of a neural net that has the appropriate training tests, scoring functions and has the right sensors to take in feedback. For an easy example look at human babies - they're not conscious (maybe self-aware is a better word?), but we can see this development happen over time. Maybe sleeping has some role in recalculating the weights for the neural net? Eventually something like a feeling of self emerges as the evolved mechanism for working with social feedback. Maybe this is the general way intelligence works. It does seem to make sense when looking at how it develops in animals.
- gambler 11y agoThis is infinitely more impressive than Google's image generation. There are zillion ways to generate weird-looking images. However, this paper claims to: 1. Have trained a networks to generate handwriting. Handwriting can be objectively judged, unlike those images. The interactive demo does look pretty darn cool. 2. Made it so the network can be "primed" by small samples of new handwriting. This is the most impressive part, because it is something that actually qualifies as semi-generic AI. You train it on one thing and then it does another thing. Actually, the second part is bit too impressive, compared to everything I've seen from NNs before. I've read the paper, but I don't understand how this priming works. How big is the primer? Is it just the sample shown on the website? Are there any constraints? Can I simply supply a sample of my writing with a textual "translation" for this network to pick up some aspects of my writing style?
- sangnoir 11y ago> This is infinitely more impressive than Google's image generation. There are zillion ways to generate weird-looking images Google wasn't training their NNs to 'generate weird-looking images'. The NNs were for image-classification (which is pretty impressive), the weird images were just a visualisation/artefact of the training process.
- gambler 11y agoThey developed and tuned a fairly elaborate process designed specifically for generating those images out of classification NNs. The difference between the two demos is that the impressiveness of those images is mostly subjective, while handwriting replication has pretty well-established criteria to judge it by. Also, it sounds like priming is fast and does not require tons of samples.
- Animats 11y agoThat's cute. At last, the forgery app. The killer app in this space will be when someone figures out how to extract a vocal model from existing recordings of singers. Vocaloid already synthesizes singing quite well, but a human singer has to go into a studio and sing a long list of standard phrases to build the singer model. The next step will be to feed existing singing into a system that extracts a model usable for synthesis. The RIAA is so going to hate this.
- justonepost 11y agoWell, not so much singers at first, but voice actors and audio books.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ericjang 11y agoI can imagine a near future whereby an RNN is trained to have an especially lovely reading voice. A large number of people might actually become convinced that the RNN is a person and develop empathy towards it.
- _lce0 11y agohaha combine that voice with some Markov chains, and you have the perfect friend replacement app!
- atom_enger 11y agoThis is starting to sound a lot like Her(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/). It'll likely be the case one day.
- contravariant 11y agoIt also sounds similar to the black mirror episode "Be Right Back", although that episode provides a somewhat darker perspective.
- comex 11y agoIt's interesting that the network will sometimes misspell words: http://i.imgur.com/cFrlyy8.png http://i.imgur.com/cFrlyy8.png The input was copied from the instructions - "Type a message into the text box, and the network will try to write it out longhand". But you can see it skipped the "e" in "Type" and added an "h" after the "w" in "network", and pretty clearly spelled "to" as "du". It also tried to cross the first vertical line of the "w" in "network" in lieu of adding an actual "t" beforehand (which is arguably an idiosyncrasy a human's handwriting might have, if a rather odd one); and stuck a big phantom stroke/letter between "T" and "y".
- cristianpascu 11y agoIt has no idea what it's doing. :)
- rosstex 11y agoThat or it's due to human error! Just like self-driving cars haha
- sarwechshar 11y agoHa! What do you mean by human error though? An analogy with the self-driving cars example could be the human inadvertently made a typo when inputting the text sample in the above link...whereas if the dataset used in "teaching" this network to create handwritten text contained errors (e.g. the handwriting samples had "to" instead of "the" and many instances of "The" were missing the 'e'). Unless I misunderstood how this was developed...that could be the case ha!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hayksaakian 11y agoThis is really cool! I could see it being used in games to generate hand written notes from data files.
- Trufa 11y agoVERY impressive demo but I find it kind of funny the extra effort it takes to produce a "worse font".
- ChrisGranger 11y agoYou could use this in conjunction with something like Cleverbot to create a virtual pen-pal who sends you snail mail letters.
- sarwechshar 11y agoAnd combine it with holographic technology to have 3D Skype calls with them too?
- fallinghawks 11y agoI'm curious as to what happened here: Text entered: this is a test of handwriting generation Style sample #1 selected. All other settings at default. http://imgur.com/6b1G5Tj http://imgur.com/6b1G5Tj Edit: I've tried a couple other styles and haven't duplicated this craziness.
- profinger 11y agoThe network that picked up that task was just a little wacky. No big deal. Look the other way. Please ignore. whistle lol
- niccaluim 11y agoThe world's first artificial neural network with a drinking problem :)
- CatharticMonkey 11y agoIt obviously gets bored sometimes and decides it'd rather draw pretty pictures of mountain ranges or something. http://imgur.com/uz60af1 http://imgur.com/uz60af1
- fallinghawks 11y agoHumans doodle, so it does too, I guess :)
- Houshalter 11y agoThere's an element of randomness in the generated samples. It does what it predicts a human would do. If it thinks there is a 1% chance a human would do move the cursor up, then it will have a 1% chance of doing that as well. Since the net can't really be 100% sure of anything, it leaves itself a little uncertainty in case the human does something crazy. So sometimes the result will seem to be a little random than real writing because of it's uncertainty. The bias parameter tries to fix this by biasing it's output towards more probable sequences. I don't know what data it's using - it's quite possible it's corrupted by people drawing randomly or something.
- prajit 11y agoI implemented this system for the final project of my computer vision class. Couldn't get it to work by the deadline, but I'm very familiar with this paper. Happy to answer any questions.
- poizan42 11y agoI'm slightly alarmed by urls such as: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.cgi?text=Hej&style=..%2Fdata%2Ftrainset_diff_no_start_all_labels.nc%2C973%2B905&bias=0.15&samples=3 http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.cgi?text=Hej&s... Relative paths allowed from user input is usually a HUGE warning sign. Are you sure I can't make it open arbitrary files? What happens to your cgi script if it reads a file in the wrong format?
- Rexxar 11y agoVery strange results with rare Unicode characters (I used "π³ππ ππππ ππππ ππππ ππππ") https://imgur.com/a/Li8OZ https://imgur.com/a/Li8OZ
- jwuphysics 11y agoLikewise: http://imgur.com/ux3xfL5 http://imgur.com/ux3xfL5
- m0dest 11y agoIt's interesting because handwritten notes are seen as one of the last symbols of human authenticity. The unique drawing of each letter seems to prove that a human invested time and thought in directly communicating with you. There was no copy-paste. There was no form letter. This was not a bot. And, based on the length of the note, there was provable effort involved. Both a Turing test and a proof of work problem. The world's oldest Captcha. And so begins the devaluing of that proof. Just like when marketers started reproducing the "signature" on every sales letter with blue-colored toner, mimicking the authenticity of a hand signature. I don't write handwritten letters, and I don't romanticize the past. But our dwindling ability to assess the authenticity of incoming communication is slightly unsettling.
- Retr0spectrum 11y agoDoes anyone know what happened here[0]? The input text was "This is a test. Reeeeeeeeeeeeee!", and I chose the third style. [0] http://i.imgur.com/6B9JkjC.png http://i.imgur.com/6B9JkjC.png
- eidyia 11y agoTheir computer had a stroke. If we can simulate a neural network I guess such a "bug" comes with the package :D
- Tiksi 11y agoSymbols seem to do strange things as well. The input was : !@#$%^&*()_+ here's 3 runs of it with bias all the way down: http://paste.click/KNIJov http://paste.click/KNIJov http://paste.click/PPjKXC http://paste.click/PPjKXC http://paste.click/RtZCtG http://paste.click/RtZCtG As I turned up the bias, it seems to trend to the letter g: http://paste.click/hJrVlX http://paste.click/hJrVlX Some symbols seem to just fail, I'm guessing that's a bug in the serializing.
- panic 11y agoCreepy: http://i.imgur.com/jvbK94t.png http://i.imgur.com/jvbK94t.png