Brains, Sex, and Machine Learning

I would highly recommend this video ▶ this video from Geoffrey Hinton in 2012 that I think is related to this research.

in “Neural Networks with Few Multiplications” · View on HN

It seems the relationship between the brain and deep learning has evolved in such a way that the later can help with insights into how the former works. In this regard, I thought I would mention the extraordinary simple and elegant talk by G. Hinton last summer: ▶ this video It starts from a simple and clever improvement to an existing deep learning method and ends up with beautiful (and simple!) insights on why neurons are using simple spikes to communicate.

in “Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI” · View on HN

Here is a GREAT talk by Geoffrey Hinton (the Prof running said lab) ▶ this video where he explains the method. Unfortunately, even though it was posted three times to HN [link] it never made the fron page. Here is the my summary and comment: " Great talk. I don't know much about artificial neural networks (ANN) and even less about natural ones, but I have the feeling that I learnt a lot from this video. If I understand correct, Hinton uses so many artificial neurons compared to the amount of learning data, that you would usually see an overfitting effect. However, his ANN's randomly shut of a substantial part (~50%) of the neurons during each learning iteration. He calls this "dropout". Therefore, a single ANN represents many different models. Most models never get trained, but they exist in the ANN, because they share their weights with the trained models. This learning method avoids over specializing and therefore improves robustness with respect to new data but it also allows for arbitrary combination of different models which tremendously enlarges the pool of testable models. When using or testing these ANNs you also "dropout" neurons during every prediction. Practically, every rerun predicts a different result by using a different model. Afterwards, these results are averaged. The more results, the higher the chance, that the classification is correct. Hinton argues, that our brains work in a similar way. This explains among other things a) Why are neurons firing in a random

in “Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin – in the same voice” · View on HN

As far as I know there is a decent amount of information against the fact that brains are quantum computers. On the other hand there is a talk by Hinton on youtube [1] that sheds interesting light on some variants of deep learning and the way the brain uses (classical) noise. [1] ▶ this video

in “AI” · View on HN

Using dropout with deep neural networks is an (extremely cheap) way to gain many of the benefits of using an ensemble. If you want a great overview of the dropout technique, watch this tech talk by Hinton: ▶ this video Also, the recent maxout algorithm (from Montreal group, authors of Theano) that got state of the art results on several datasets is essentially just an algorithm designed to do particularly well with dropout (as far as I understand it).

in “Unsupervised Feature Learning and Deep Learning Tutorial” · View on HN

Speaking of bagging: Geoff Hinton talks a bit about model averaging and has a very stimulating pair of hypotheses related to this, which are: a) genetic recombination in the form of sex might be "bagging across genes" that prevents tight co-adaptation (= overfitting on the evolutionary timescale) b) the brain uses noisy discrete firing instead of continuous communication because it allows for "bagging across network topologies". The bulk of his talk is about how dropout in neural nets can be used to accomplish some of the same performance benefits that model averaging gives on other algorithms (at a much smaller relative computational cost). Here's the talk: ▶ this video

in “Machine Learning as a Service” · View on HN