The Genesis of Deep Learning

Last week we talked about simple single hidden layer neural networks and gradient descent. The addition of hidden layers allowed the model to implicitly map the input feature vector into a higher dimension without all of the computational complexity of actually exploring the high dimensional space. Gradient descent is an algorithm that improves the performance of a model by computing vectors of partial derivatives, which it uses to “descend the error bowl” and reach an optimal point in the space of the neural networks weights. Generally, the error that gradient descent attempts to minimize depends on the task at end: regression or classification. Regression tasks involve outputting vectors of real numbers; essentially predicting points in arbitrary dimensions. This is just like the type of linear regression seen in many introductory statistics classes.

Given a dataset (represented by the blue points), a neural network optimizing on a regression task would try to approximate a function (represented by the red line) that best fits the dataset. Alternatively, a neural network may also be used as a classifier, outputting a probability density function that is compared to a datapoint’s label.

Typically, the loss function for regression is mean squared error, and cross-entropy for classification. However, as long as the loss function is differentiable, neural networks can really be trained to approximate anything that can intuitively be thought of as a function.

After researchers saw how the addition of a hidden layer massively increased the expressiveness of perceptrons, they began experimenting with varying numbers and sizes of the hidden layers in neural networks. The results were astounding, and this is when “deep” neural networks really came into the limelight. The idea was that extra hidden layers allowed the model to learn more abstract representations of the data, which would be far more beneficial than the feature vectors that a human could provide the model as input. In theory, each layer would learn to extract a different set of features, specializing to focus on the parts of the input that would be most beneficial to subsequent layers. These deep architectures allowed neural networks to perform such tasks as handwriting recognition and language modeling with far greater accuracy than in the past.

However, training these models was far more problematic than expected. Gradient descent was still an adequate algorithm for computing the vectors of partial derivatives, but the extra hidden layers introduced an interesting problem: the deeper a network was, the harder it was to train. This was because training earlier layers was essentially impossible with traditional applications of gradient descent. This problem was solved by Paul Werbos, who introduced the backpropagation algorithm for training neural networks. Essentially a well-marketed application of the multivariable chain rule, backpropagation calculated the error of the network, just as in vanilla gradient descent, but then distributed the “blame” for the error amongst all of the weights that contributed to the final result.

Above is an example of the “computational graph” that demonstrates how the partial derivatives in a neural network are applied in backpropagtion. This algorithm became crucial to the success of more complicated architectures, and allowed deep learning to take off. Next week, we’ll discuss recurrent neural networks and backpropagation through time.

11 thoughts on “The Genesis of Deep Learning

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    In recent years, deep learning has been applied to a variety of tasks, including image classification, object detection, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Deep learning has also been used to improve the performance of humans in various cognitive tasks such as decision-making and problem-solving. The potential applications of deep learning are vast, and researchers are only beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible.

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