Introduction

I read a lot of deep learning papers, typically a few/week. I've read probably several thousands of papers. My general problem with papers in machine learning or deep learning is that often they sit in some strange no man's land between science and engineering, I call it "academic engineering". Let me describe what I mean:

1. A scientific paper IMHO, should convey an idea that has the ability to explain something. For example a paper that proves a mathematical theorem, a paper that presents a model of some physical phenomenon. Alternatively a scientific paper could be experimental, where the result of an experiment tells us something fundamental about the reality. Nevertheless the central point of a scientific paper is a relatively concisely expressible idea of some nontrivial universality (and predictive power) or some nontrivial observation about the nature of reality.
2. An engineering paper shows a method of solving a particular problem. Problems may vary and depend on an application, sometimes they could be really uninteresting and specific but nevertheless useful for somebody somewhere. For an engineering paper, things that matter are different than for a scientific paper: the universality of the solution may not be of paramount importance. What matters

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In recent weeks I've been forced to reformulate and distill my views on AI. After my winter post went viral many people contacted me over email and on twitter with many good suggestions. Since there is now more attention to what I have to offer,  I decided to write down in a condensed form what I think is wrong with our approach to AI and what could we fix. Here are my 10 points:

1. We are trapped by Turing's definition of intelligence. In his famous formulation Turing confined intelligence as a solution to a verbal game played against humans. This in particular sets intelligence as a (1) solution to a game, and (2) puts human in the judgement position. This definition is extremely deceptive and has not served the field well. Dogs, monkeys, elephants and even rodents are very intelligent creatures but are not verbal and hence would fail the Turing test.
2. The central problem of AI is Moravec's Paradox. It is vastly more stark today than it was when it was originally formulated in 1988 and the fact we've done so little to address it over those 30 years is embarrassing. The central thesis of the paradox is

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My previous post on AI winter went viral almost to the point of killing my Amazon instance (it got well north of 100k views). It triggered a serious tweet storms, lots of discussion on hackernews and reddit. From this empirical evidence one thing is clear - whether the AI winter is close or not, it is a very sensitive and provocative subject. Almost as if many people felt something under their skin...

Anyway, in this quick followup post, I'd like to respond to some of the points and explain some misunderstandings.

Hype is not fading, it is cracking.

First off, many citations to my post were put in context that the AI hype is fading. This was not my point at all. The hype is doing very well. Some of the major propagandists have gone quieter but much like I explained in the post, on the surface everything is still nice and colorful. You have to look below the propaganda to see the cracks. It would actually be great if the hype faded down but that is not how it works. When the stock market crashes, it is not like everybody slowly begin to admit that they overpaid for … Read more...

Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so called AI revolution for quite a few years now, and many people had believed that it is the silver bullet that will take us to the world of wonders of technological singularity (general AI). Many bets were made in 2014, 2015 and 2016 when still new boundaries were pushed, such as the Alpha Go etc.  Companies such as Tesla were announcing through the mouths of their CEO's that fully self driving car was very close, to the point that Tesla even started selling that option to customers [to be enabled by future software update].

We have now mid 2018 and things have changed. Not on the surface yet, NIPS conference is still oversold, the corporate PR still has AI all over its press releases, Elon Musk still keeps promising self driving cars and Google CEO keeps repeating Andrew Ng's slogan that AI is bigger than electricity. But this narrative begins to crack. And as I predicted in my older post, the place where the cracks are most visible is autonomous driving - an actual application of the technology in the real world.

The dust settled on deep learning

When … Read more...

Those who regularly read my blog are aware that I'm a bit skeptical of the current AI "benchmarks" and whether they serve the field well. In particular I think that the lack of definition of intelligence is the major elephant in the room. For a proof that this apparently is not a well recognized issue take this recent twitter thread:

Aside from the broader context of this thread discussing evolution and learning, Ilya Sutskever, one of the leading deep learning researchers, is expressing a nice sounding empirical approach: we don't have to argue, we can just test. Well, as it may clearly follow from my reply, I don't think this is really the case. I have no idea what Sutskever means by "obviously more intelligent" - do you? Does he mean better ability to overfit existing datasets? Play yet another Atari computer game? I find this approach prevalent in the circles associated with deep learning, as if this field had some very well defined empirical measurement foundation. Quite the opposite is true: the field is driven by a dogma that a "dataset" (blessed as standard in the field by some committee) and some God given measure (put Hinton, LeCun or … Read more...

A year ago I wrote a post summarizing the disengagement data that the state of California requires from the companies developing Autonomous Vehicles. The thesis of my post back then was that the achieved disengagement rates were not yet comparable to human safety levels. It is 2018 now and new data has been released to it is perhaps a good time to revisit my claims.

Let me first show the data:

And in a separate plot for better readability just Waymo, the unquestionable leader of that race (so far at least):

 

So where did that data came from? There are several sources:

1. California DMV disengagement reports for years 2017, 2016 and 2015
2. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety fatality data.
3. RAND driving to safety report.
4. Bureau of Transportation Statistics

One can easily verify the numbers plotted above with all of these sources. Now before we start any discussion let's recall what California defines as a qualifying event:

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In this post I'd like to present a slightly different take on AI and expose one dimension of Intelligence which we hardly explore with mainstream efforts. In order to do that, I'll use a metaphor, which should hopefully make things clear. As with every analogy, this one is also bound to be imperfect, but should be sufficient to get certain idea across.

The metaphor

The way I see progress in artificial intelligence (AI) could be summarized with the following (visual) metaphor:

Imagine that elevation symbolizes ability to accomplish certain level of performance in a given task, and each horizontal position (latitude/longitude) represents a task. Human intelligence is like a mountain, tall and rather flat, just like one of those buttes in Monument Valley. Let's call this mountain "Mt. Intelligence". A lot of horizontal space is covered by the hill (representing the vast amount of tasks that can be accomplished), less intelligent animals can be represented by lower hills covering different areas of task space.

In this setting our efforts in AI resemble building towers. They are very narrow and shaky, but by strapping together a bunch of cables and duct tape we can often reach elevation higher than the "human … Read more...

Most people (at least those with college education) are well aware of how exponential growth works. The typical (correct) intuition is that when things are growing exponentially, they may initially look like nothing, in fact things may go very slow for quite a while, but eventually there is an explosion and exponential growth eventually outpaces everything sub-exponential. What is less commonly appreciated is that exponential decay works similarly - things exist, get smaller and effectively at some point become nonexistent. It is almost as if there was a discrete transition. Let us keep that in mind while we discuss some probability theory below.

Gauss and Cauchy

Gauss and Cauchy were two very famous mathematicians, both having countless contributions in various areas of mathematics. Coincidentally, two seemingly similarly looking probability distributions are named after these two individuals. And although many people working in data science and engineering have relatively good understanding of Gaussian distribution (otherwise known as "normal" distribution), Cauchy distribution is less known. It is also a very interesting beast, as it is an example of a much less "normal" distribution than Gaussian and most intuitions from typical statistics fail in the context of Cauchy. Although Cauchy like distributions are … Read more...

Introduction

One of the hallmarks of science is the reproducibility of results. It lies at the very foundation of our epistemology that objectivity of a result could only be assured if others are able to independently reproduce the experiment.

One could argue that science today actually has various issues with reproducibility, e.g. results obtained in a unique instrument (such as the LHC - Large Hydron Collider) cannot be reproduced anywhere, simply because nobody has another such instrument. At least in this case the results are in principle reproducible, and aside from the lack of another instrument, the basic scientific methodology can remain intact. Things get a bit more hairy with AI.

Determinism, reproducibility and randomness

The one hidden assumption with reproducibility is that the reality is roughly deterministic, and the results of the experiment depend deterministically on the experimental setup. After carefully tuning the initial conditions we expect the same experimental result. But things start to be more complex when our experiment itself is statistical in nature and relies on a random sample.

For example the experiment called elections: once the experiment is performed it cannot be reproduced, since the outcome of the first experiment affects substantially the system studied … Read more...

With today's advancements in AI we often see media reports of superhuman performance in some task. These often quite dramatic announcements should however be treated with a dose of skepticism, as many of them may result purely from pathologies in measures applied to the problem. In this post I'd like to show what I mean by a "measurement pathology". I therefore constructed a simple example, which hopefully will  to get the point across.

Example: measuring lemons

Imagine somebody came to your machine learning lab/company with a following problem: identify lemons in a photo. This problems sounds clear enough, but in order to build an actual machine learning system that will accomplish such task, we have to formalize what this means in the form of a measure (of performance). The way this typically begins, is that some student will laboriously label the dataset. For the sake of this example, my dataset consists of a single image with approximately 50 lemons in it:

As mentioned the picture was carefully labeled:

With human labeled mask here:

Now that there is a ground truth label we can establish a measurement. One way to formally express the desire to identify lemons in this picture … Read more...

Regular readers by now may have gathered that I'm skeptical about the current self driving car hype. To make things clear: this is not because I would not like to use a driverless car, or that because I think it is fundamentally impossible. My skepticism is merely caused by my concern that the technology we have right not is not mature enough for such application. That includes both the fundamental technological primitives in the space of AI as well as economic feasibility. Also the increasing hype and sensational press reports are not improving the realistic and fact based discussion that should take place.

The argument that is often repeated in popular press and used by the proponents of autonomous cars is that they will be much safer than humans. This argument is very potent and emotional, as nearly each one of us had a relative killed in a car accident and the number of these accidents is still too high (even though in absolute terms motor vehicle related fatalities are very rare). I would certainly like to see the improved safety by whatever means, the lowest hanging fruits in this space I think are: better training and testing of drivers … Read more...