GaryGaulin
Posts: 5385 Joined: Oct. 2012
|
Here is how well the supposedly "ground truthed" AI neural networks that Wesley and others have been looking for and demanding from me are doing right now:
www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-wizard-unveils-a-new-twist-on-neural-networks/ Quote | GOOGLE’S AI WIZARD UNVEILS A NEW TWIST ON NEURAL NETWORKS
IF YOU WANT to blame someone for the hoopla around artificial intelligence, 69-year-old Google researcher Geoff Hinton is a good candidate.
The droll University of Toronto professor jolted the field onto a new trajectory in October 2012. With two grad students, Hinton showed that an unfashionable technology he’d championed for decades called artificial neural networks permitted a huge leap in machines’ ability to understand images. Within six months, all three researchers were on Google’s payroll. Today neural networks transcribe our speech, recognize our pets, and fight our trolls. But Hinton now belittles the technology he helped bring to the world. “I think the way we’re doing computer vision is just wrong,” he says. “It works better than anything else at present but that doesn’t mean it’s right.”
In its place, Hinton has unveiled another “old” idea that might transform how computers see—and reshape AI. That’s important because computer vision is crucial to ideas such as self-driving cars, and having software that plays doctor.
Late last week, Hinton released two research papers that he says prove out an idea he’s been mulling for almost 40 years. “It’s made a lot of intuitive sense to me for a very long time, it just hasn’t worked well,” Hinton says. “We’ve finally got something that works well.”
Hinton’s new approach, known as capsule networks, is a twist on neural networks intended to make machines better able to understand the world through images or video. In one of the papers posted last week, Hinton’s capsule networks matched the accuracy of the best previous techniques on a standard test of how well software can learn to recognize handwritten digits.
In the second, capsule networks almost halved the best previous error rate on a test that challenges software to recognize toys such as trucks and cars from different angles. Hinton has been working on his new technique with two colleagues at Google’s Toronto office.
Capsule networks aim to remedy a weakness of today’s machine-learning systems that limits their effectiveness. Image-recognition software in use today by Google and others needs a large number of example photos to learn to reliably recognize objects in all kinds of situations. That’s because the software isn’t very good at generalizing what it learns to new scenarios, for example understanding that an object is the same when seen from a new viewpoint.
To teach a computer to recognize a cat from many angles, for example, could require thousands of photos covering a variety of perspectives. Human children don’t need such explicit and extensive training to learn to recognize a household pet.
Hinton’s idea for narrowing the gulf between the best AI systems and ordinary toddlers is to build a little more knowledge of the world into computer-vision software. Capsules—small groups of crude virtual neurons—are designed to track different parts of an object, such as a cat’s nose and ears, and their relative positions in space. A network of many capsules can use that awareness to understand when a new scene is in fact a different view of something it has seen before.
Hinton formed his intuition that vision systems need such an inbuilt sense of geometry in 1979, when he was trying to figure out how humans use mental imagery. He first laid out a preliminary design for capsule networks in 2011. The fuller picture released last week was long anticipated by researchers in the field. “Everyone has been waiting for it and looking for the next great leap from Geoff,” says Kyunghyun Cho, a professor at NYU who works on image recognition. |
My work has likewise been towards modeling "small groups of crude virtual neurons". I focused on the motor navigation side of the system while Geoff Hinton was focusing on the sensory input side.
For my critics this is the worst-case scenario imaginable. I better prepare for an even more damaging bashing from them.
-------------- The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
|