Brains, sex, and machine learning -- Hinton google tech talk.
- Hinton believes in the the power of crowds -- he thinks that the brain fits many, many different models to the data, then selects afterward.
- Random forests, as used in predator, is an example of this: they average many simple to fit and simple to run decision trees. (is apparently what Kinect does)
- Talk focuses on dropout, a clever new form of model averaging where only half of the units in the hidden layers are trained for a given example.
- He is inspired by biological evolution, where sexual reproduction often spontaneously adds or removes genes, hence individual genes or small linked genes must be self-sufficient. This equates to a 'rugged individualism' of units.
- Likewise, dropout forces neurons to be robust to the loss of co-workers.
- This is also great for parallelization: each unit or sub-network can be trained independently, on it's own core, with little need for communication! Later, the units can be combined via genetic algorithms then re-trained.
- Hinton then observes that sending a real value p (output of logistic function) with probability 0.5 is the same as sending 0.5 with probability p. Hence, it makes sense to try pure binary neurons, like biological neurons in the brain.
- Indeed, if you replace the backpropagation with single bit propagation, the resulting neural network is trained more slowly and needs to be bigger, but it generalizes better.
- Neurons (allegedly) do something very similar to this by poisson spiking. Hinton claims this is the right thing to do (rather than sending real numbers via precise spike timing) if you want to robustly fit models to data.
- Sending stochastic spikes is a very good way to average over the large number of models fit to incoming data.
- Yes but this really explains little in neuroscience...
- Paper referred to in intro: Livnat, Papadimitriou and Feldman, PMID-19073912 and later by the same authors PMID-20080594
- A mixability theory for the role of sex in evolution. -- "We define a measure that represents the ability of alleles to perform well across different combinations and, using numerical iterations within a classical population-genetic framework, show that selection in the presence of sex favors this ability in a highly robust manner"
- Plus David MacKay's concise illustration of why you need sex, pg 269, __Information theory, inference, and learning algorithms__
- With rather simple assumptions, asexual reproduction yields 1 bit per generation,
- Whereas sexual reproduction yields , where G is the genome size.
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