Dense Sample Deep Learning
This work addresses a foundational gap in AI by providing insights into deep learning dynamics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing visualization methods.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding learning mechanisms and representations in deep learning by using a novel high-density sample task with a large VGG network, allowing careful observation of category structure emergence and feature construction, and proposes a new theory of complex feature construction based on these results.
Deep Learning (DL) , a variant of the neural network algorithms originally proposed in the 1980s, has made surprising progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI), ranging from language translation, protein folding, autonomous cars, and more recently human-like language models (CHATbots), all that seemed intractable until very recently. Despite the growing use of Deep Learning (DL) networks, little is actually understood about the learning mechanisms and representations that makes these networks effective across such a diverse range of applications. Part of the answer must be the huge scale of the architecture and of course the large scale of the data, since not much has changed since 1987. But the nature of deep learned representations remain largely unknown. Unfortunately training sets with millions or billions of tokens have unknown combinatorics and Networks with millions or billions of hidden units cannot easily be visualized and their mechanisms cannot be easily revealed. In this paper, we explore these questions with a large (1.24M weights; VGG) DL in a novel high density sample task (5 unique tokens with at minimum 500 exemplars per token) which allows us to more carefully follow the emergence of category structure and feature construction. We use various visualization methods for following the emergence of the classification and the development of the coupling of feature detectors and structures that provide a type of graphical bootstrapping, From these results we harvest some basic observations of the learning dynamics of DL and propose a new theory of complex feature construction based on our results.