An Automatic Observer for Neural Nets
August 25, 2017
We are making progress in training AI systems through the neural net approach, but exactly how those systems make their decisions remains difficult to discern. Now, Tech Crunch reveals, “MIT CSAIL Research Offers a Fully Automated Way to Peer Inside Neural Nets.” Writer Darrell Etherington recalls that, a couple years ago, the same team of researchers described a way to understand these decisions using human reviewers. A fully automated process will be much more efficient and lead to greater understanding of what works and what doesn’t. Etherington explains:
Current deep learning techniques leave a lot of questions around how systems actually arrive at their results – the networks employ successive layers of signal processing to classify objects, translate text, or perform other functions, but we have very little means of gaining insight into how each layer of the network is doing its actual decision-making. The MIT CSAIL team’s system uses doctored neural nets that report back the strength with which every individual node responds to a given input image, and those images that generate the strongest response are then analyzed. This analysis was originally performed by Mechanical Turk workers, who would catalogue each based on specific visual concepts found in the images, but now that work has been automated, so that the classification is machine-generated. Already, the research is providing interesting insight into how neural nets operate, for example showing that a network trained to add color to black and white images ends up concentrating a significant portion of its nodes to identifying textures in the pictures.
The write-up points us to MIT’s own article on the subject for more information. We’re reminded that, because the human thought process is still largely a mystery to us, AI neural nets are based on hypothetical models that attempt to mimic ourselves. Perhaps, the piece suggests, a better understanding of such systems could inform the field of neuroscience. Sounds fair.
Cynthia Murrell, August 25, 2017
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