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Comment by oillio | Hacker News Reader

Good article and great tech. However, I don't know if I believe the results are as good as they claim. Many of the pictures look a bit off to me, like they all have dead eyes. Maybe celebrities generally look like that anyway, so it is being true to form. :)

In particular, I think this guy is missing a pretty significant part of his head: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2017/12/26/ai-faces/8e...

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The inventor of GANs, which have been considered the most interesting idea in ML in the last decade, is Ian Goodfellow. I met him on reddit a few years ago. I was supposed to get private ML tutoring from him, just around the time Andrew Ng opened the first Coursera course. I didn't get lessons because I gave up and eventually took the MOOC. But it's amazing to know we share the same forums and sometimes exchange a comment or two.

The great idea about GANs is that they replace one of the most hard to understand parts of a neural net - the "Loss function" - with another neural net, thus making the loss function learnable. This opens up the door for a kind of unsupervised learning that was impossible to make work before. GANs are very very important also because they are almost like reinforcement learning (actor + critic = RL, generator + discriminator = GAN), and RL is supposed to be the way to AGI.

The most famous problem of GANs is instability during training and mode collapse - which is like a student learning especially for an exam (and not in general) thus optimising for the test instead of the real thing.

> The most famous problem of GANs is instability during training and mode collapse - which is like a student learning especially for an exam (and not in general) thus optimising for the test instead of the real thing.

I must confess I haven't worker with GANs yet, but isn't that the whole point of GANs? Student is optimising for the test while the teacher is learning how to make tests as similar to reality as possible?

If I understand correctly, the main challenge is finding a way to allow teacher and student (well, generator and adversary) to learn at a similar rate, so that one doesn't stop learning because its competitor is too advanced. Is that correct?

> but isn't that the whole point of GANs?

not quite, but youre on the right path.

think about it this way: you (the generative model) are trying to predict a unit gaussian, which is just a fancy way to say bell curve. you get +1 if you predict a number in this distribution (eg 0.1 or -0.5, which is within one standard deviation of the mean of 0); you get -1 if you predict a number thats "far" from this distribution (something like 40 - which has an infinitesimally low probability of being drawn from a unit gaussian).

mode collapse, then, is when you predict 0 all the time. yes, you are technically correct but youve failed to learn the true distribution.

obviously ive simplified this quite a bit and have anthropomorphize the model, but i hope you get the gist. otherwise, the [original paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661) is refreshingly easy to read.

Thanks!

> RL is supposed to be the way to AGI

Could you expand on that? The more I read from folks like LeCunn & Chollet seem to disagree strongly. Just this week Yan posted about unsupervised modeling (with or without DL) to be the next path forward, and described RL as essentially a roundabout way of doing supervised learning.

that is true: popular rl techniques (eg policy gradients) are very similar to "vanilla" supervised learning techniques and architectures, but they are unsupervised in the sense that they required zero human input.

alphago zero is the canonical example of tabula rasa machine learning.

RL/DRL assumes world is Markovian, i.e. past doesn't matter between two states, which is way too simple. It requires huge amount of tries/episodes and properly tuned exploration-exploitation ratio. It is somewhat based on biological reinforcement learning, so there might be basis in reality as it is with convolutional neural networks and visual field maps in visual cortex (even if very rough approximation). DRL is the technique that allows modeling decisions; so for predictions you have CNN/RNN/FCN, for generation GANs and for decisions DRL; together they are closest to AGI we have right now.

> RL/DRL assumes world is Markovian, i.e. past doesn't matter between two states, which is way too simple.

There's plenty of RL papers using RNNs and some types of memory networks.

Likely as value function approximators for one piece of the whole algorithm (as is the case with DQN/DDQN). However the main algorithm is likely using variation of Bellman equation, that assumes Markovian property and gives strong guarantees about convergence.

If you're using DQN or pretty much anything in DRL, you don't have any guarantees about convergence in the first place, and using a RNN does give you the history summary you need (at least up to the minimum error achievable with that fixed-length summary, not that that is any more likely to converge than the overall DRL algo is).

I meant that under Markovian assumption value iteration used for Bellman equation is guaranteed to converge. So it makes math people happy, even if such property doesn't hold in the real world nor in the problem they try to solve, and the "deep" in DRL is just heuristics, though surprisingly working in many cases.

> private ML tutoring from him

> I didn't get lessons because I gave up and eventually took the MOOC

Udacity still didn't get him onboard. I took DLF ND because of the tutoring they promised, did GANs as my first project to be in the queue, then graduated later still with no mentoring sessions. So you didn't miss anything by dropping out. How were Ng's new lessons? Worth taking it if I did DLF + fast.ai already?

BTW, GANs main use might be allowing almost fully unsupervised learning by extending small datasets with believable data.

> BTW, GANs main use might be allowing almost fully unsupervised learning by extending small datasets with believable data.

I've wondered if dreams are basically this. Your brain uses its world-model-prediction subsystem to generate plausible inputs against which to train its action-generation-policy subsystem. Then, in real life, the action-generation-policy subsystem can react much more appropriately and quickly to real events.

Also, toddlers' stream-of-consciousness babbling when they first start talking. They narrate everything and more than once I've wondered if it's essentially them generating their own verbal training data. When they start talking to themselves their pronunciation, grammar etc. start improving much more rapidly.

Even better: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2017/12/26/ai-faces/8e...

That's one heck of a receding hairline, meaning receding out of the plane of existence.

You were primed to be looking for flaws by the nature of the article. It wouldn't be hard to come up with a context where each and every one of the 3x3 grid of pictures in that article was accepted at face value.

They might work as thumbnails, but these are terrible when blown up to full size. When given both images I was trying to find one that might be real thinking it could be some freaky filter or something. And I still had a 'these are terrible fakes feeling.'

Even the 'best' headline image fails as the eyes are not the same size and the rest of the face just looks off.

Did you even read my comment? They're not perfect, but you were expecting them to be fake. Someone not told there would be computer generated images would be considerably easier to fool.

Also, probably the bigger risk is not that you'll be shown an entirely fabricated image, but rather that someone could convincingly be inserted into an existing image.

I was not thinking about fake images when looking at the article this was pure instinctive revulsion. It's easier to avoid the uncanny valley with pictures than motion, but some of theses fall deep into it and many others don't even make it that far.

In most cases hair gave it away for me, especially at the contours. The picture you linked is an extreme example.

However, give it to a good Photoshop artist, like most celebrity pictures are, and I'm sure these issues will be fixed in no time.

Most likes I ever got on OKCupid was when I used a GAN-generated celebrity as my profile picture. Just one girl noticed something wasn't quite right.

The test of believability they give in the article is also bullshit. Both of the options are fakes, they both even look like fakes. Her hair and forehead doesn't make sense, his mouth and ears don't make sense. They don't match it up against a real picture because people's performance on that task would contradict the headline.

> The test of believability yep! that is the fundamental limitation of adversarial networks. theres no good measure or "loss", as it's highly subjective.

And the ears are not "compatible" either. Could this be the reason they prefer women's faces (with long hair which covers ears) in the article?

https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2017/12/26/ai-faces/8e...

Several of them seem to be using many features from specific celebrities. It may just be me, but there is a very strong similarity to Paul Walker, Liv Tyler, Michael Douglas and Adam Sandler in some of these. I don't know if it's a result of overfitting?

To me the fine details are incongruent: the grain of the hair sporadically changes direction, patches of skin have different qualities. It looks like a bit of Frankenstein's work.

The hair was the giveaway to me. I stared at the two "which one is real" images for a couple minutes thinking, "They both have that fake looking wavy hair, I thought for sure neither was real."

Cheap trick NYTimes. Cheap.

look at their foreheads, there's still like blurry half-generated wavey hair texture on their skin.

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