HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

sbszllr

687 karma · joined August 7, 2018

trustworthy ml ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
submissionscomments
sbszllr··on Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
I don’t know CCPA laws that well, but I do the EU ones. As it stands “the right to erasure / to be forgotten” is extremely vague on this, and there doesn’t seem to be a wide precedent. In general the law is applicable to raw data records and not to aggregate data/metrics, neither to models. However, models in this context refers to one particular ruling w.r.t. to insurance or credit scoring industry (don’t remember exactly which one).

I want to point out that the model doesn’t need to “spit out” removed data. It can be a classifier, or regression model, and not a generative model, and ideally, it would not be trained on your data.

Worth noting that from the technical standpoint, it’s difficult too. Say, a model costs X-large amount of dollars. Normally, I would retrain it e.g. every 6 months. But now I have erasure requests coming in on a regular basis —- retraining often to comply with those is too expensive. There’s a line of research on “machine unlearning” on how to do it efficiently but it’s quite underwhelming so far.

sbszllr··on We Don’t Need a New Twitter
Twitter’s real value was its “global RSS” nature. You could get short, quick updates about local news, published papers, sports events, political happenings, and more.

It made it easy to source info from your followers (or their followers) quickly. Think Ask HN but broader.

Activity on Twitter is down now, mastodon and threads aren’t cutting it. There’s more activity on LinkedIn but it’s quite phoney.

I genuinely feel that Twitter provided me with useful information from people of interest.

sbszllr··on Attention Is Off By One
The family of sigmoid functions has nice gradient properties with theoretical backing. Good starting read: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/162988/why-sigmoid...
sbszllr··on Attention Is Off By One
OP is right in that his change would make the softmax in the attention output zero if it "has nothing to add" (QuietAttention, as he said).

Buuut, it's missing the forest for the trees. The goal of the last step of attention (ref., Fig. 2, left in https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762) is not to add/say anything (as the author is saying) but to compute the relationship between the tokens (QK^T) and V -- in layman terms, simplifying, which tokens are related to each other. The softmax is there because it gives a representation that is nicer to work with, it gives probabilities, instead of unscaled matrix multiplication.

TLDR; author isn't wrong but he isn't right, practically speaking, either.

sbszllr··on To uncover a deepfake video call, ask the caller to turn sideways
Source: I work in the field.

This is a current limitation, and an artifact of the data+method but not something that should be relied upon.

If we do some adversary modelling, we can find two ways to work around this:

1) actively generate and search for such data; perhaps expensive for small actors but not well equipped malicious ones.

2) wait for deep learning to catch up, e.g. by extending NERFs (neural radiance fields) to faces; matter of time.

Now, if your company/government is on the bleeding edge of ML-based deception, they can have such policy, and they will update it 12-18-24 months (or whenever (1) or (2) materialises). However, I don't know one organisation that doesn't have some outdated security guideline that they cling to, e.g. old school password rules and rotations.

Will "turning sideways to spot a deepfake" be a valid test in 5 years? Prolly no, so don't base your secops around this.

← PreviousPage 2 of 2