Neural networks, which learn to perform computational tasks by analyzing large sets of training data, are responsible for today’s best-performing artificial intelligence systems, from speech recognition systems, to automatic translators, to self-driving cars.
But neural nets are black boxes. Once they’ve been trained, even their designers rarely have any idea what they’re doing — what data elements they’re processing and how.
Two years ago, a team of computer-vision researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) described a method for peering into the black box of a neural net trained to identify visual scenes. The method provided some interesting insights, but it required data to be sent to human reviewers recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service.
Neural networks, which learn to perform computational tasks by analyzing large sets of training data, are responsible for today’s best-performing artificial intelligence systems, from speech recognition systems, to automatic translators, to self-driving cars.
But neural nets are black boxes. Once they’ve been trained, even their designers rarely have any idea what they’re doing — what data elements they’re processing and how.
Two years ago, a team of computer-vision researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) described a method for peering into the black box of a neural net trained to identify visual scenes. The method provided some interesting insights, but it required data to be sent to human reviewers recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service.
At this year’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference, CSAIL researchers will present a fully automated version of the same system. Where the previous paper reported the analysis of one type of neural network trained to perform one task, the new paper reports the analysis of four types of neural networks trained to perform more than 20 tasks, including recognizing scenes and objects, colorizing grey images, and solving puzzles. Some of the new networks are so large that analyzing any one of them would have been cost-prohibitive under the old method.
Continue reading at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image: Neural networks learn to perform computational tasks by analyzing large sets of training data. But once they’ve been trained, even their designers rarely have any idea what data elements they’re processing. (Credits: Christine Daniloff / MIT)
