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by wackspurt 3355 days ago
(Apologies for the slightly incoherent post below)

I've been noticing a lot of work that digs into ML model internals (as they've done here to find the sentiment neuron) to understand why they work or use them to do something. Let me recall interesting instances of this:

1. Sander Dieleman's blog post about using CNNs at Spotify to do content-based recommendations for music. He didn't write about the system performance but collected playlists that maximally activated each of the CNN filters (early layer filters picked up on primitive audio features, later ones picked up on more abstract features). The filters were essentially learning the musical elements specific to various subgenres.

2. The ELI5 - Explain Like I'm Five - Python Library. It explains the outputs of many linear classifiers. I've used it to explain why a text classifier was given a certain prediction: it highlights features to show how much or little they contribute to the prediction (dark red for negative contribution, dark green for positive contribution).

3. FairML: Auditing black-box models. Inspecting the model to find which features are important. With privacy and security concerns too!

Since deep learning/machine learning is very empirical at this stage, I think improvements in instrumentation can lead to ML/DL being adopted for more kinds of problems. For example: chemical/biological data. I'd be highly curious to what new ways of inspecting such kinds of data would be insightful (we can play audio input that maximally active filters for a music-related network, we can visualize what filters are learning in an object detection network, etc.)