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by ergodic 4837 days ago
At the risk of being a bit annoying... regarding speech recognition, as said here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5376319

they use DNNs not DBNs (DBNs only used for pre-training, sometimes). Also if you read Microsoft's paper Table2, 7 hidden layer networks, which clearly qualifies as deep, work just fine with Back-propagation. Just a bigfat-MLP, no preprocessing! but 17.4 Word Error Rate (WER) vs 17.0 WER for DBN pre-training.

>they're not much like the old ANNs. DBNs are generative probabilistic graphical models using Bayesian inference.

MLPs (DNNs) can also be interpreted probabilistically. Just a directed model where inference is attained by marginalization of the hidden binary nodes in a layer-wise manner and by using a naive mean field approximation. All that to say the classic "forward-pass" ;).

Also could you indicate me a source confirming that Siri (Nuance) also switched to DNNs?. I am interested in that.

>Conceptually, going deeper (LOL) allows the networks to learn higher level concepts.

That is the really interesting part!. Now, I have not seen a proof for that. Wondering at individual neurons modeling individual features of e.g. a face or so is also a trend of the 90s and does not count as proof. I said this because it is what I usually hear.

Until now the justifications I saw for multiple layers of perceptrons being suitable for modeling arbitrary high level abstractions are reduced to

1) MLPs are universal approximators. This in my opinion is a superficial argument. GMMs also allow modeling "any" distribution and Taylor series any linear function, but in reality there are physical limitations to this argument. Maybe is true if you had a billion layer net, but will you get there?. If you had that computing power maybe a more realistic modeling of the brain might work better

2) They resemble how brain architecture works and similar arguments. Which I am fairly sure is not true. There are more human-brain based approaches to AI like e.g. cortical learning algorithms and those just seem to model that stuff to a certain extent.