[HN Gopher] Cornell and NTT's Physical Neural Nets Enable Arbitr...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Cornell and NTT's Physical Neural Nets Enable Arbitrary Physical
       System Training
        
       Author : rch
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2021-05-29 13:35 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (syncedreview.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (syncedreview.com)
        
       | rich_sasha wrote:
       | Hard to deduce much from the article. Is it that it's a NN where
       | the individual components are physical transforms?
       | 
       | > On the MNIST handwritten digit classification task, the
       | trainable SHG transformations boost the performance of digital
       | operations from roughly 90 percent accuracy to 97 percent.
       | 
       | It is hard to take it seriously, when 97% on MNIST is achievable
       | with the kind of tutorials bundled at the end of PyTorch
       | installation guides - "see you can make a DNN model in 10 lines
       | of code!".
        
         | rch wrote:
         | The paper is linked at the bottom of the article: _Deep
         | physical neural networks enabled by a backpropagation algorithm
         | for arbitrary physical systems_ --
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13386
         | 
         | > physics-aware training (PAT)... allows us to efficiently and
         | accurately execute the backpropagation algorithm on any
         | sequence of physical input-output transformations, directly _in
         | situ_.
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | What they're doing, I think, is compiling a trained neural net
       | into a different form.
       | 
       | (1), training input data (e.g., an image) is input to the
       | physical system, along with parameters.
       | 
       | (2), in the forward pass, the physical system applies its
       | transformation to produce an output.
       | 
       | (3), the physical output is compared to the intended output
       | (e.g., for an image of an '8', a predicted label of 8) to compute
       | the error.
       | 
       | (4), using a differentiable digital model to estimate the
       | gradients of the physical system(s), the gradient of the loss is
       | computed with respect to the controllable parameters.
       | 
       | (5) the parameters are updated according to the inferred
       | gradient.
       | 
       | What they mean by a "physical system" is a series of analog
       | elements with lots of tuning parameters. Like filters. This is a
       | system for setting the tuning parameters. You have to be able to
       | simulate the "physical system", and it has to be mostly
       | differentiable, so you can tune by hill-climbing.
       | 
       | The control systems people ought to like this, because the output
       | is a control system that's made of components with predictable
       | and continuous properties. You want to know that if if does the
       | right thing for an input of 1.0 and 1.5, it doesn't do something
       | totally unexpected for 1.365. This may be a way to get there.
       | 
       | This may be the mechanism behind "muscle memory". Tasks get
       | optimized down to a control system that executes fast, but
       | doesn't retrain easily.
       | 
       | The problems they chose to work on seem strange, but that may
       | reflect their funding or interests. This might be worth trying
       | for, say, quadcopter control. You might be able to train a neural
       | net controller and then hammer it down into a quick little
       | algorithm that can fit in the onboard computer.
       | 
       | (I subscribe to IEEE Control Systems Journal, and I understand
       | maybe 15% of it.)
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | teruakohatu wrote:
         | The hybrid approach of calculating loss with a physical system
         | and then calculating the gradient using a model narrows the
         | simulation-reality gap. The cost would surley be much, much
         | slower training. If the physical process required, for example,
         | heating and cooling an oven, training would take a very long
         | time.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-05-30 23:01 UTC)