On stories in neural networks

http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap3.html#on_stories_in_neural_networks

Question: How do you approach utilizing and researching machine learning techniques that are supported almost entirely empirically, as opposed to mathematically? Also in what situations have you noticed some of these techniques fail?

Answer: You have to realize that our theoretical tools are very weak. Sometimes, we have good mathematical intuitions for why a particular technique should work. Sometimes our intuition ends up being wrong […] The questions become: how well does my method work on this particular problem, and how large is the set of problems on which it works well.

Source: Question and answer with neural networks researcher Yann LeCun

Once, attending a conference on the foundations of quantum mechanics, I noticed what seemed to me a most curious verbal habit: when talks finished, questions from the audience often began with "I'm very sympathetic to your point of view, but […]". Quantum foundations was not my usual field, and I noticed this style of questioning because at other scientific conferences I'd rarely or never heard a questioner express their sympathy for the point of view of the speaker. At the time, I thought the prevalence of the question suggested that little genuine progress was being made in quantum foundations, and people were merely spinning their wheels. Later, I realized that assessment was too harsh. The speakers were wrestling with some of the hardest problems human minds have ever confronted. Of course progress was slow! But there was still value in hearing updates on how people were thinking, even if they didn't always have unarguable new progress to report.

You may have noticed a verbal tic similar to "I'm very sympathetic […]" in the current book. To explain what we're seeing I've often fallen back on saying "Heuristically, […]", or "Roughly speaking, […]", following up with a story to explain some phenomenon or other. These stories are plausible, but the empirical evidence I've presented has often been pretty thin. If you look through the research literature you'll see that stories in a similar style appear in many research papers on neural nets, often with thin supporting evidence. What should we think about such stories?

In many parts of science - especially those parts that deal with simple phenomena - it's possible to obtain very solid, very reliable evidence for quite general hypotheses. But in neural networks there are large numbers of parameters and hyper-parameters, and extremely complex interactions between them. In such extraordinarily complex systems it's exceedingly difficult to establish reliable general statements. Understanding neural networks in their full generality is a problem that, like quantum foundations, tests the limits of the human mind. Instead, we often make do with evidence for or against a few specific instances of a general statement. As a result those statements sometimes later need to be modified or abandoned, when new evidence comes to light.

One way of viewing this situation is that any heuristic story about neural networks carries with it an implied challenge. For example, consider the statement I quoted earlier, explaining why dropout works: "This technique reduces complex co-adaptations of neurons, since a neuron cannot rely on the presence of particular other neurons. It is, therefore, forced to learn more robust features that are useful in conjunction with many different random subsets of the other neurons." This is a rich, provocative statement, and one could build a fruitful research program entirely around unpacking the statement, figuring out what in it is true, what is false, what needs variation and refinement. Indeed, there is now a small industry of researchers who are investigating dropout (and many variations), trying to understand how it works, and what its limits are. And so it goes with many of the heuristics we've discussed. Each heuristic is not just a (potential) explanation, it's also a challenge to investigate and understand in more detai

Of course, there is not time for any single person to investigate all these heuristic explanations in depth. It's going to take decades (or longer) for the community of neural networks researchers to develop a really powerful, evidence-based theory of how neural networks learn. Does this mean you should reject heuristic explanations as unrigorous, and not sufficiently evidence-based? No! In fact, we need such heuristics to inspire and guide our thinking. It's like the great age of exploration: the early explorers sometimes explored (and made new discoveries) on the basis of beliefs which were wrong in important ways. Later, those mistakes were corrected as we filled in our knowledge of geography. When you understand something poorly - as the explorers understood geography, and as we understand neural nets today - it's more important to explore boldly than it is to be rigorously correct in every step of your thinking. And so you should view these stories as a useful guide to how to think about neural nets, while retaining a healthy awareness of the limitations of such stories, and carefully keeping track of just how strong the evidence is for any given line of reasoning. Put another way, we need good stories to help motivate and inspire us, and rigorous in-depth investigation in order to uncover the real facts of the matter.