Understanding Neural Network, Visually
176 points
3 days ago
| 14 comments
| visualrambling.space
| HN
tpdly
4 hours ago
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Lovely visualization. I like the very concrete depiction of middle layers "recognizing features", that make the whole machine feel more plausible. I'm also a fan of visualizing things, but I think its important to appreciate that some things (like 10,000 dimension vector as the input, or even a 100 dimension vector as an output) can't be concretely visualized, and you have to develop intuitions in more roundabout ways.

I hope make more of these, I'd love to see a transformer presented more clearly.

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helloplanets
4 hours ago
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For the visual learners, here's a classic intro to how LLMs work: https://bbycroft.net/llm
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esafak
5 hours ago
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This is just scratching the surface -- where neural networks were thirty years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database

If you want to understand neural networks, keep going.

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jetfire_1711
35 minutes ago
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Spent 10 minutes on the site and I think this is where I'll start my day from next week! I just love visual based learning.
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8cvor6j844qw_d6
1 hour ago
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Oh wow, this looks like a 3d render of a perceptron when I started reading about neural networks. I guess essentially neural networks are built based on that idea? Inputs > weight function to to adjust the final output to desired values?
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brudgers
1 day ago
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jazzpush2
1 hour ago
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I love this visual article as well:

https://mlu-explain.github.io/neural-networks/

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ge96
3 hours ago
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I like the style of the site it has a "vintage" look

Don't think it's moire effect but yeah looking at the pattern

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Bengalilol
54 minutes ago
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ge96
36 minutes ago
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Oh god my eyes! As it zooms in (ha)

That's cool, rendering shades in the old days

Man those graphics are so good damn

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cwt137
3 hours ago
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This visualizations reminds me of the 3blue1brown videos.
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giancarlostoro
3 hours ago
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I was thinking the same thing. Its at least the same description.
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artemonster
2 hours ago
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I get 3fps on my chrome, most likely due to disabled HW acceleration
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nerdsniper
2 hours ago
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High FPS on Safari M2 MBP.
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4fterd4rk
5 hours ago
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Great explanation, but the last question is quite simple. You determine the weights via brute force. Simply running a large amount of data where you have the input as well as the correct output (handwriting to text in this case).
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ggambetta
4 hours ago
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"Brute force" would be trying random weights and keeping the best performing model. Backpropagation is compute-intensive but I wouldn't call it "brute force".
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Ygg2
4 hours ago
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"Brute force" here is about the amount of data you're ingesting. It's no Alpha Zero, that will learn from scratch.
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jazzpush2
1 hour ago
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What? Either option requires sufficient data. Brute force implies iterating over all combinations until you find the best weights. Back-prop is an optimization technique.
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anon291
2 hours ago
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Nice visuals, but misses the mark. Neural networks transform vector spaces, and collect points into bins. This visualization shows the structure of the computation. This is akin to displaying a Matrix vector multiplication in Wx + b notation, except W,x,and b have more exciting displays.

It completely misses the mark on what it means to 'weight' (linearly transform), bias (affine transform) and then non-linearly transform (i.e, 'collect') points into bins

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titzer
2 hours ago
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> but misses the mark

It doesn't match the pictures in your head, but it nevertheless does present a mental representation the author (and presumably some readers) find useful.

Instead of nitpicking, perhaps pointing to a better visualization (like maybe this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChfEO8l-fas) could help others learn. Otherwise it's just frustrating to read comments like this.

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pks016
2 hours ago
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Great visualization!
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javaskrrt
3 hours ago
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very cool stuff
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