Category: Research

[Initial posting on Nov 29 2020][Updated on Nov 30 2020] added a section about the scaling law w.r.t. the model size, per request from Felix Hill. [Updated on Dec 1 2020] added a paragraph referring to Dauphin & Bengio’s “Big Neural Networks Waste Capacity“.{Update on Feb 8 2021] see “Learning Curve Theory” by Marcus Hutter for a better exposition of the scaling law and where it might be coming from. this is a short post on why i thought (or more like imagined) the scaling laws from <scaling laws for autoregressive generative modeling> by Heninghan et al. “[is] inevitable from

[WARNING: there is nothing “WOW” nor technical about this post, but a piece of thought i had about GPT-3 and few-shot learning.] Many aspects of OpenAI’s GPT-3 have fascinated and continue to fascinate people, including myself. these aspects include the sheer scale, both in terms of the number of parameters, the amount of compute and the size of data, the amazing infrastructure technology that has enabled training this massive model, etc. of course, among all these fascinating aspects, meta-learning, or few-shot learning, seems to be the one that fascinates people most. the idea behind this observation of GPT-3 as a

Update on October 23 2020: After I wrote this post, i was invited to give a talk on this topic of social impacts & bias of AI at the course <Ethics in AI> by Prof. Alice Oh at KAIST. I’m sharing the slide set here: Unreasonably shallow deep learning [slides]. There have been a series of news articles in Korea about AI and its applications that have been worrying me for sometime. I’ve often ranted about them on social media, but I was told that my rant alone is not enough, because it does not tell others why I ranted about

[this post was originally posted here in March 2020 and has been ported here for easier access.] TL;DR: after all, isn’t $k$-NN all we do? in my course, i use $k$-NN as a bridge between a linear softmax classifier and a deep neural net via an adaptive radial basis function network. until this year, i’ve been considering the special case of $k=1$, i.e., 1-NN, only and from there on moved to the adaptive radial basis function network. i decided however to show them how $k$-NN with $k > 1$ could be implemented as a sequence of computational layers this year,

A few weeks ago there was an open house at NYU Center for Data Science intended for faculty members of NYU. As one of the early members of the Center (i know! already!) i was given an opportunity to share why i joined the center and my experience at the Center so far with the audience. although i’m much more familiar with giving a research talk using a set of slides, i decided to try something new and give a talk without any slide. of course, this is totally new to me, and i couldn’t help but prepare a script in advance.