[HN Gopher] Breaking into the black box of artificial intelligence
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Breaking into the black box of artificial intelligence
        
       Author : rntn
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2022-05-15 20:05 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | SemanticStrengh wrote:
       | It's not that it is a black box that can somehow be unblacked.
       | Neural networks are inherently messy things that have contrived,
       | complex and partial or ad-hoc representations
        
         | burtonator wrote:
         | Also, If you look at each layer as just a vector, how the heck
         | do you describe that so that it's easy to understand?
         | 
         | I think this might be perpetually difficult to diagnose.
         | 
         | Maybe there could be a tool that could show WHY a decision was
         | made but not sure that you could identify bias in deep networks
         | before hand.
        
           | ewuhic wrote:
           | Isn't the "why" the weights of the model themselves?
        
             | sdenton4 wrote:
             | People want brief explanations of reasons for outputs, and
             | a 10gb pile of weights isn't really what they mean.
             | 
             | Human explanations meanwhile are often invented to fit
             | evidence to personal biases and beliefs, and are thus
             | typically deeply flawed. But we're more ok with humans
             | making suspect decisions than ML, in many cases.
        
         | version_five wrote:
         | Yeah, when people want to see e.g. an image classification
         | model explain the different features it saw in the image and
         | the weights it assigned them in making it's decision (this is
         | an example in the article), they are asking for something that
         | isn't what the model does.
         | 
         | ML models have tacit knowledge in a sense, you can't tractably
         | write down a process for it. That's not to say you can't
         | describe the situations in which a model works.
        
         | drdeca wrote:
         | Are you familiar with the "circuits" thread on distill.pub ? (
         | https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/ )
         | 
         | Messy and complex, yes, but not altogether immune to analysis.
         | 
         | And, if the training data is diverse enough, it appears that
         | the individual neurons can reflect things we find meaningful,
         | while being expressed in terms of neurons in previous layers
         | which we also find semantically meaningful, in a way we can
         | find comprehensible.
         | 
         | Of course, the amount of time and effort needed to collectively
         | understand the entirety of such a network (to the point that a
         | similar network could be made by people choosing weights by
         | hand (not copying the specific numbers, only the interpreted
         | meanings/reasons of the numbers), and producing something which
         | is not too much worse than the trained network, would be
         | gargantuan, and I suspect it might require multiple
         | generations, possibly even many.
         | 
         | But, I don't think it is impossible?
         | 
         | (presumably it will never happen, because it would not come
         | anywhere close to being worth it to do the whole thing, but,
         | still.)
        
       | oneoff786 wrote:
       | I feel like articles like this are always... behind. SHAP isn't a
       | perfect tool by any means but it would catch the low hanging
       | fruit like the "R" example
        
         | killjoywashere wrote:
         | Yeah, I skimmed it for about a minute and now I want my minute
         | back.
        
         | burtonator wrote:
         | The R issue is a data cleansing problem too. Data cleansing is
         | something that not many people talk about because it isn't
         | exciting work.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-05-15 23:00 UTC)