Notes: Little book of deep learning

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Here are my notes from The Little Book of Deep Learning1. It’s a short read at ~ 176 pages in 3 parts and around 8 chapters.

Notable Papers

  • ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks – Krizhevsky et al. (2012)
  • Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition – LeCun et al. (1989)

P1: Machine Learning Foundations

1. Types of Learning

  • Supervised Learning: Regression, classification
  • Unsupervised Learning: Density modeling

2. Efficient Computation

Limiting factor in GPU: memory read-write operations

Tensors: Series of scalars arranged along discrete axes

3. Training Techniques

  • Loss minimization
  • Softmax of logits
  • Autoregressive models: NLP and computer vision
  • Gradient descent and learning rate
  • Backpropagation and activations
  • Autograd – Baydin et al. (2015)

P2: Deep Models

4. Model Components

  • Deep architectures improve performance, yet face challenges like vanishing gradient
  • Layers: Convolutional, activation functions, pooling, attention (transformers)

5. Architectures

  • 5.1 Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP)
  • 5.2 Convolutional Network (ConvNet): Image processing
  • 5.3 Attention Models
  • Transformer – Vaswani et al. (2017) (arXiv)
  • Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) (2018) (OpenAI Paper)
  • Vision Transformer

P3: Applications

6. Prediction

  • Image denoising, classification, object detection, semantic segmentation
  • Speech recognition, text-image, zero-shot prediction
  • Reinforcement learning

7. Synthesis

  • 7.1 Text Generation
    • Few-shot prediction
    • Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
  • 7.2 Image Generation

8. Compute Schism

  • 8.1 Prompt Engineering
  • 8.2 Quantization
  • 8.3 Adapters
  • 8.4 Model Merging

Missing Bits

  • Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN)
  • Autoencoder
  • Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN)
  • Graph Neural Networks (GNN)

Conclusion

This book provides an excellent overview of AI and machine learning fundamentals. A key takeaway is that different models serve different types of learning needs. For instance:

  • Image Generation: GANs, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), autoregressive models
  • Text Generation: RNNs, transformers like GPT and BERT, reinforcement learning models like SeqGAN

 


 

  1. https://fleuret.org/francois/lbdl.html ↩︎

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