When I first started learning deep learning, I only had a vague idea of how backprop worked. It wasn't until I forced myself to implement it from scratch that I realized it was not magic after all. The process was painful, but it gave me much more confidence when debugging models or trying to figure out where the loss was getting stuck. I would really recommend everyone in deep learning try writing it out by hand at least once.

More generally, it's often worth learning and understanding things one step deeper. Having a more fundamental understanding of things explains more of the "why" behind why some things are the way they are, or why we do some things a certain way. There's probably a cutoff point for balancing how much you actually need to know though. You could potentially take things a step further by writing the backwards pass without using matrix multiplication, or spend some time understanding what the numerical value of a gradient means.

Karpathy suggests the following error:

  def clipped_error(x): 
    return tf.select(tf.abs(x) < 1.0, 
                   0.5 * tf.square(x), 
                   tf.abs(x) - 0.5) # condition, true, false

Following the same principles that he outlines in this post, the "- 0.5" part is unnecessary since the gradient of 0.5 is 0, therefore -0.5 doesn't change the backpropagated gradient. In addition, a nicer formula that achieves the same goal as the above is √(x²+1)

Karpathy's work on large datasets for deep neural flow is conceiving of the "backward pass" as the preparation for initializing the mechanics for weight ranges, either as derivatives in -10/+10 statistic deviations.

... (2016)

9 years ago, 365 points, 101 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13215590

I feel like my learning curve for AI is:

1) Learn backprop, etc, basic math

2) Learn more advanced things, CNNs, LMM, NMF, PCA, etc

3) Publish a paper or poster

4) Forget basics

5) Relearn that backprop is a thing

repeat.

Some day I need to get my education together.

Do LLMs still use backprop?

Are dead ReLUs still a pronlem today? Why not?

off-topic, anybody knows what's going on with EurekaLabs? It's been a while since the announcement