Understanding Neural Network, Visually

(visualrambling.space)

238 points | by surprisetalk 3 days ago

20 comments

  • vivzkestrel 30 minutes ago
    - while impressive, it still doesnt tell me why a neural network is architected the way it is and that my bois is where this guy comes in https://threads.championswimmer.in/p/why-are-neural-networks...

    - make a visualization of the article above and it would be the biggest aha moment in tech

    • tpdly 10 hours ago
      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.

      • helloplanets 10 hours ago
        For the visual learners, here's a classic intro to how LLMs work: https://bbycroft.net/llm
        • esafak 11 hours ago
          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.

          • abrookewood 3 hours ago
            Which, if you are trying to learn the basics, is actually a great place to start ...
          • brudgers 1 day ago
            • swframe2 4 hours ago
              This Welch Labs video is very helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx7hirqgfuU
              • chan1 3 hours ago
                Super cool visualization Found this vid by 3Blue1Brown super helpful for visualizing transformers as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M&t=1198s
                • 8cvor6j844qw_d6 8 hours ago
                  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?
                  • mr_toad 2 hours ago
                    The layers themselves are basically perceptrons, not really any different to a generalized linear model.

                    The ‘secret sauce’ in a deep network is the hidden layer with a non-linear activation function. Without that you could simplify all the layers to a linear model.

                    • sva_ 4 hours ago
                      A neural network is basically a multilayer perceptron

                      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilayer_perceptron

                      • adammarples 5 hours ago
                        Yes, vanilla neural networks are just lots of perceptrons
                      • ge96 10 hours ago
                        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

                      • jazzpush2 8 hours ago
                        I love this visual article as well:

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

                        • atultw 1 hour ago
                          Nice work
                          • jetfire_1711 7 hours ago
                            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.
                            • 4fterd4rk 12 hours ago
                              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).
                              • ggambetta 11 hours ago
                                "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".
                                • Ygg2 11 hours ago
                                  "Brute force" here is about the amount of data you're ingesting. It's no Alpha Zero, that will learn from scratch.
                                  • jazzpush2 8 hours ago
                                    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.
                              • cwt137 9 hours ago
                                This visualizations reminds me of the 3blue1brown videos.
                                • giancarlostoro 9 hours ago
                                  I was thinking the same thing. Its at least the same description.
                                • artemonster 8 hours ago
                                  I get 3fps on my chrome, most likely due to disabled HW acceleration
                                • shrekmas 5 hours ago
                                  As someone who does not use Twitter, I suggest adding RSS to your site.
                                  • anon291 9 hours ago
                                    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

                                    • titzer 8 hours ago
                                      > 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.

                                    • pks016 9 hours ago
                                      Great visualization!
                                      • javaskrrt 10 hours ago
                                        very cool stuff