Understanding Neural Network, Visually

189 points24 comments3 days ago
tpdly

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

For the visual learners, here's a classic intro to how LLMs work: https://bbycroft.net/llm

esafak

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.

shrekmas

As someone who does not use Twitter, I suggest adding RSS to your site.

brudgers
8cvor6j844qw_d6

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?

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jazzpush2

I love this visual article as well:

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

ge96

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

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jetfire_1711

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.

cwt137

This visualizations reminds me of the 3blue1brown videos.

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4fterd4rk

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).

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artemonster

I get 3fps on my chrome, most likely due to disabled HW acceleration

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anon291

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

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pks016

Great visualization!

javaskrrt

very cool stuff