Re:An Elementary Introduction to Information Geometry [pdf]
by amirkdv on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @09:57PM
(#24646436)
That's indeed mathematically very exciting and reason enough to study IG.
But does IG allow us to reason about Neural Nets in new ways that could move the needle on open questions about information representation in ANNs or, even better, BNNs?
Re:An Elementary Introduction to Information Geometry [pdf]
by antixk on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @10:56PM
(#24646819)
Good question. Most people are focussing on the natural gradient and making it as efficient as SGD. But some have been exploring if we can introduce inductive bias in the function space rather than the weight space, using IG. But it is still quite a new field.
Re:An Elementary Introduction to Information Geometry [pdf]
by ogogmad on Thursday October 01, 2020 @03:53AM
(#24648489)
BNNs?
Re:An Elementary Introduction to Information Geometry [pdf]
by jmt_ on Thursday October 01, 2020 @08:55AM
(#24650295)
They're distinguishing between artificial neural networks(ANN) and biological neural networks(BNN)
Re:An Elementary Introduction to Information Geometry [pdf]
by 7373737373 on Thursday October 01, 2020 @01:50AM
(#24647780)
Perhaps one day this could be used to reduce distance between mathematical proofs in "proof space"? :)
Now what's all this gotta do with Information? Usually, information is represented in terms of statistical distributions, from Shannon's information theory. What the early founders of IG observed is that, these statistical distributions can be represented as points on some curved space called a Statistical Manifold. Now, all the terms used in information theory can be reinterpreted in terms of geometry.
So, why is it so exciting? Well in Deep Learning people predominantly work statistical distributions, some even without realising it. All our optimizations involve reducing distance between some statistical distributions like the distribution of of the data and the distribution that the neural network is trying to model. Turns out, such optimization when done in the space of statistical manifold, amounts to the gradient descent that we all know and love. All the gradient based optimisations are only approximations to the local geometry like gradient(local slope) , Hessian(local quadratic approximation of curvature), but optimisation in the statistical manifold can yield the exact curvature and thus are more efficient. This method is called Natural Gradient.
Hope this helps.