Connectionists: Stephen Hanson in conversation with Geoff Hinton

[Gary Marcus]

Dear John, 

I agree with you that cluttered scenes are critical, but Geoff’s GLOM paper [https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/glomfinal.pdf] might actually have some relevance. It may well be that we need to do a better job with parts and whole before we can fully address clutter, and Geoff is certainly taking that question seriously.

Geoff’s “Stable islands of identical vectors” do sound suspiciously like symbols to me (in a good way!), but regardless, they seem to me to be a plausible candidate as a foundation for coping with clutter. 

And not just cluttered scenes, but also relations between multiple objects in a scene, which is another example of the broader issue you raise, challenging for pure MLPs but critical for deeper AI.

Gary

> On Feb 7, 2022, at 00:23, Juyang Weng <juyang.weng at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Dear Geoff Hinton,
> I respect that you have been working on pattern recognition on isolated characters using neural networks.
> 
> However, I am deeply disappointed that after receiving the Turing Award 2018, you are still falling behind your own award work by talking about "how you
> recognize that a handwritten 2 is a 2."  You have fallen behind our group's 
> Creceptron work in 1992, let alone our group's work on 3D-to-2D-to-3D Conscious Learning using DNs.   Both deal with cluttered scenes.  
> 
> Specifically, you will never be able to get a correct causal explanation by looking at a single hand-written 2.   Your problem is too small to explain a brain network.  You must look at cluttered sciences, with many objects.  
> 
> Yours humbly,
> -John
>  ----
> Message: 7
> Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2022 15:24:02 -0500
> From: Geoffrey Hinton <geoffrey.hinton at gmail.com>
> To: "Dietterich, Thomas" <tgd at oregonstate.edu>
> Cc: AIhub <aihuborg at gmail.com>,
>         "connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu"
>         <connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
> Subject: Re: Connectionists: Stephen Hanson in conversation with Geoff
>         Hinton
> Message-ID:
>         <CAK8NvqpAHbC=T2U3dZb=QaSMVkY4=xCqaYmzu+pq5rnoh+p2mQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> I agree that it's nice to have a causal explanations. But I am not
> convinced there will ever be a simple causal explanation for how you
> recognize that a handwritten 2 is a 2. 
> 
> -- 
> Juyang (John) Weng
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