Connectionists: Scientific Integrity, the 2021 Turing Lecture, etc.

Mon Jan 3 05:56:42 EST 2022

I have been resistant to comment because we are ultimately talking about
bad position jockeying behavior in this field.  The reality is that
everyone here that is successful has had to display some sort of skill in
it.  This is the downfall of academia and will in my opinion be its
ultimate undoing.

With this discussion we have an opportunity to raise awareness and work
towards not repeating it, or at least discussing what can be done about it.

However I am really triggered when it is actively obscured in combination
with claims to be above it by somehow focusing on "new ideas"  while
instead normalizing and actively doing it.

We all know this jockeying and bad behavior unjustifiably helps inhibit new
ideas and then mis-credit when the new ideas eventually get through.  This
inhibition and bad behavior is occurring today.  For example because of
jockeying and turf this community is especially resistant to looking at
models which primarily use self-inhibitory presynaptic feedback (25
years).  Please dont be dismissive of the problems displayed here and act
like we are above it all when we are contributing to the problems right as
we speak.

I suggest instead embracing the problem and discussing how not to repeat it
for future generations.

Sincerely,
-Tsvi

On Sun, Jan 2, 2022 at 11:12 PM Terry Sejnowski <terry at snl.salk.edu> wrote:

> We would be remiss not to acknowledge that backprop would not be
> possible without the calculus,
> so Isaac newton should also have been given credit, at least as much
> credit as Gauss.
>
> All these threads will be sorted out by historians one hundred years
> from now.
> Our precious time is better spent moving the field forward.  There is
> much more to discover.
>
> A new generation with better computational and mathematical tools than
> we had back
> in the last century have joined us, so let us be good role models and
> mentors to them.
>
> Terry
>
> -----
>
> On 1/2/2022 5:43 AM, Schmidhuber Juergen wrote:
> > Asim wrote: "In fairness to Jeffrey Hinton, he did acknowledge the work
> of Amari in a debate about connectionism at the ICNN’97 .... He literally
> said 'Amari invented back propagation'..." when he sat next to Amari and
> Werbos. Later, however, he failed to cite Amari’s stochastic gradient
> descent (SGD) for multilayer NNs (1967-68) [GD1-2a] in his 2015 survey
> [DL3], his 2021 ACM lecture [DL3a], and other surveys.  Furthermore, SGD
> [STO51-52] (Robbins, Monro, Kiefer, Wolfowitz, 1951-52) is not even
> backprop. Backprop is just a particularly efficient way of computing
> gradients in differentiable networks, known as the reverse mode of
> automatic differentiation, due to Linnainmaa (1970) [BP1] (see also
> Kelley's precursor of 1960 [BPa]). Hinton did not cite these papers either,
> and in 2019 embarrassingly did not hesitate to accept an award for having
> "created ... the backpropagation algorithm” [HIN]. All references and more
> on this can be found in the report, especially in !
>  Se!
> >   c. XII.
> >
> > The deontology of science requires: If one "re-invents" something that
> was already known, and only becomes aware of it later, one must at least
> clarify it later [DLC], and correctly give credit in all follow-up papers
> and presentations. Also, ACM's Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct
> [ACM18] states: "Computing professionals should therefore credit the
> creators of ideas, inventions, work, and artifacts, and respect copyrights,
> patents, trade secrets, license agreements, and other methods of protecting
> authors' works." LBH didn't.
> >
> > Steve still doesn't believe that linear regression of 200 years ago is
> equivalent to linear NNs. In a mature field such as math we would not have
> such a discussion. The math is clear. And even today, many students are
> taught NNs like this: let's start with a linear single-layer NN (activation
> = sum of weighted inputs). Now minimize mean squared error on the training
> set. That's good old linear regression (method of least squares). Now let's
> introduce multiple layers and nonlinear but differentiable activation
> functions, and derive backprop for deeper nets in 1960-70 style (still used
> today, half a century later).
> >
> > Sure, an important new variation of the 1950s (emphasized by Steve) was
> to transform linear NNs into binary classifiers with threshold functions.
> Nevertheless, the first adaptive NNs (still widely used today) are 1.5
> centuries older except for the name.
> >
> > Happy New Year!
> >
> > Jürgen
> >
> >
> >> On 2 Jan 2022, at 03:43, Asim Roy <ASIM.ROY at asu.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> And, by the way, Paul Werbos was also there at the same debate. And so
> was Teuvo Kohonen.
> >>
> >> Asim
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Asim Roy
> >> Sent: Saturday, January 1, 2022 3:19 PM
> >> To: Schmidhuber Juergen <juergen at idsia.ch>; connectionists at cs.cmu.edu
> >> Subject: RE: Connectionists: Scientific Integrity, the 2021 Turing
> Lecture, etc.
> >>
> >> In fairness to Jeffrey Hinton, he did acknowledge the work of Amari in
> a debate about connectionism at the ICNN’97 (International Conference on
> Neural Networks) in Houston. He literally said "Amari invented back
> propagation" and Amari was sitting next to him. I still have a recording of
> that debate.
> >>
> >> Asim Roy
> >> Professor, Information Systems
> >> Arizona State University
> >> https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/9973
> >> https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.asim.roy
> >
> > On 2 Jan 2022, at 02:31, Stephen José Hanson <jose at rubic.rutgers.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> > Juergen:  Happy New Year!
> >
> > "are not quite the same"..
> >
> > I understand that its expedient sometimes to use linear regression to
> approximate the Perceptron.(i've had other connectionist friends tell me
> the same thing) which has its own incremental update rule..that is doing
> <0,1> classification.    So I guess if you don't like the analogy to
> logistic regression.. maybe Fisher's LDA?  This whole thing still doesn't
> scan for me.
> >
> > So, again the point here is context.   Do you really believe that Frank
> Rosenblatt didn't reference Gauss/Legendre/Laplace  because it slipped his
> mind??   He certainly understood modern statistics (of the 1940s and 1950s)
> >
> > Certainly you'd agree that FR could have referenced linear regression as
> a precursor, or "pretty similar" to what he was working on, it seems
> disingenuous to imply he was plagiarizing Gauss et al.--right?  Why would
> he?
> >
> > Finally then, in any historical reconstruction, I can think of,  it just
> doesn't make sense.    Sorry.
> >
> > Steve
> >
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
> On Behalf Of Schmidhuber Juergen
> >> Sent: Friday, December 31, 2021 11:00 AM
> >> To: connectionists at cs.cmu.edu
> >> Subject: Re: Connectionists: Scientific Integrity, the 2021 Turing
> Lecture, etc.
> >>
> >> Sure, Steve, perceptron/Adaline/other similar methods of the 1950s/60s
> are not quite the same, but the obvious origin and ancestor of all those
> single-layer  “shallow learning” architectures/methods is indeed linear
> regression; today’s simplest NNs minimizing mean squared error are exactly
> what they had 2 centuries ago. And the first working deep learning methods
> of the 1960s did NOT really require “modern” backprop (published in 1970 by
> Linnainmaa [BP1-5]). For example, Ivakhnenko & Lapa (1965) [DEEP1-2]
> incrementally trained and pruned their deep networks layer by layer to
> learn internal representations, using regression and a separate validation
> set. Amari (1967-68)[GD1] used stochastic gradient descent [STO51-52] to
> learn internal representations WITHOUT “modern" backprop in his multilayer
> perceptrons. Jürgen
> >>
> >>
> >>> On 31 Dec 2021, at 18:24, Stephen José Hanson <jose at rubic.rutgers.edu>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Well the perceptron is closer to logistic regression... but the
> heaviside function  of course is <0,1>   so technically not related to
> linear regression which is using covariance to estimate betas...
> >>>
> >>> does that matter?  Yes, if you want to be hyper correct--as this
> appears to be-- Berkson (1944) coined the logit.. as log odds.. for
> probabilistic classification.. this was formally developed by Cox in the
> early 60s, so unlikely even in this case to be a precursor to perceptron.
> >>>
> >>> My point was that DL requires both Learning algorithm (BP) and an
> >>> architecture.. which seems to me much more responsible for the the
> success of Dl.
> >>>
> >>> S
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On 12/31/21 4:03 AM, Schmidhuber Juergen wrote:
> >>>> Steve, this is not about machine learning in general, just about deep
> >>>> learning vs shallow learning. However, I added the Pandemonium -
> >>>> thanks for that! You ask: how is a linear regressor of 1800
> >>>> (Gauss/Legendre) related to a linear neural network? It's formally
> >>>> equivalent, of course! (The only difference is that the weights are
> >>>> often called beta_i rather than w_i.) Shallow learning: one adaptive
> >>>> layer. Deep learning: many adaptive layers. Cheers, Jürgen
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> On 31 Dec 2021, at 00:28, Stephen José Hanson
> >>>>> <jose at rubic.rutgers.edu>
> >>>>> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Despite the comprehensive feel of this it still appears to me to be
> too focused on Back-propagation per se.. (except for that pesky
> Gauss/Legendre ref--which still baffles me at least how this is related to
> a "neural network"), and at the same time it appears to be missing other
> more general epoch-conceptually relevant cases, say:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Oliver Selfridge  and his Pandemonium model.. which was a
> hierarchical feature analysis system.. which certainly was in the air
> during the Neural network learning heyday...in fact, Minsky cites Selfridge
> as one of his mentors.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Arthur Samuels:  Checker playing system.. which learned a evaluation
> function from a hierarchical search.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Rosenblatt's advisor was Egon Brunswick.. who was a gestalt
> perceptual psychologist who introduced the concept that the world was
> stochastic and the the organism had to adapt to this variance somehow.. he
> called it "probabilistic functionalism"  which brought attention to
> learning, perception and decision theory, certainly all piece parts of what
> we call neural networks.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> There are many other such examples that influenced or provided
> context for the yeasty mix that was 1940s and 1950s where Neural Networks
> first appeared partly due to PItts and McCulloch which entangled the human
> brain with computation and early computers themselves.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I just don't see this as didactic, in the sense of a conceptual view
> of the  multidimensional history of the         field, as opposed to  a
> 1-dimensional exegesis of mathematical threads through various statistical
> algorithms.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Steve
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On 12/30/21 1:03 PM, Schmidhuber Juergen wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> Dear connectionists,
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> in the wake of massive open online peer review, public comments on
> the connectionists mailing list [CONN21] and many additional private
> comments (some by well-known deep learning pioneers) helped to update and
> improve upon version 1 of the report. The essential statements of the text
> remain unchanged as their accuracy remains unchallenged. I'd like to thank
> everyone from the bottom of my heart for their feedback up until this point
> and hope everyone will be satisfied with the changes. Here is the revised
> version 2 with over 300 references:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://people.idsia.ch/*juergen/scient
> >>>>>> ific-integrity-turing-award-deep-learning.html__;fg!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ
> >>>>>> !NsJ4lf4yO2BDIBzlUVfGKvTtf_QXY8dpZaHzCSzHCvEhXGJUTyRTzZybDQg-DZY$
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> In particular, Sec. II has become a brief history of deep learning
> up to the 1970s:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Some of the most powerful NN architectures (i.e., recurrent NNs)
> were discussed in 1943 by McCulloch and Pitts [MC43] and formally analyzed
> in 1956 by Kleene [K56] - the closely related prior work in physics by
> Lenz, Ising, Kramers, and Wannier dates back to the 1920s
> [L20][I25][K41][W45]. In 1948, Turing wrote up ideas related to artificial
> evolution [TUR1] and learning NNs. He failed to formally publish his ideas
> though, which explains the obscurity of his thoughts here. Minsky's simple
> neural SNARC computer dates back to 1951. Rosenblatt's perceptron with a
> single adaptive layer learned in 1958 [R58] (Joseph [R61] mentions an
> earlier perceptron-like device by Farley & Clark); Widrow & Hoff's similar
> Adaline learned in 1962 [WID62]. Such single-layer "shallow learning"
> actually started around 1800 when Gauss & Legendre introduced linear
> regression and the method of least squares [DL1-2] - a famous early example
> of pattern recognition and generalization from training!
>   !
> >   d!
> >> at!
> >>>> a through a parameterized predictor is Gauss' rediscovery of the
> asteroid Ceres based on previous astronomical observations. Deeper
> multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) were discussed by Steinbuch [ST61-95] (1961),
> Joseph [R61] (1961), and Rosenblatt [R62] (1962), who wrote about
> "back-propagating errors" in an MLP with a hidden layer [R62], but did not
> yet have a general deep learning algorithm for deep MLPs  (what's now
> called backpropagation is quite different and was first published by
> Linnainmaa in 1970 [BP1-BP5][BPA-C]). Successful learning in deep
> architectures started in 1965 when Ivakhnenko & Lapa published the first
> general, working learning algorithms for deep MLPs with arbitrarily many
> hidden layers (already containing the now popular multiplicative gates)
> [DEEP1-2][DL1-2]. A paper of 1971 [DEEP2] already described a deep learning
> net with 8 layers, trained by their highly cited method which was still
> popular in the new millennium [DL2], especially in Eastern Europ!
>  e!
> >> , w!
> >>>> here much of Machine Learning was born [MIR](Sec. 1)[R8]. LBH !
> >>>> failed to
> >>>> cite this, just like they failed to cite Amari [GD1], who in 1967
> proposed stochastic gradient descent [STO51-52] (SGD) for MLPs and whose
> implementation [GD2,GD2a] (with Saito) learned internal representations at
> a time when compute was billions of times more expensive than today (see
> also Tsypkin's work [GDa-b]). (In 1972, Amari also published what was later
> sometimes called the Hopfield network or Amari-Hopfield Network [AMH1-3].)
> Fukushima's now widely used deep convolutional NN architecture was first
> introduced in the 1970s [CNN1].
> >>>>
> >>>>>> Jürgen
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> ******************************
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> On 27 Oct 2021, at 10:52, Schmidhuber Juergen
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> <juergen at idsia.ch>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Hi, fellow artificial neural network enthusiasts!
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> The connectionists mailing list is perhaps the oldest mailing list
> on ANNs, and many neural net pioneers are still subscribed to it. I am
> hoping that some of them - as well as their contemporaries - might be able
> to provide additional valuable insights into the history of the field.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Following the great success of massive open online peer review
> >>>>>> (MOOR) for my 2015 survey of deep learning (now the most cited
> >>>>>> article ever published in the journal Neural Networks), I've
> >>>>>> decided to put forward another piece for MOOR. I want to thank the
> >>>>>> many experts who have already provided me with comments on it.
> >>>>>> Please send additional relevant references and suggestions for
> >>>>>> improvements for the following draft directly to me at
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> juergen at idsia.ch
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> :
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://people.idsia.ch/*juergen/scient
> >>>>>> ific-integrity-turing-award-deep-learning.html__;fg!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ
> >>>>>> !NsJ4lf4yO2BDIBzlUVfGKvTtf_QXY8dpZaHzCSzHCvEhXGJUTyRTzZybDQg-DZY$
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> The above is a point-for-point critique of factual errors in ACM's
> justification of the ACM A. M. Turing Award for deep learning and a
> critique of the Turing Lecture published by ACM in July 2021. This work can
> also be seen as a short history of deep learning, at least as far as ACM's
> errors and the Turing Lecture are concerned.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> I know that some view this as a controversial topic. However, it is
> the very nature of science to resolve controversies through facts. Credit
> assignment is as core to scientific history as it is to machine learning.
> My aim is to ensure that the true history of our field is preserved for
> posterity.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Thank you all in advance for your help!
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Jürgen Schmidhuber
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>> --
> >>>>> <signature.png>
> >>>>>
> >>> --
> >>> <signature.png>
> >>
> >
>
>
>
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