Disclaimer: I’m building nanonets.com to help build ML with less data

I think AI is akin to building a rocket ship. You need a huge engine and a lot of fuel. If you have a large engine and a tiny amount of fuel, you won’t make it to orbit. If you have a tiny engine and a ton of fuel, you can’t even lift off. To build a rocket you need a huge engine and a lot of fuel. The analogy to deep learning is that the rocket engine is the deep learning models and the fuel is the huge amounts of data we can feed to these algorithms. — Andrew Ng

There has been a recent surge in popularity of Deep Learning, achieving state of the art performance in various tasks like Language Translation, playing Strategy Games and Self Driving Cars requiring millions of data points. One common barrier for using deep learning to solve problems is the amount of data needed to train a model. The requirement of large data arises because of the large number of parameters in the model that machines have to learn.

A few examples of number of parameters in these recent models are:

Details of Deep Learning Models

Neural Networks aka Deep Learning are layered structures which can be stacked together (think LEGO)

Deep Learning is nothing but Large Neural networks, they can be thought of as a flow chart where data comes in from one side and inference/knowledge comes out the other. You can also break the neural network, pull it apart and take the inference out from wherever you please. You might get nothing meaningful but you can do it nonetheless eg Google DeepDream

Size(Model) ∝ Size(Data) ∝ Complexity(Problem)

There is an interesting almost linear relationship in the amount of data required and the size of the model. Basic reasoning is that your model should be large enough to capture relations in your data (eg textures and shapes in images, grammar in text and phonemes in speech) along with specifics of your problem (eg number of categories). Early layers of the model capture high level relations between the different parts of the input (like edges and patterns). Later layers capture information that helps make the final decision; usually information that can help discriminate between the desired outputs. Therefore if the complexity of the problem is high (like Image Classification) the number of parameters and the amount of data required is also very large.

What AlexNet sees at every step

Transfer Learning to the Rescue!

When working on a problem specific to your domain, often the amount of data needed to build models of this size is impossible to find. However models trained on one task capture relations in the data type and can easily be reused for different problems in the same domain. This technique is referred to as Transfer Learning.

Qiang Yang, Sinno Jialin Pan, “A Survey on Transfer Learning”, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge & Data Engineering, vol. 22, no. , pp. 1345–1359, October 2010, doi:10.1109/TKDE.2009.191

Transfer Learning is like the best kept secret that nobody is trying to keep. Everybody in the industry knows about it but nobody outside does.

Referring to Awesome — Most Cited Deep Learning Papers for the top papers in Deep Learning, More than 50% of the papers use some form of Transfer Learning or Pretraining. Transfer Learning becomes more and more applicable for people with limited resources (data and compute) unfortunately the idea has not been socialised nearly enough as it should. The people who need it the most don’t know about it yet.

If Deep Learning is the holy grail and data is the gate keeper, transfer learning is the key.

With transfer learning, we can take a pretrained model, which was trained on a large readily available dataset (trained on a completely different task, with the same input but different output). Then try to find layers which output reusable features. We use the output of that layer as input features to train a much smaller network that requires a smaller number of parameters. This smaller network only needs to learn the relations for your specific problem having already learnt about patterns in the data from the pretrained model. This way a model trained to detect Cats can be reused to Reproduce the work of Van Gogh

Another major advantage of using transfer learning is how well the model generalizes. Larger models tend to overfit (ie modeling the data more than the underlying phenomenon) the data and don’t work as well when you test it out on unseen data. Since transfer learning allows the model to see different types of data its learning underlying rules of the world better.

Think of overfitting as memorizing as opposed to learning. — James Faghmous

Data Reduction because of Transfer Learning

Let’s say you want to end the debate of blue and black vs. white and gold dress. You start collecting images of verified blue black dresses and white gold dresses. To build an accurate model on your own like the one mentioned above (with 140M parameters!!), to train this model you will need to find 1.2M images which is an impossible task. So you give transfer learning a shot.

Calculating the number of parameters needed to train for this problem using transfer learning:

No of parameters = [Size(inputs) + 1] * [Size(outputs) + 1]

= [2048+1]*[1+1]~ 4098 parameters

We see a reduction in number of parameters from 1.4*10⁸ to 4*10³ which is 5 orders of magnitude. So we should be fine collecting less than hundred images of dresses. Phew!

If your impatient and can’t wait to find out the actual color of the dress, scroll down to the bottom and see how to build the model for dresses yourself.