information-theory

[Updated on 2019-05-27: add the section on Lottery Ticket Hypothesis.] If you are like me, entering into the field of deep learning with experience in traditional machine learning, you may often ponder over this question: Since a typical deep neural network has so many parameters and training error can easily be perfect, it should surely suffer from substantial overfitting. How could it be ever generalized to out-of-sample data points? The effort in understanding why deep neural networks can generalize somehow reminds me of this interesting paper on System Biology — “Can a biologist fix a radio?...

Professor Naftali Tishby passed away in 2021. Hope the post can introduce his cool idea of information bottleneck to more people. Recently I watched the talk “Information Theory in Deep Learning” by Prof Naftali Tishby and found it very interesting. He presented how to apply the information theory to study the growth and transformation of deep neural networks during training. Using the Information Bottleneck (IB) method, he proposed a new learning bound for deep neural networks (DNN), as the traditional learning theory fails due to the exponentially large number of parameters....