Turning Neural Networks Upside Down Produces Psychedelic Visuals

cjellibebi writes: Neural networks that were designed to recognize images also hold some interesting capabilities for generating them. If you run them backwards, they turn out to be capable of enhancing existing images to resemble the images they were meant to try and recognize. The results are pretty trippy. A Google Research blog post explains the research in great detail. There are pictures, and even a video. The Guardian has a digested article for the less tech-savvy.

Comments

They've nailed it

[DavidSpencer]

I've had a few up-close experiences with heavy psychedelics. Those photos took me right back. Wonderful insights!

Re:They've nailed it

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes an argument as to what psychedelics actually do.

Re:They've nailed it

[qpqp]

While I agree that the photos provoke a similar reaction on a superficial glance, what struck me while on psychedelics was the actual texture of what you see, which extends fractal-wise when concentrated upon.

Re:They've nailed it

[iMadeGhostzilla]

It's true. And we know the physical texture does extend fractal-wise into infinity... I'm thinking the opposite is when one is not on psychedelics and is further stressed out, texture details disappear if they are not relevant for the stressful situation. (E.g a sponge becomes a yellow block, no holes or pores.) As if psychedelics open the valve and stress closes it, like many people have said.

I tried this myself

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran slashdot backwards through the DICE marketing bullshit neural network and got www.soylentnews.org

Wow!

[nospam007]

The slashdot UI produces psychedelic visuals even without any artificial or natural intelligence.
Every time I come here, there are icons all over the place, in the middle of the text, the title bar shows random icons or text and I'm not even on beta.
Not to mention the dupes or stupid articles and don't make me begin about the videos.

Re:Now THAT's art!

[captnjohnny1618]

A human can't do it? Alex Gray begs to differ.

I guess we could argue that it's "similar" (i.e. not the same), but it's pretty darn close ;-).

The Mandelbrot set is a very different animal from what these algorithms are doing. I agree that a human couldn't draw a Mandlebrot set, but in some sense this work is much less precise and analytic than something like a Mandlebrot set.

Is this your brain on drugs?

[jscottk]

This makes me wonder if a similar process is occurring in the brain of someone on a psychedelic. Are the compounds stimulating pattern recognition feedback loops from the inside out, causing people to see their imaginations manifested in the fuzz?

Re:Is this your brain on drugs?

[vix86]

There is a guy that wrote wrote an essay some years ago that suggested as much. He posited that drugs like psilocibin basically overload the brain and cause it to form feedback loops. Many of the effects you can experience on hallucinogens also suggest as much. Closed eye visuals for instance are basically the "lights" you see when you push on your eye balls. They are just amplified and put into a feedback loop. Thought loops are common on hallucinogens as well, I imagine its the result of that as well.

Prints

[lq_x_pl]

Any possibility that they will release higher-res versions of these images? Maybe sell some prints?
I realize these are just the output of a funnel-run-backwards, but they'd make awfully cool posters.

Re:does this explain dreaming and the "mind's eye"

[Tatarize]

To some extent yes, but it's likely way more complicated than that. But, yeah, without sensory input we start hallucinating. It's like asking your senses repeatedly "is that real" and the senses always say yes, rather than no. So you drift off into whatever because that's real and therefore there's this other things too.

It's a bit like that old parlor game where you tell somebody that you're going to have them ask questions about a dream, send them in the other room, asking for dream volunteers, and then tell the people still in the room that the answer is yes if the last letter of the last word of the question ends A-M and no if the last letter of the last word of the question ends N-Z. -- They inevitably guess a dream involving all manner of perverted stuff as the crowd confirms and rejects bits at random. Inventing a dream out of his own head rather than somebody else's head.

There's also every day hallucinations like seeing detail where it doesn't exist, movement where it doesn't exist, and hallucinating something to fill the big blind spot in our eyes.

Re:Questions

[ShanghaiBill]

I know nothing about these NNs, but the NNs used for the ImageNet Competition typically have a few hundred thousand neurons. This is to place images of about 1M pixels into one of 1000 categories. Most image recognition NNs are "convolutional" which means they are tiled. So each neuron in the first layer is only looking at a small part of the image. Later layers will pool the results from the convolutional layer into extended features. This cuts way down on both the size, and the amount of computation needed. The number of layers will typically be 5 or 6. Even more layers should, in theory, help, but deeper networks are very hard to train. The total size in bytes would be maybe 100MB, but that will vary widely depending on the implementation. I don't know how big Baidu's implementation was (they were the winner, but they cheated). NNs can run fast, categorizing hundreds or thousands of images per second. But it can take a long time to train them, days or weeks on a GPU farm. Fortunately the training is highly parallel.