Rohan Taori Profile picture
Sep 15, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read Read on X
🎉 The last few weeks have seen the release of #StableDiffusion, #OPT, and other large models.

⚠️ But should we be concerned about an irreversible influx of AI content on the internet?

⚙️ Will this make it harder to collect clean training data for future AI models?

🧵👇 1/6
(thread based on recent work arxiv.org/pdf/2209.03942…)

Q: So what’s the root issue?

A: Biases in AI models will be represented in their outputs, which become *training data* for future models! (if we’re not careful).

These feedback cycles have the potential to get nasty.

2/6
A concrete example -

Generating from a language model with beam search is known to be repetitive/disfluent.

Under feedback (where a model is re-trained on its outputs), this problem very quickly magnifies by 2-3x!

Nucleus sampling, OTOH, is surprisingly stable.

3/6 Image
In fact, we find that the more a model behaves like a sampler, the more stable it is.

We can connect samplers to necessary conditions for stability, which imply bounded bias amplification *even in the limit of infinite time feedback*.

This result has wider consequences -

4/6
Take image classifiers. Classifiers pick the argmax vote (like beam search), so perhaps they behave poorly.

In fact, the opposite is true bc classifiers actually kind of behave like samplers, a finding by @PreetumNakkiran & @whybansal called “Distributional Generalization”.

5/6 Image
Lots more discussion & experiments in paper with @tatsu_hashimoto - arxiv.org/abs/2209.03942

More on:
1) when sampling-like behavior appears naturally,
2) what this means for bias amplification on the internet, and
3) how to induce stability in otherwise unstable systems.

6/6

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Rohan Taori

Rohan Taori Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @rtaori13

Dec 8, 2020
Reliability is a key challenge in ML. There are now dozens of robust training methods and datasets - how do they compare?

We ran 200+ ImageNet models on 200+ test sets to find out.
modestyachts.github.io/imagenet-testb…

TDLR: Distribution shift is *really* hard, but common patterns emerge.
To organize the 200 distribution shifts, we divide them into two categories: synthetic shifts and natural shifts.

Synthetic shifts are derived from existing images by perturbing them with noise, etc.

Natural shifts are new, unperturbed images from a different distribution.
At a high level, there has been good progress on the synthetic shifts (e.g., ImageNet-C or adversarial examples).

Natural distribution shifts (e.g., ImageNetV2 or ObjectNet), on the other hand, are still much harder.
Read 8 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(