emergents

I've attended a talk about the commercial use of the pre-trained neural networks. The idea is that you take a pre-trained network, throw away the top couple of layers, then put the blank layers on top instead and train only these new layers for your purpose.

The presenter gave an example of taking the Google's general image classifier network and teaching it to recognize your specific images instead: "huggable" vs "non-huggable". It was smart enough to recognize that a knitted cactus is huggable while a real one is not.

Well, it's kind of not surprising: the top layers of the classifier network are trained to recognize the various kinds of images but to do that the layer below it must produce the characteristics that allow to recognize these various kinds of images. If the original classifier has the wide knowledge (and it does), the previous layer would know what is important to recognize a very wide rage of images. They call the output of that previous layer "the emergents". And then when you use them as inputs, the new top layer would have an easy job classifying them for the new goal. You could probably even do a Bayesian classifier on top of them without much difference.