Deep Learning: GANs and Variational Autoencoders

Variational autoencoders and GANs have been 2 of the most interesting developments in deep learning and machine learning recently.

Yann LeCun, a deep learning pioneer, has said that the most important development in recent years has been adversarial training, referring to GANs.

GAN stands for generative adversarial network, where 2 neural networks compete with each other.

What is unsupervised learning?

Unsupervised learning means we re not trying to map input data to targets, we re just trying to learn the structure of that input data.

Once we ve learned that structure, we can do some pretty cool things.

One example is generating poetry – we ve done examples of this in the past.

But poetry is a very specific thing, how about writing in general?

If we can learn the structure of language, we can generate any kind of text. In fact, big companies are putting in lots of money to research how the news can be written by machines.

But what if we go back to poetry and take away the words?

Well then we get art, in general.

By learning the structure of art, we can create more art.

How about art as sound?

If we learn the structure of music, we can create new music.