Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991

In 2020, we will celebrate that many of the basic ideas behind the deep learning revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our "Annus Mirabilis" or "Miraculous Year" 1990-1991 at TU Munich. Back then, few people were interested, but a quarter century later, neural networks based on these ideas were on over 3 billion devices such as smartphones, and used many billions of times per day, consuming a significant fraction of the world's compute.Comment: 37 pages, 188 references, based on work of 4 Oct 201

Adversarial Generation of Natural Language

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have gathered a lot of attention from the computer vision community, yielding impressive results for image generation. Advances in the adversarial generation of natural language from noise however are not commensurate with the progress made in generating images, and still lag far behind likelihood based methods. In this paper, we take a step towards generating natural language with a GAN objective alone. We introduce a simple baseline that addresses the discrete output space problem without relying on gradient estimators and show that it is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on a Chinese poem generation dataset. We present quantitative results on generating sentences from context-free and probabilistic context-free grammars, and qualitative language modeling results. A conditional version is also described that can generate sequences conditioned on sentence characteristics.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 5 table