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On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of CNNs (arxiv.org)
2 points by ipunchghosts on Jul 31, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A standard image-to-image network, normally used to clean up blurry pictures, was given noisy data scrambled by a simple bit-flipping code (XOR) and asked to recover the original. It managed with acceptable accuracy, showing even basic networks can crack this puzzle.

Abstract · On the unreasonable effectiveness of CNNs

Deep learning methods using convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been successfully applied to virtually all imaging problems, and particularly in image reconstruction tasks with ill-posed and complicated imaging models. In an attempt to put upper bounds on the capability of baseline CNNs for solving image-to-image problems we applied a widely used standard off-the-shelf network architecture (U-Net) to the "inverse problem" of XOR decryption from noisy data and show acceptable results.

Andreas Hauptmann, Jonas Adler
arXiv:2007.14745 · eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.NE · submitted Jul 29, 2020
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Also discussed: Aug 2020 (1 point, 0 comments)

The authors show that CNNs work well on a problem which, be definition, is discontinuous everywhere!