
This part of the book describes the more ambitious and advanced approaches
to deep learning, currently pursued by the research community.
In the previous parts of the book, we have shown how to solve supervised
learning problems—how to learn to map one vector to another, given enough
examples of the mapping.
Not all problems we might want to solve fall into this category. We may wish to
generate new examples, or determine how likely some point is, or handle missing
values and take advantage of a large set of unlabeled examples or examples from
related tasks. Many deep learning algorithms have been designed to tackle such
unsupervised learning problems, but none have truly solved the problem in the
same way that deep learning has largely solved the supervised learning problem
for a wide variety of tasks. In this part of the book, we describe the existing
approaches to unsupervised learning and some of the popular thought about how
we can make progress in this field.
Another shortcoming of the current state of the art for industrial applications
is that our learning algorithms require large amounts of supervised data to achieve
good accuracy. In this part of the book, we discuss some of the speculative
approaches to reducing the amount of labeled data necessary for existing models
to work well.
This section is the most important for a researcher—someone who wants to
understand the breadth of perspectives that have been brought to the field of
deep learning, and push the field forward towards true artificial intelligence.
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