A New AI Study May Explain Why Deep Learning Works

The resurgence of artificial intelligence (AI) is largely due to advances in pattern-recognition due to deep learning, a form of machine learning that does not require explicit hard-coding. The architecture of deep neural networks is somewhat inspired by the biological brain and neuroscience. Like the biological brain, the inner workings of exactly why deep networks work are largely unexplained, and there is no single unifying theory. Recently researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) revealed new insights about how deep learning networks work to help further demystify the black box of AI machine learning. The MIT research trio of Tomaso Poggio, Andrzej Banburski, and Quianli Liao at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines developed a new theory as to why deep networks work and published their study published on June 9, 2020 in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America).