Hello everyone! It’s April, which means we are ready again for a new unit. Let’s dive in.

You know what’s better than one neural network? TWO!!! Multi-modal approaches—making two neural networks interact for a certain result—dominate many of the current edge of neural network research. In this unit, we are going to introduce one such approach, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), but leave you with some food for thought for other possibilities for what training multiple networks together can do.

Welcome back! I think, over the last few days, we have been hyping up convolutional neural networks enough such that you are probably ready to dive right in. So… Let’s, uh, motivate it first!

Why do we use a CNN?

Let’s think of a toy problem to play with. Given a pattern made using two colours (let’s name them a and b, or perhaps black and white), let’s classify whether it is the “zebra” pattern" or the “checkerboard” pattern.