The Evolution of Deep Learning

From Perceptrons to Transformers and

Their Revolutionary Impact on AI
INTRODUCTION
 What is Deep Learning?

• • A subset of machine learning using neural networks with

multiple layers
• • Learns hierarchical representations automatically
• • Requires minimal feature engineering
• • Scales with data and computation
• • Achieves state-of-the-art performance across domains
 Timeline of Deep Learning Evolution

• • 1950s-1960s: Perceptrons (Rosenblatt)

• • 1980s: Multi-layer networks and backpropagation
(Rumelhart, Hinton, Williams)
• • 1990s: Convolutional Neural Networks (LeCun)
• • 1997: Long Short-Term Memory (Hochreiter &
Schmidhuber)
• • 2012: Deep Learning Renaissance (AlexNet)
• • 2017: Transformers (Vaswani et al.)
• • 2018-Present: Large language models, multimodal systems,
foundation models
 Why This Evolution Matters

• • Enabled human-level performance in many cognitive tasks

• • Created new capabilities previously thought impossible
• • Transformed industries from healthcare to entertainment
• • New understanding of learning and intelligence
• • Cross-pollination with neuroscience and cognitive science
• • Paradigm shift in how we approach complex problems
THE BIRTH OF NEURAL
NETWORKS: PERCEPTRONS
 Historical Context (1950s-1960s)

• • Inspired by biological neurons in the human brain

• • Early computational models of cognition
• • Part of the first wave of artificial intelligence research
• • Cybernetics movement and information theory
• • Frank Rosenblatt developed the first perceptron in 1957
 How Perceptrons Learn

• • Supervised learning with labeled examples

• • Perceptron learning rule: adjust weights based on errors
• • Weight update: wᵢ = wᵢ + η(target - output)xᵢ
• • Converges when data is linearly separable
• • Simple but powerful algorithm for its time
 Legacy of Perceptrons

• • Foundation for all future neural network research

• • Proof that machines could learn from data
• • Basic principles still used in modern neurons
• • Conceptual framework for thinking about artificial learning
• • Limitations led to the first AI winter but also to future
innovations
MULTI-LAYER NEURAL
NETWORKS AND
BACKPROPAGATION
 Revival of Neural Networks (1980s)

• • Renewed interest after the AI winter

• • Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) research group
• • New computational resources becoming available
• • Theoretical advances in learning algorithms
• • Growing dissatisfaction with symbolic AI approaches
 The Concept of Hidden Layers

Multi-layer networks with hidden layers can solve non-linear problems

 The Backpropagation Algorithm

• • Efficient method to calculate gradients in neural networks

• • Based on the chain rule from calculus
• • Propagates error signals backward through the network
• • Allows credit assignment to hidden neurons
• • Enables supervised learning in deep architectures
 How Backpropagation Works

Backpropagation updates weights by propagating errors backward

 Challenges with Training Deep Networks

• • The vanishing gradient problem

• • Gradients become extremely small in early layers
• • Learning becomes very slow or stops entirely
• • Limits the depth of practical networks
• • Led to preference for shallow architectures in 1990s-2000s
CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL
NETWORKS (CNNS)
 Inspiration from the Visual Cortex

• • Inspired by studies of the visual cortex in mammals

• • Hubel and Wiesel's research on receptive fields (1960s)
• • Local connectivity patterns in the brain
• • Specialized neurons that respond to specific visual features
• • Hierarchical processing of visual information
 Key Components of CNNs

CNN architecture with convolutional, pooling, and fully connected layers

 How Convolution Works

• • Sliding filters (kernels) across the input image

• • Each filter detects specific patterns (edges, textures, etc.)
• • Early layers detect simple features, deeper layers detect
complex patterns
• • Feature maps represent activations of different filters
• • Dramatically reduces parameters compared to fully
connected networks
The Convolution Operation

Convolution operation applying filters to detect features

 Applications in Computer Vision

• • Image classification and object detection

• • Facial recognition and biometrics
• • Medical image analysis
• • Autonomous vehicles and robotics
• • Augmented reality and computer graphics
• • Satellite imagery and remote sensing
RECURRENT NEURAL
NETWORKS (RNNS) AND LSTMS
 Processing Sequential Data

• • Many real-world data are sequential in nature

• • Traditional feedforward networks process inputs
independently
• • Sequential data requires understanding context and order
• • Examples: text, speech, time series, video
• • Need for architectures that can maintain state across inputs
Basic RNN Architecture

RNN architecture with recurrent connections

Unrolled RNN Through Time

RNN unrolled through time, showing information flow

 Limitations of Vanilla RNNs

• • The vanishing/exploding gradient problem

• • Difficult to learn long-range dependencies
• • Practical limit on sequence length
• • Information from early time steps gets lost
• • Need for more sophisticated memory mechanisms
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)

LSTM architecture with gates to control information flow

 Applications of RNNs and LSTMs

• • Natural language processing and generation

• • Speech recognition and synthesis
• • Machine translation (pre-Transformer era)
• • Time series prediction (finance, weather, etc.)
• • Music generation
• • Video analysis
THE ATTENTION MECHANISM
AND TRANSFORMERS
 Limitations of RNNs/LSTMs for Long
Sequences

• • Sequential computation limits parallelization

• • Still struggles with very long-range dependencies
• • Computational bottleneck for long sequences
• • Information bottleneck through fixed-size hidden states
• • Need for more direct connections between distant elements
Transformer Architecture

High-level view of the Transformer architecture

 How Attention Works

• • Query (Q): What we're looking for

• • Key (K): What we match against
• • Value (V): What we retrieve
• • Attention weights = softmax(QK^T/√d_k)
• • Output = Attention weights × V
• • Creates a weighted sum of values based on query-key
similarity
Encoder-Decoder Structure

Transformer's encoder-decoder architecture

Stacked Encoders and Decoders

Multiple stacked encoders and decoders in the Transformer

 Advantages Over Previous Architectures

• • Highly parallelizable (no sequential processing)

• • Constant path length between any two positions (O(1) vs
O(n))
• • Better handling of long-range dependencies
• • More stable training dynamics
• • Scales effectively with more data and compute
• • Adaptable to various domains beyond text
REVOLUTIONARY IMPACT ON AI
 Natural Language Processing Revolution

• • BERT (2018): Bidirectional encoder representations from

Google
• • GPT series: Increasingly powerful autoregressive language
models
• • T5, XLNet, RoBERTa: Refined transformer architectures
• • Scaling laws: Performance predictably improves with model
size and data
• • Foundation models: Pre-trained on vast corpora, fine-tuned
for specific tasks
 Large Language Models

• • GPT-3/4, PaLM, LLaMA, Claude, Gemini

• • Trained on trillions of tokens of text
• • Emergent capabilities not explicitly designed
• • In-context learning and chain-of-thought reasoning
• • Instruction following and code generation
• • Blurring the line between specialized and general
intelligence
 Computer Vision Applications

• • Vision Transformer (ViT): Applied transformers to images

• • DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney: Text-to-image
generation
• • Segment Anything Model (SAM): Universal image
segmentation
• • Video generation models: Consistent video synthesis from
text
• • Multimodal understanding: Connecting vision and language
 Scientific Applications

• • AlphaFold: Revolutionary protein structure prediction

• • Drug discovery: Molecule generation and property
prediction
• • Climate science: Improved weather forecasting and climate
modeling
• • Astronomy: Galaxy classification and exoplanet detection
• • Materials science: New material discovery and optimization
• • Particle physics: Analysis of collision data
CURRENT CHALLENGES AND
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
 Computational Efficiency and
Environmental Concerns

• • Training large models requires enormous computational

resources
• • GPT-3 training estimated to emit ~85 tons of CO2 equivalent
• • Increasing model sizes creating accessibility barriers
• • Energy consumption raising sustainability questions
• • Research directions in efficient architectures and training
methods
 Interpretability and Explainability

• • Growing need to understand model decisions

• • Regulatory requirements for transparency
• • Methods for visualizing and explaining predictions
• • Mechanistic interpretability research
• • Circuit analysis in transformer models
• • Balancing performance with explainability
 Ethical Considerations

• • Bias and fairness in training data and model outputs

• • Privacy concerns with large-scale data collection
• • Potential for misuse and harmful applications
• • Concentration of power in organizations with compute
resources
• • Need for responsible development practices
• • Governance frameworks and regulation
 Emerging Architectures and Approaches

• • State space models: Mamba and structured state space

sequences
• • Graph neural networks: Learning on graph-structured data
• • Neuro-symbolic approaches: Combining neural and
symbolic reasoning
• • Self-supervised learning: Reducing dependence on labeled
data
• • Multimodal architectures: Unified processing across
modalities
• • Retrieval-augmented generation: Combining parametric and
non-parametric knowledge
CONCLUSION
 Recap of the Evolutionary Journey

• • Perceptrons (1950s-60s): Single-layer, linear classifiers

• • Multi-layer networks (1980s): Hidden layers,
backpropagation
• • CNNs (1990s-2010s): Specialized for visual processing
• • RNNs/LSTMs (1990s-2010s): Sequential data processing
• • Transformers (2017-present): Attention-based architectures
• • Each innovation addressed limitations of previous
approaches
 Key Takeaways

• • Architectural innovations drive major breakthroughs

• • Computational resources enable theoretical ideas to
become practical
• • Domain-specific architectures yield significant performance
gains
• • Scale (data, parameters, compute) is a crucial factor
• • Interdisciplinary inspiration leads to novel approaches
• • Simple, elegant principles can have profound impacts
 The Continuing Impact on Society

• • Transformation of industries and creation of new ones

• • Democratization of advanced capabilities
• • Changing nature of work and skills
• • Ethical and governance challenges
• • Scientific discoveries and acceleration of research
• • Human-AI collaboration and augmentation
REFERENCES AND ADDITIONAL
RESOURCES
 Academic Papers

• • Rosenblatt (1958). The perceptron: A probabilistic model for

information storage and organization in the brain
• • Rumelhart, Hinton, & Williams (1986). Learning
representations by back-propagating errors
• • LeCun et al. (1998). Gradient-based learning applied to
document recognition
• • Hochreiter & Schmidhuber (1997). Long short-term memory
• • Vaswani et al. (2017). Attention is all you need
 Books and Online Resources

• • Goodfellow, Bengio, & Courville (2016). Deep Learning. MIT

Press
• • Nielsen (2015). Neural Networks and Deep Learning
• • Chollet (2021). Deep Learning with Python
• • Alammar: The Illustrated Transformer
• • Olah: Understanding LSTM Networks
• • Stanford CS231n, CS224n, and other online courses
 Thank You!

• • Questions?
• • Discussion
• • Contact information
• • Additional resources available upon request