The Little Book

of
Deep Learning

François Fleuret
François Fleuret is a professor of computer sci-
ence at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

The cover illustration is a schematic of the

Neocognitron by Fukushima [1980], a key an-
cestor of deep neural networks.

This ebook is formatted to fit on a phone screen.

Contents

Contents 5

List of figures 7

Foreword 8

I Foundations 10
1 Machine Learning 11
1.1 Learning from data . . . . . . . 12
1.2 Basis function regression . . . . 14
1.3 Under and overfitting . . . . . . 16
1.4 Categories of models . . . . . . 18
2 Efficient computation 20
2.1 GPUs, TPUs, and batches . . . . 21
2.2 Tensors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3 Training 25
3.1 Losses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.2 Autoregressive models . . . . . 30
3.3 Gradient descent . . . . . . . . 34
3 161
 3.4 Backpropagation . . . . . . . . 39
3.5 The value of depth . . . . . . . 44
3.6 Training protocols . . . . . . . 47
3.7 The benefits of scale . . . . . . 50

II Deep models 55
4 Model components 56
4.1 The notion of layer . . . . . . . 57
4.2 Linear layers . . . . . . . . . . . 59
4.3 Activation functions . . . . . . 69
4.4 Pooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
4.5 Dropout . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
4.6 Normalizing layers . . . . . . . 78
4.7 Skip connections . . . . . . . . 82
4.8 Attention layers . . . . . . . . . 85
4.9 Token embedding . . . . . . . . 92
4.10 Positional encoding . . . . . . . 93
5 Architectures 95
5.1 Multi-Layer Perceptrons . . . . 96
5.2 Convolutional networks . . . . 98
5.3 Attention models . . . . . . . . 105

III Applications 112

6 Prediction 113
6.1 Image denoising . . . . . . . . . 114
6.2 Image classification . . . . . . . 116
6.3 Object detection . . . . . . . . . 117
4 161
 6.4 Semantic segmentation . . . . . 122
6.5 Speech recognition . . . . . . . 125
6.6 Text-image representations . . . 127
7 Synthesis 130
7.1 Text generation . . . . . . . . . 131
7.2 Image generation . . . . . . . . 133

The missing bits 137

Afterword 143

Bibliography 144

Index 153

5 161
List of Figures

1.1 Kernel regression . . . . . . . . . . 14

1.2 Overfitting of kernel regression . . 16

3.1 Causal autoregressive model . . . . 32

3.2 Gradient descent . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.3 Backpropagation . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.4 Feature warping . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.5 Train and validation losses . . . . . 48
3.6 Scaling laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.7 Model training costs . . . . . . . . . 53

4.1 1D convolution . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
4.2 2D convolution . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4.3 Stride, padding, and dilation . . . . 63
4.4 Receptive field . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
4.5 Activation functions . . . . . . . . . 70
4.6 Max pooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
4.7 Dropout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
4.8 Batch normalization . . . . . . . . . 79
4.9 Skip connections . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.10 Attention operator interpretation . 86

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4.11 Complete attention operator . . . . 88
4.12 Multi-Head Attention layer . . . . . 90

5.1 Multi-Layer Perceptron . . . . . . . 96

5.2 LeNet-like convolutional model . . 99
5.3 Residual block . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
5.4 Downscaling residual block . . . . . 101
5.5 ResNet-50 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
5.6 Self and cross-attention blocks . . . 106
5.7 Transformer . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
5.8 GPT model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
5.9 ViT model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

6.1 Convolutional object detector . . . 118

6.2 Object detection with SSD . . . . . 119
6.3 Semantic segmentation with PSP . . 123
6.4 CLIP zero-shot prediction . . . . . . 129

7.1 Denoising diffusion . . . . . . . . . 134

7 161
Foreword

The current period of progress in artificial in-

telligence was triggered when Krizhevsky et al.
[2012] showed that an artificial neural network
with a simple structure, which had been known
for more than twenty years [LeCun et al., 1989],
could beat complex state-of-the-art image recog-
nition methods by a huge margin, simply by
being a hundred times larger, and trained on a
data set similarly scaled up.

This breakthrough was made possible thanks to

Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), mass-market
highly parallel computing devices developed for
real-time image synthesis and repurposed for
artificial neural networks.

Since then, under the umbrella term of “deep

learning,” innovations in the structures of these
networks, the strategies to train them, and ded-
icated hardware have allowed for an exponen-
tial increase in both their size and the quantity
8 161
of training data they take advantage of [Sevilla
et al., 2022]. This has resulted in a wave of suc-
cessful applications across technical domains,
from computer vision and robotics, to speech,
and natural language processing.

Although the bulk of deep learning is not par-

ticularly difficult to understand, it combines di-
verse components, which makes it complicated
to learn. It involves multiple branches of mathe-
matics such as calculus, probabilities, optimiza-
tion, linear algebra, and signal processing, and it
is also deeply anchored in computer science, pro-
gramming, algorithmic, and high-performance
computing.

Instead of trying to be exhaustive, this little book

is limited to the background and tools necessary
to understand a few important models.

If you did not get this book from its official URL

https://fleuret.org/public/lbdl.pdf

please do so, so that I can estimate the number

of readers.

François Fleuret,
May 21, 2023

9 161
 Part I

Foundations

10 161
Chapter 1

Machine Learning

Deep learning belongs historically to the larger

field of statistical machine learning, as it funda-
mentally concerns methods able to learn repre-
sentations from data. The techniques involved
come originally from artificial neural networks,
and the “deep” qualifier highlights that models
are long compositions of mappings, now known
to achieve greater performance.

The modularity of deep models, their versatility,

and scaling qualities, have resulted in a plethora
of specific mathematical methods and software
development tools that have established deep
learning as a separate and vast technical field.

11 161
1.1 Learning from data
The simplest use case for a model trained from
data is when a signal x is accessible, for instance,
the picture of a license plate, from which one
wants to predict a quantity y, such as the string
of characters written on the plate.

In many real-world situations where x is a high-

dimension signal captured in an uncontrolled
environment, it is too complicated to come up
with an analytical recipe that relates x and y.

What one can do is to collect a large training

set 𝒟 of pairs (xn ,yn ), and devise a parametric
model f , a piece of computer code that incorpo-
rates trainable parameters w that modulate its
behavior, and such that, with the proper values
w∗ , it is a good predictor. “Good” here means
that if an x is given to this piece of code, the
value ŷ = f (x;w∗ ) it computes is a good esti-
mate of the y that would have been associated
to x in the training set had it been there.

This notion of goodness is usually formalized

with a loss ℒ (w) which is small when f (·;w) is
good on 𝒟 . Then, training the model consists of
computing a value w∗ that minimizes ℒ (w∗ ).

Most of the content of this book is about the defi-

12 161
nition of f which, in realistic scenarios, is a com-
plex combination of pre-defined sub-modules.

The trainable parameters that compose w are

often referred to as weights, by analogy with
the synaptic weights of biological neural net-
works. In addition to these parameters, models
usually depend on meta-parameters which are
set according to domain prior knowledge, best
practices, or resource constraints. They may also
be optimized in some way, but with techniques
different from those used to optimize w.

13 161
1.2 Basis function regression
We can illustrate the training of a model in a sim-
ple case where xn and yn are two real numbers,
the loss is the mean squared error:
N
1 X
ℒ (w) = (yn − f (xn ;w))2 , (1.1)
N
n=1

and f (·;w) is a linear combination of a pre-

defined basis of functions f1 ,...,fK , with w =
(w1 ,...,wK ):
K
X
f (x;w) = wk fk (x).
k=1

Since f (xn ;w) is linear with respect to the wk s

and ℒ (w) is quadratic with respect to f (xn ;w),

Figure 1.1: Given a basis of functions (blue curves)

and a training set (black dots), we can compute an
optimal linear combination of the former (red curve)
to approximate the latter for the mean squared error.

14 161
the loss ℒ (w) is quadratic with respect to the
wk s, and finding w∗ that minimizes it boils down
to solving a linear system. See Figure 1.1 for an
example with Gaussian kernels as fk .

15 161
1.3 Under and overfitting
A key element is the interplay between the ca-
pacity of the model, that is its flexibility and
ability to fit diverse data, and the amount and
quality of the training data. When the capacity
is insufficient, the model cannot fit the data and
the error during training is high. This is referred
to as underfitting.

On the contrary, when the amount of data is

insufficient, as illustrated with an example in
Figure 1.2, the performance during training can
be excellent, but unrelated to the actual fit to
the data structure, as in that case the model will
often learn random noise present in the signal.

Figure 1.2: If the amount of training data is small com-

pared to the capacity of the model, the performance
during training reflects poorly the actual fit to the un-
derlying data structure, and consequently the useful-
ness for prediction.

16 161
This is overfitting.

So, a large part of the art of applied machine

learning is to design models that are not too
flexible yet still able to fit the data. This is done
by crafting the right inductive bias in a model,
which means that its structure corresponds to
the underlying structure of the data at hand.

Even though this classical perspective is relevant

for reasonably-sized deep models, things get con-
fusing with large ones that have a very large
number of trainable parameters and extreme ca-
pacity yet still perform well for prediction. We
will come back to this in § 3.6.

17 161
1.4 Categories of models
We can organize the use of machine learning
models into three broad categories:

• Regression consists of predicting a

continuous-valued vector y ∈ RK , for instance,
a geometrical position of an object, given an
input signal X. This is a multi-dimensional
generalization of the setup we saw in § 1.2. The
training set is composed of pairs of an input
signal and a ground-truth value.

• Classification aims at predicting a value from

a finite set {1,...,C}, for instance, the label Y of
an image X. As for regression, the training set
is composed of pairs of input signal, and ground-
truth quantity, here a label from that set. The
standard way of tackling this is to predict one
score per potential class, such that the correct
class has the maximum score.

• Density modeling has as its objective to model

the probability density function of the data µX
itself, for instance, images. In that case, the train-
ing set is composed of values xn without associ-
ated quantities to predict, and the trained model
should allow either the evaluation of the prob-
ability density function, or sampling from the
distribution, or both.
18 161
Both regression and classification are generally
referred to as supervised learning since the value
to be predicted, which is required as a target dur-
ing training, has to be provided, for instance, by
human experts. On the contrary, density mod-
eling is usually seen as unsupervised learning
since it is sufficient to take existing data, without
the need for producing an associated ground-
truth.

These three categories are not disjoint; for in-

stance, classification can be cast as class-score
regression, or discrete sequence density model-
ing as iterated classification. Furthermore, they
do not cover all cases. One may want to predict
compounded quantities, or multiple classes, or
model a density conditional on a signal.

19 161
Chapter 2

Efficient computation

From an implementation standpoint, deep learn-

ing is about executing heavy computations with
large amounts of data. The Graphical Processing
Units (GPUs) have been instrumental in the suc-
cess of the field by allowing such computations
to be run on affordable hardware.

The importance of their use, and the resulting

technical constraints on the computations that
can be done efficiently, force the research in the
field to constantly balance mathematical sound-
ness and implementability of novel methods.

20 161
2.1 GPUs, TPUs, and batches
Graphical Processing Units were originally de-
signed for real-time image synthesis, which re-
quires highly parallel architectures that happen
to be fitting for deep models. As their usage for
AI has increased, GPUs have been equipped with
dedicated sub-components referred to as tensor
cores, and deep-learning specialized chips such
as Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) have
been developed.

A GPU possesses several thousands of parallel

units, and its own fast memory. The limiting fac-
tor is usually not the number of computing units
but the read-write operations to memory. The
slowest link is between the CPU memory and
the GPU memory, and consequently one should
avoid copying data across devices. Moreover,
the structure of the GPU itself involves multiple
levels of cache memory, which are smaller but
faster, and computation should be organized to
avoid copies between these different caches.

This is achieved, in particular, by organizing the

computation in batches of samples that can fit
entirely in the GPU memory and are processed
in parallel. When an operator combines a sample
and model parameters, both have to be moved

21 161
to the cache memory near the actual computing
units. Proceeding by batches allows for copying
the model parameters only once, instead of doing
it for every sample. In practice, a GPU processes
a batch that fits in memory almost as quickly as
a single sample.

A standard GPU has a theoretical peak perfor-

mance of 1013 -1014 floating point operations
(FLOPs) per second, and its memory typically
ranges from 8 to 80 gigabytes. The standard
FP32 encoding of float numbers is on 32 bits, but
empirical results show that using encoding on
16 bits, or even less for some operands, does not
degrade performance.

We come back in § 3.7 to the large size of deep

architectures.

22 161
2.2 Tensors
GPUs and deep learning frameworks such as Py-
Torch or JAX manipulate the quantities to be
processed by organizing them as tensors, which
are series of scalars arranged along several dis-
crete axes. They are elements of RN1 ×···×ND
that generalize the notion of vector and matrix.

Tensors are used to represent both the signals to

process, the trainable parameters of the models,
and the intermediate quantities they compute.
The latters are called activations, in reference to
neuronal activations.

For instance, a time series is naturally encoded

as a T × D tensor, or, for historical reasons, as a
D × T tensor, where T is its duration and D is
the dimension of the feature representation at
every time step, often referred to as the number
of channels. Similarly a 2D-structured signal can
be represented as a D × H × W tensor, where H
and W are its width and height. An RGB image
would correspond to D = 3, but the number of
channels can grow up to several thousands in
large models.

Adding more dimensions allows for the represen-

tation of series of objects. Fifty RGB images of
resolution 32 × 24 can, for instance, be encoded
23 161
as a 50 × 3 × 24 × 32 tensor.

Deep learning libraries all provide a large num-

ber of operations that encompass standard linear
algebra, complex reshaping and extraction, and
deep-learning specific operations, some of which
we will see in Chapter 4. The implementation of
tensors separates the shape representation from
the storage layout of the coefficients in mem-
ory, which allows many reshaping, transposing,
and extraction operations to be done without
coefficient copying, hence extremely rapidly.

In practice, virtually any computation can be

decomposed into elementary tensor operations,
which avoids non-parallel loops at the language
level and poor memory management.

Besides being convenient tools, tensors are in-

strumental to achieve computational efficiency.
All the people involved in the development of
an operational deep model, from the designers
of the drivers, libraries, and models to those of
the computers and chips, know that the data will
be manipulated as tensors. The resulting con-
straints on locality and block decomposability
enable all the actors in this chain to come up
with optimal designs.

24 161
Chapter 3

Training

As introduced in § 1.1, training a model con-

sists of minimizing a loss ℒ (w) which reflects
the performance of the predictor f (·;w) on a
training set 𝒟 . Since the models are usually
extremely complex, and their performance is di-
rectly related to how well the loss is minimized,
this minimization is a key challenge, which in-
volves both computational and mathematical dif-
ficulties.

25 161
3.1 Losses
The example of the mean squared error of Equa-
tion 1.1 is a standard loss for predicting a con-
tinuous value.

For density modeling, the standard loss is the

likelihood of the data. If f (x;w) is to be inter-
preted as a normalized log-probability or log-
density, the loss is the opposite of the sum of its
value over training samples.

Cross-entropy
For classification, the usual strategy is that the
output of the model is a vector with one com-
ponent f (x;w)y per class y, interpreted as the
logarithm of a non-normalized probability, or
logit.

With X the input signal and Y the class to pre-

dict, we can then compute from f an estimate
of the posterior probabilities:

expf (x;w)y
P̂ (Y = y | X = x) = P .
z expf (x;w)z

This expression is generally referred to as the

softmax, or more adequately, the softargmax, of
the logits.

26 161
To be consistent with this interpretation the
model should be trained to maximize the proba-
bility of the true classes, hence to minimize the
cross-entropy, expressed as:
N
1 X
ℒce (w) = − log P̂ (Y = yn | X = xn )
N
n=1
N
1 X expf (xn ;w)yn
= −log P .
N z expf (xn ;w)z
n=1 | {z }
Lce (f (xn ;w),yn )

Contrastive loss
In certain setups, even though the value to be
predicted is continuous, the supervision takes
the form of ranking constraints. The typical do-
main where this is the case is metric learning,
where the objective is to learn a measure of dis-
tance between samples such that a sample xa
from a certain semantic class is closer to any
sample xb of the same class than to any sample
xc from another class. For instance, xa and xb
can be two pictures of a certain person, and xc a
picture of someone else.

The standard approach for such cases is to min-

imize a contrastive loss, in that case, for in-
stance, the sum over triplets (xa ,xb ,xc ), such
27 161
that ya = yb ̸= yc , of

max(0,1 − f (xa ,xc ;w) + f (xa ,xb ;w)).

This quantity will be strictly positive unless

f (xa ,xc ;w) ≥ 1 + f (xa ,xb ;w).

Engineering the loss

Usually, the loss minimized during training is
not the actual quantity one wants to optimize
ultimately, but a proxy for which finding the best
model parameters is easier. For instance, cross-
entropy is the standard loss for classification,
even though the actual performance measure is
a classification error rate, because the latter has
no informative gradient, a key requirement as
we will see in § 3.3.

It is also possible to add terms to the loss that

depend on the trainable parameters of the model
themselves to favor certain configurations.

The weight decay regularization, for instance,

consists of adding to the loss a term proportional
to the sum of the squared parameters. It can be
interpreted as having a Gaussian Bayesian prior
on the parameters, which favors smaller values
and reduces the influence of the data. This de-
grades performance on the training set, but re-
28 161
duces the gap between the performance in train-
ing and that on new, unseen data.

29 161
3.2 Autoregressive models
Many spectacular applications in computer vi-
sion and natural language processing have been
tackled with autoregressive models of discrete
sequences.

The chain rule

Such models put to use the chain rule from prob-
ability theory:

P (X1 = x1 ,X2 = x2 ,...,XT = xT ) =

P (X1 = x1 )
× P (X2 = x2 | X1 = x1 )
...
× P (XT = xT | X1 = x1 ,...,XT −1 = xT −1 ).

Although it is valid for any type of random quan-

tity, this decomposition finds its most efficient
use when the signal of interest can be encoded
into a sequence of discrete tokens from a finite
vocabulary {1,...K}.

With the convention that the additional token ∅

stands for an “unknown” quantity, we can rep-
resent the event {X1 = x1 ,...,Xt = xt } as the
vector (x1 ,...,xt ,∅,...,∅).

30 161
Then, given a model

f (x1 ,...,xt−1 ,∅,...,∅;w) =

log P̂ (Xt | X1 = x1 ,...,Xt−1 = xt−1 ),

the chain rule states that one can sample a full se-
quence of length T by sampling the xt s one after
another, each according to the predicted poste-
rior distribution, given the x1 ,...,xt−1 already
sampled. This is an autoregressive generative
model.

Causal models
Training such a model could be achieved naively
by minimizing the sum across training sequences
x and time steps t of


Lce f (x1 ,...,xt−1 ,∅,...,∅;w),xt ,

however such an approach is inefficient, as most

computations done for t < t′ have to be repeated
for t′ .

The standard strategy to address this issue is

to design a model f that predicts the distribu-
tions of all the xt of the sequence at once, but
which has a structure such that the computed
logits for e.g. xt depend only on the input val-
ues x1 ,...,xt−1 . Such a model is called causal,
31 161
 y1 y2 y3 ... yT yT +1

cst x1 x2 ... xT −1 xT

Figure 3.1: An autoregressive model f , is causal if a

time step xt of the input sequence can only modulate
a predicted ys = P̂ (Xs | Xt<s ) for s > t.

since it corresponds in the case of temporal se-

ries to not letting the future influence the past,
as illustrated in Figure 3.1.

The consequence is that the output at every po-

sition is the one that would be obtained if the in-
put was only available up to before that position.
Hence, training can be done by computing the
output for a full training sequence, and maximiz-
ing the predicted probabilities of all the tokens
of that same sequence, which boils down to min-
imizing the sum of the per-token cross-entropy.

32 161
Tokenizer
One important technical detail when dealing
with natural languages is that the representation
as tokens can be done in multiple ways, from the
finest granularity of individual symbols to entire
words. The conversion to and from the token
representation is done by a separate algorithm
called a tokenizer.

A standard method is the Byte Pair Encoding

(BPE) [Sennrich et al., 2015] that constructs to-
kens by hierarchically merging groups of char-
acters, trying to get tokens that represent frag-
ments of words of various lengths but of similar
frequencies, allocating tokens to long frequent
fragments, as well as to rare individual symbols.

33 161
3.3 Gradient descent
Except in specific cases like the linear regression
we saw in § 1.2, the optimal parameters w∗ do
not have a closed-form expression. In the general
case, the tool of choice to minimize a function is
gradient descent. It starts by initializing the pa-
rameters with a random w0 , and then improves
this estimate by iterating gradient steps, each
consisting of computing the gradient of the loss
with respect to the parameters, and subtracting
a fraction of it:

wn+1 = wn − η∇ℒ |w (wn ). (3.1)

This procedure corresponds to moving the cur-

rent estimate a bit in the direction that locally
decrease ℒ (w) maximally, as illustrated in Fig-
ure 3.2.

Learning rate
The meta-parameter η is referred to as the learn-
ing rate. It is a positive value that modulates
how quickly the minimization is done, and has
to be chosen carefully.

If it is too small, the optimization will be slow

at best, and may be trapped in a local minimum
early. If it is too large, the optimization may
34 161
 w

ℒ (w)

Figure 3.2: At every point w, the gradient ∇ℒ |w (w) is

in the direction that maximizes the increase of ℒ , or-
thogonal to the level curves (top). The gradient descent
minimizes ℒ (w) iteratively by subtracting a fraction
of the gradient at every step, resulting in a trajectory
that follows the steepest descent (bottom).

35 161
bounce around a good minimum and never de-
scend into it. As we will see in § 3.6, it can depend
on the iteration number n.

Stochastic Gradient Descent

All the losses used in practice can be expressed
as an average of a loss per sample, or per small
group of samples:
N
1 X
ℒ (w) = 𝓁n (w),
N
n=1

where 𝓁n (w) = L(f (xn ;w),yn ) for some L, and

the gradient is then:
N
1 X
∇ℒ |w (w) = ∇𝓁n |w (w). (3.2)
N
n=1

The resulting gradient descent would compute

exactly the sum in Equation 3.2, which is usu-
ally computationally heavy, and then update the
parameters according to Equation 3.1. However,
under reasonable assumptions of exchangeabil-
ity, for instance, if the samples have been prop-
erly shuffled, any partial sum of Equation 3.2
is an unbiased estimator of the full sum, albeit
noisy. So, updating the parameters from partial
sums corresponds to doing more gradient steps
36 161
for the same computational budget, with noisier
estimates of the gradient. Due to the redundancy
in the data, this happens to be a far more efficient
strategy.

We saw in § 2.1 that processing a batch of sam-

ples small enough to fit in the computing de-
vice’s memory is generally as fast as processing
a single one. Hence, the standard approach is to
split the full set 𝒟 into batches, and to update
the parameters from the estimate of the gradient
computed from each. This is referred to as mini-
batch stochastic gradient descent, or stochastic
gradient descent (SGD) for short.

It is important to note that this process is ex-

tremely gradual, and that the number of mini-
batches and gradient steps are typically of the
order of several millions.

As with many algorithms, intuition breaks down

in high dimensions, and although it may seem
that this procedure would be easily trapped in
a local minimum, in reality, due to the number
of parameters, the design of the models, and
the stochasticity of the data, its efficiency is far
greater than one might expect.

Plenty of variations of this standard strategy

have been proposed. The most popular one is
37 161
Adam [Kingma and Ba, 2014], which keeps run-
ning estimates of the mean and variance of each
component of the gradient, and normalizes them
automatically, avoiding scaling issues and differ-
ent training speeds in different parts of a model.

38 161
3.4 Backpropagation
Using gradient descent requires a tech-
nical means to compute ∇𝓁 |w (w) where
𝓁 = L(f (x;w);y). Given that f and L are
both compositions of standard tensor opera-
tions, as for any mathematical expression, the
chain rule from differential calculus allows us to
get an expression of it.

For the sake of making notation lighter–which,

unfortunately, will be needed in what follows–
we do not specify at which point gradients are
computed, since the context makes it clear.

f (d) (·;wd )
x(d−1) x(d)
×Jf (d) |x
∇𝓁 |x(d−1) ∇𝓁 |x(d)
×Jf (d) |w

∇𝓁 |wd

Figure 3.3: Given a model f = f (D) ◦ ··· ◦ f (1) , the

forward pass (top) consists of computing the outputs
x(d) of the mappings f (d) in order. The backward pass
(bottom) computes the gradients of the loss with respect
to the activation x(d) and the parameters wd backward
by multiplying them by the Jacobians.
39 161
Forward and backward passes
Consider the simple case of a composition of
mappings:

f = f (1) ◦ f (2) ◦ ··· ◦ f (D) .

The output of f (x;w) can be computed by start-

ing with x(0) = x and applying iteratively:
 
x(d) = f (d) x(d−1) ;wd ,

with x(D) as the final value.

The individual scalar values of these interme-

diate results x(d) are traditionally called acti-
vations in reference to neuron activations, the
value D is the depth of the model, the individual
mappings f (d) are referred to as layers, as we
will see is § 4.1, and their sequential evaluation
is the forward pass (see Figure 3.3, top).

Conversely, the gradient ∇𝓁 |x(d−1) of the loss

with respect to the output x(d−1) of f (d−1) is
the product of the gradient ∇𝓁 |x(d) with respect
to the output of f (d) multiplied by the Jacobian
Jf (d−1) |x of f (d−1) with respect to its variable
x. Thus, the gradients with respect to the out-
puts of all the f (d) s can be computed recursively
backward, starting with ∇𝓁 |x(D) = ∇L|x .
40 161
And the gradient that we are interested in for
training, that is ∇𝓁 |wd , is the gradient with re-
spect to the output of f (d) multiplied by the Ja-
cobian Jf (d) |w of f (d) with respect to the param-
eters.

This iterative computation of the gradients with

respect to the intermediate activations, com-
bined with that of the gradients with respect
to the layers’ parameters, is the backward pass
(see Figure 3.3, bottom). The combination of
this computation with the procedure of gradient
descent is called backpropagation.

In practice, the implementation details of the

forward and backward passes are hidden from
programmers. Deep learning frameworks are
able to automatically construct the sequence of
operations to compute gradients. A particularly
convenient algorithm is Autograd [Baydin et al.,
2015], which tracks tensor operations and builds,
on the fly, the combination of operators for gra-
dients. Thanks to this, a piece of imperative
programming that manipulates tensors can auto-
matically compute the gradient of any quantity
with respect to any other.

41 161
Resource usage
Regarding the computational cost, as we will
see, the bulk of the computation goes into linear
operations that require one matrix product for
the forward pass and two for the products by
the Jacobians for the backward pass, making the
latter roughly twice as costly as the former.

The memory requirement during inference is

roughly equal to that of the most demanding
individual layer. For training, however, the back-
ward pass requires keeping the activations com-
puted during the forward pass to compute the
Jacobians, which results in a memory usage that
grows proportionally to the model’s depth. Tech-
niques exist to trade the memory usage for com-
putation by either relying on reversible layers
[Gomez et al., 2017], or using checkpointing,
which consists of storing activations for some
layers only and recomputing the others on the fly
with partial forward passes during the backward
pass [Chen et al., 2016].

Vanishing gradient
A key historical issue when training a large net-
work is that when the gradient propagates back-
wards through an operator, it may be rescaled

42 161
by a multiplicative factor, and consequently de-
crease or increase exponentially when it tra-
verses many layer. When it decreases exponen-
tially, this is called the vanishing gradient, and
it may make the training impossible, or, in its
milder form, cause different parts of the model
to be updated at different speeds, degrading their
co-adaptation [Glorot and Bengio, 2010].

As we will see in Chapter 4, multiple techniques

have been developed to prevent this from hap-
pening, reflecting a change in perspective that
was crucial to the success of deep-learning: in-
stead of trying to improve generic optimization
methods, the effort shifted to engineering the
models themselves to make them optimizable.

43 161
3.5 The value of depth
As the term “deep learning” indicates, useful
models are generally compositions of long se-
ries of mappings. Training them with gradient
descent results in a sophisticated co-adaptation
of the mappings, even though this procedure is
gradual and local.

We can illustrate this behavior with a simple

model R2 → R2 that combines eight layers, each
multiplying its input by a 2 × 2 matrix and ap-
plying Tanh per component, with a final linear
classifier. This is a simplified Multi-Layer Per-
ceptron (see § 5.1).

If we train this model with SGD and cross-en-

tropy on a toy binary classification task (Figure
3.4, top-left), the matrices co-adapt to deform the
space until the classification is correct, which im-
plies that the data have been made linearly sep-
arable before the final affine operation (Figure
3.4, bottom-right).

Such an example gives a glimpse of what a deep

model can achieve; however, it is partially mis-
leading due to the low dimension of both the sig-
nal to process and the internal representations.
Everything is kept in 2D here for the sake of
visualization, while real models take advantage
44 161
 d=0 d=1 d=2

d=3 d=4 d=5

d=6 d=7 d=8

Figure 3.4: Each plot shows the deformation of the
space and the resulting positioning of the training
points in R2 after d layers of processing, starting with
the input to the model itself (top-left). The oblique line
in the last plot (bottom-right) shows the final affine
decision.

45 161
of representations in high dimensions, which, in
particular, facilitates the optimization by provid-
ing many degrees of freedom.

Empirical evidence accumulated over twenty

years demonstrates that state-of-the-art perfor-
mance across application domains necessitates
models with tens of layers, such as residual net-
works (see § 5.2) and Transformers (see § 5.3).

Theoretical results show that for a fixed com-

putational budget or number of parameters, in-
creasing the depth leads to a greater complexity
of the resulting mapping [Telgarsky, 2016].

46 161
3.6 Training protocols
Training a deep network requires defining a pro-
tocol to make the most of computation and data,
and ensure that performance will be good on
new data.

As we saw in § 1.3, the performance on the train-

ing samples may be misleading, so in the sim-
plest setup one needs at least two sets of samples:
one is a training set, used to optimize the model
parameters, and the other is a test set, to estimate
the performance of the trained model.

Additionally, there are usually meta-parameters

to adapt, in particular, those related to the model
architecture, the learning rate, and the regular-
ization terms in the loss. In that case, one needs
a validation set that is disjoint from both the
training set and the test set to assess the best
configuration.

The full training is usually decomposed into

epochs, each of them corresponding to going
through all the training examples once. The
usual dynamic of the losses is that the train loss
decreases as long as the optimization runs while
the validation loss may reach a minimum after
a certain number of epochs and then start to
increase, reflecting an overfitting regime, as in-
47 161
 Overfitting

Loss
Validation

Train
Number of epochs

Figure 3.5: As training progresses, a model’s perfor-

mance is usually monitored through losses. The train
loss is the one driving the optimization process and goes
down, while the validation loss is estimated on an other
set of examples to assess the overfitting of the model.
Overfitting appears when the model starts to take into
account random structures specific to the training set
at hands, resulting in the validation loss starting to
increase.

troduced in § 1.3 and illustrated on Figure 3.5.

Paradoxically, although they should suffer from

severe overfitting due to their capacity, large
models usually continue to improve as training
progresses. This may be due to the inductive
bias of the model becoming the main driver of
optimization when performance is near perfect

48 161
on the training set [Belkin et al., 2018].

An important design choice is the learning rate

schedule during training. The general policy is
that the learning rate should be initially large to
avoid having the optimization being trapped in
a bad local minimum early, and that it should get
smaller so that the optimized parameter values
do not bounce around, and reach a good mini-
mum in a narrow valley of the loss landscape.

The training of extremely large models may take

months on thousands of powerful GPUs and
have a financial cost of several million dollars. At
this scale, the training may involve many man-
ual interventions informed, in particular, by the
dynamics of the loss evolution.

49 161
3.7 The benefits of scale
There is an accumulation of empirical results
showing that performance, for instance, esti-
mated through the loss on test data, improves
with the amount of data according to remarkable
scaling laws, as long as the model size increases
correspondingly [Kaplan et al., 2020] (see Figure
3.6).

Benefiting from these scaling laws in the multi-

billion samples regime is possible in part thanks
to the structural plasticity of models, which al-
lows them to be scaled up arbitrarily, as we will
see, by increasing the number of layers or fea-
ture dimensions. But it is also made possible
by the distributed nature of the computation
implemented by these models and by stochas-
tic gradient descent, which requires only a tiny
fraction of the data at a time and can operate
with data sets whose size is orders of magnitude
greater than that of the computing device’s mem-
ory. This has resulted in an exponential growth
of the models, as illustrated in Figure 3.7.

Typical vision models have 10–100 million train-

able parameters and require 1018 –1019 FLOPs
for training [He et al., 2015; Sevilla et al., 2022].
Language models have from 100 million to hun-

50 161
 Test loss

Compute (peta-FLOP/s-day)
Test loss

Data set size (tokens)

Test loss

Number of parameters

Figure 3.6: Test loss of a language model vs. the amount

of computation in petaflop/s-day, the data set size in
tokens, that is fragments of words, and the model size
in parameters [Kaplan et al., 2020].
51 161
 Dataset Year Nb. of images Size
ImageNet 2012 1.2M 150Gb
Cityscape 2016 25K 60Gb
LAION-5B 2022 5.8B 240Tb

Dataset Year Nb. of books Size

WMT-18-de-en 2018 14M 8Gb
The Pile 2020 1.6B 825Gb
OSCAR 2020 12B 6Tb

Table 3.1: Some examples of publicly available datasets.

The equivalent number of books is an indicative esti-
mate for 250 pages of 2000 characters per book.

dreds of billions of trainable parameters and re-

quire 1020 –1023 FLOPs for training [Devlin et al.,
2018; Brown et al., 2020; Chowdhery et al., 2022;
Sevilla et al., 2022]. The latter require machines
with multiple high-end GPUs.

Training these large models is impossible using

datasets with a detailed ground-truth costly to
produce, which can only be of moderate size.
Instead, it is done with datasets automatically
produced by combining data available on the
internet with minimal curation, if any. These
sets may combine multiple modalities, such as
text and images from web pages, or sound and
images from videos, which can be used for large-
scale supervised training.

52 161
 1TWh
PaLM

1024
GPT-3 LaMDA

AlphaZero Whisper
Training cost (FLOP)

ViT
1MWh
AlphaGo CLIP-ViT
GPT-2
1021
BERT

Transformer
GPT
ResNet
1KWh
VGG16
1018 AlexNet GoogLeNet

2015 2020

Year
Figure 3.7: Training costs in number of FLOP of some
landmark models [Sevilla et al., 2023]. The colors in-
dicate the domains of application: Computer Vision
(blue), Natural Language Processing (red), or other
(black). The dashed lines correspond to the energy con-
sumption using A100s SXM in 16 bits precision.

53 161
The most impressive current successes of artifi-
cial intelligence rely on the so-called Large Lan-
guage Models (LLMs), which we will see in § 5.3
and § 7.1, trained on extremely large text datasets
(see Table 3.1).

54 161
 Part II

Deep models

55 161
Chapter 4

Model components

A deep model is nothing more than a complex

tensorial computation that can be decomposed
ultimately into standard mathematical opera-
tions from linear algebra and analysis. Over the
years, the field has developed a large collection
of high-level modules that have a clear semantic,
and complex models combining these modules,
which have proven to be effective in specific ap-
plication domains.

Empirical evidence and theoretical results show

that greater performance is achieved with deeper
architectures, that is, long compositions of map-
pings. As we saw in section § 3.4, training such
a model is challenging due to the vanishing gra-
dient, and multiple important technical contri-
butions have mitigated this problem.

56 161
4.1 The notion of layer
We call layers standard complex compounded
tensor operations that have been designed and
empirically identified as being generic and effi-
cient. They often incorporate trainable param-
eters and correspond to a convenient level of
granularity for designing and describing large
deep models. The term is inherited from sim-
ple multi-layer neural networks, even though
modern models may take the form of a complex
graph of such modules, incorporating multiple
parallel pathways.
Y
4×4
g n=4

f
×K
32 × 32
X

In the following pages, I try to stick to the con-

vention for model depiction illustrated above:

• operators / layers are depicted as boxes,

• darker coloring indicates that they embed

trainable parameters,

• non-default valued meta-parameters are

57 161
added in blue on their right,

• a dashed outer frame with a multiplicative

factor indicates that a group of layers is repli-
cated in series, each with its own set of trainable
parameters if any, and

• in some cases, the dimension of their output is

specified on the right when it differs from their
input.

Additionally, layers that have a complex internal

structure are depicted with a greater height.

58 161
4.2 Linear layers
The most important modules in terms of compu-
tation and number of parameters are the Linear
layers. They benefit from decades of research
and engineering in algorithmic and chip design
for matrix operations.

Note that the term “linear” in deep learning gen-

erally improperly refers to an affine operation,
that is the sum of a linear expression and a con-
stant bias.

Fully connected layers

The most basic linear layer is the fully connected
layer, parameterized by a trainable weight ma-
trix W of size D′ × D and bias vector b of dimen-
sion D′ . It implements an affine transformation
generalized to arbitrary tensor shapes, where
the supplementary dimensions are interpreted
as vector indexes. Formally, given an input X
of dimension D1 × ··· × DK × D, it computes an
output Y of dimension D1 × ··· × DK × D′ with

∀d1 ,...,dK ,
Y [d1 ,...,dK ] = W X[d1 ,...,dK ] + b.

While at first sight such an affine operation

59 161
seems limited to geometric transformations such
as rotations, symmetries, and translations, it can
in facts do more than that. In particular, projec-
tions for dimension reduction or signal filtering,
but also, from the perspective of the dot product
being a measure of similarity, a matrix-vector
product can be interpreted as computing match-
ing scores between the queries, as encoded by
the input vectors, and keys, as encoded by the
matrix rows.

As we saw in § 3.3, the gradient descent starts

with the parameters’ random initialization. If
this is done too naively, as seen in § 3.4, the net-
work may suffer from exploding or vanishing
activations and gradients [Glorot and Bengio,
2010]. Deep learning frameworks implement ini-
tialization methods that in particular scale the
random parameters according to the dimension
of the input to keep the variance of the activa-
tions constant and prevent pathological behav-
iors.

Convolutional layers
A linear layer can take as input an arbitrarily-
shaped tensor by reshaping it into a vector, as
long as it has the correct number of coefficients.
However, such a layer is poorly adapted to deal-

60 161
 Y Y

ϕ ψ

X X

Y Y

ϕ ψ

X X
... ...

Y Y

ϕ ψ

X X

1D transposed
1D convolution
convolution
Figure 4.1: A 1D convolution (left) takes as input
a D × T tensor X, applies the same affine mapping
ϕ(·;w) to every sub-tensor of shape D × K, and stores
the resulting D′ × 1 tensors into Y . A 1D transposed
convolution (right) takes as input a D × T tensor, ap-
plies the same affine mapping ψ(·;w) to every sub-
tensor of shape D × 1, and sums the shifted resulting
D′ × K tensors. Both can process inputs of different
size.

61 161
 ϕ ψ

Y X
X Y

2D transposed
2D convolution
convolution
Figure 4.2: A 2D convolution (left) takes as input a
D × H × W tensor X, applies the same affine mapping
ϕ(·;w) to every sub-tensor of shape D × K × L, and
stores the resulting D′ × 1 × 1 tensors into Y . A 2D
transposed convolution (right) takes as input a D ×
H × W tensor, applies the same affine mapping ψ(·;w)
to every D × 1 × 1 sub-tensor, and sums the shifted
resulting D′ × K × L tensors into Y .

ing with large tensors, since the number of pa-

rameters and number of operations are propor-
tional to the product of the input and output
dimensions. For instance, to process an RGB
image of size 256 × 256 as input and compute a
result of the same size, it would require approxi-
mately 4 × 1010 parameters and multiplications.

Besides these practical issues, most of the high-

dimension signals are strongly structured. For
instance, images exhibit short-term correlations

62 161
 Y

Y ϕ

X
ϕ
p=2
X
Padding
Y
Y
ϕ

X ϕ

X
s=2
...
d=2
Stride
Dilation
Figure 4.3: Beside its kernel size and number of input
/ output channels, a convolution admits three meta-
parameters: the stride s (left) modulates the step size
when going though the input tensor, the padding p
(top right) specifies how many zeros entries are added
around the input tensor before processing it, and the
dilation d (bottom right) parameterizes the index count
between coefficients of the filter.

63 161
and statistical stationarity to translation, scaling,
and certain symmetries. This is not reflected
in the inductive bias of a fully connected layer,
which completely ignores the signal structure.

To leverage these regularities, the tool of choice

is convolutional layers, which are also affine, but
process time-series or 2D signals locally, with
the same operator everywhere.

A 1D convolution is mainly defined by three

meta-parameters: its kernel size K, its number
of input channels D, its number of output chan-
nels D′ , and by the trainable parameters w of an
′
affine mapping ϕ(·;w) : RD×K → RD ×1 .

It can process any tensor X of size D × T with

T ≥ K, and applies ϕ(·;w) to every sub-tensor
D × K of X, storing the results in a tensor Y of
size D′ × (T − K + 1), as pictured in Figure 4.1
(left).

A 2D convolution is similar but has a K × L ker-

nel and takes as input a D × H × W tensor (see
Figure 4.2, left).

Both operators have for trainable parameters

those of ϕ that can be envisioned as D′ filters
of size D × K or D × K × L respectively, and a
bias vector of dimension D′ .
64 161
They also admit three additional meta-
parameters, illustrated on Figure 4.3:

• The padding specifies how many zero coeffi-

cients should be added around the input tensor
before processing it, particularly to maintain the
tensor size when the kernel size is greater than
one. Its default value is 0.

• The stride specifies the step used when going

through the input, allowing one to reduce the
output size geometrically by using large steps.
Its default value is 1.

• The dilation specifies the index count between

the filter coefficients of the local affine opera-
tor. Its default value is 1, and greater values
correspond to inserting zeros between the coef-
ficients, which increases the filter / kernel size
while keeping the number of trainable parame-
ters unchanged.

Except for the number of channels, a convolu-

tion’s output is usually strictly smaller than its
input by roughly the size of the kernel, or even
by a scaling factor if the stride is greater than
one.

Given an activation computed by a convolutional

layer, or the vector of values for all the channels
65 161
Figure 4.4: Given an activation in a series of convolu-
tion layers, here in red, its receptive field is the area in
the input signal, in blue, that modulates its value. Each
intermediate convolutional layer increases the width
and height of that area by roughly those of the kernel.

at a certain location, the portion of the input

signal that it depends on is called its receptive
field (see Figure 4.4). One of the H × W sub-
tensors corresponding to a single channel of a
D × H × W activation tensor is referred to as an
activation map.

Convolutions are used to recombine informa-

tion, generally to reduce the spatial size of the
representation, trading it for a greater number
of channels, which translates into a richer local
representation. They can implement differential
operators such as edge-detectors, or template
66 161
matching mechanisms. A succession of such lay-
ers can also be envisioned as a compositional and
hierarchical representation [Zeiler and Fergus,
2014], or as a diffusion process in which infor-
mation can be transported by half the kernel size
when passing through a layer.

A converse operation is the transposed convo-

lution that also consists of a localized affine op-
erator, defined by similar meta and trainable pa-
rameters as the convolution, but which applies,
for instance, in the 1D case, an affine mapping
′
ψ(·;w) : RD×1 → RD ×K , to every D × 1 sub-
tensor of the input, and sums the shifted D′ × K
resulting tensors to compute its output. Such an
operator increases the size of the signal and can
be understood intuitively as a synthesis process
(see Figure 4.1, right, and Figure 4.2, right).

A series of convolutional layers is the usual archi-

tecture to map a large-dimension signal, such as
an image or a sound sample, to a low-dimension
tensor. That can be, for instance, to get class
scores for classification or a compressed repre-
sentation. Transposed convolution layers are
used the opposite way to build a large-dimension
signal from a compressed representation, either
to assess that the compressed representation con-
tains enough information to build back the signal

67 161
or for synthesis, as it is easier to learn a density
model over a low-dimension representation. We
will come back to this in § 5.2.

68 161
4.3 Activation functions
If a network were combining only linear compo-
nents, it would itself be a linear operator, so it is
essential to have non-linear operations. They are
implemented in particular with activation func-
tions, which are layers that transforms each com-
ponent of the input tensor individually through a
mapping, resulting in a tensor of the same shape.

There are many different activation functions,

but the most used is the Rectified Linear Unit
(ReLU) [Glorot et al., 2011], which sets nega-
tive values to zero and keeps positive values un-
changed (see Figure 4.5, top right):
(
0 if x < 0,
relu(x) =
x otherwise.

Given that the core training strategy of deep-

learning relies on the gradient, it may seem prob-
lematic to have a mapping that is not differen-
tiable at zero and constant on half the real line.
However, the main property gradient descent
requires is that the gradient is informative on
average. Parameter initialization and data nor-
malization make half of the activations positive
when the training starts, ensuring that this is the
case.
69 161
 Tanh ReLU

Leaky ReLU GELU

Figure 4.5: Activation functions.

Before the generalization of ReLU, the standard

activation function was the hyperbolic tangent
(Tanh, see Figure 4.5, top left) which saturates
exponentially fast on both the negative and the
positive sides, aggravating the vanishing gradi-
ent.

Other popular activation functions follow the

same idea of keeping positive values unchanged
and squashing the negative values. Leaky ReLU
[Maas et al., 2013] applies a small positive multi-
plying factor to the negative values (see Figure

70 161
4.5, bottom left):
(
ax if x < 0,
leakyrelu(x) =
x otherwise.

And GELU [Hendrycks and Gimpel, 2016] is de-

fined with the cumulative distribution function
of the Gaussian distribution, that is:

gelu(x) = xP (Z ≤ x),

where Z ∼ 𝒩 (0,1). It roughly behaves like a

smooth ReLU (see Figure 4.5, bottom right).

The choice of an activation function, in partic-

ular among the variants of ReLU, is generally
driven by empirical performance.

71 161
4.4 Pooling
A classical strategy to reduce the signal size is to
use a pooling operation that combines multiple
activations into one that ideally summarizes the
information. The most standard operation of this
class is the max pooling layer, which, similarly
to convolution, can operate in 1D and 2D, and is
defined by a kernel size.

This layer computes the maximum activation

per channel, over non-overlapping sub-tensors
of spatial size equal to the kernel size. These val-
ues are stored in a result tensor with the same
number of channels as the input, and whose spa-
tial size is divided by the kernel size. As with
the convolution, this operator has three meta-
parameters: padding, stride, and dilation, with
the stride being equal to the kernel size by de-
fault.

The max operation can be intuitively interpreted

as a logical disjunction, or, when it follows a
series of convolutional layer that compute lo-
cal scores for the presence of parts, as a way
of encoding that at least one instance of a part
is present. It loses precise location, making it
invariant to local deformations.

A standard alternative is the average pooling

72 161
 Y

max

max

...

max

1D max pooling

Figure 4.6: A 1D max pooling takes as input a D ×

T tensor X, computes the max over non-overlapping
1 × L sub-tensors and stores the values in a resulting
D × (T /L) tensor Y .

73 161
layer that computes the average instead of the
maximum over the sub-tensors. This is a linear
operation, whereas max pooling is not.

74 161
4.5 Dropout
Some layers have been designed to explicitly
facilitate training or improve the learned repre-
sentations.

One of the main contributions of that sort was

dropout [Srivastava et al., 2014]. Such a layer
has no trainable parameters, but one meta-
parameter, p, and takes as input a tensor of arbi-
trary shape.

It is usually switched off during testing, in which

case its output is equal to its input. When it is
active, it has a probability p to set to zero each
activation of the input tensor independently, and
it re-scales all the activations by a factor of 1−p
1

to maintain the expected value unchanged (see

Figure 4.7).

The motivation behind dropout is to favor

meaningful individual activation and discourage
group representation. Since the probability that
a group of k activations remains intact through
a dropout layer is (1 − p)k , joint representations
become unreliable, which makes the training
procedure avoid them. It can also be seen as
a noise injection that makes the training more
robust.

75 161
 Y Y

0
1 1 1 1 1 0
1 1 1 1 0
1
1 1
0 1 1
0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
× 1 1 1
0 1 1 1 1 1
0 1 1 × 1−p
1 1 1 1 1 1
0 1 1 1
0 1
1
0 1 1 1
0 1 1 1 1 1 1

X X

Train Test
Figure 4.7: Dropout can process a tensor of arbitrary
shape. During training (left), it sets activations at ran-
dom to zero with probability p and applies a multiply-
ing factor to keep the expected values unchanged. Dur-
ing test (right), it keeps all the activations unchanged.

When dealing with images and 2D tensors, the

short-term correlation of the signals and the re-
sulting redundancy negate the effect of dropout,
since activations set to zero can be inferred from
their neighbors. Hence, dropout for 2D tensors
sets entire channels to zero instead of individual
activations.

Although dropout is generally used to improve

training and is inactive during inference, it can
be used in certain setups as a randomization
strategy, for instance, to estimate empirically

76 161
confidence scores [Gal and Ghahramani, 2015].

77 161
4.6 Normalizing layers
An important class of operators to facilitate the
training of deep architectures are the normaliz-
ing layers, which force the empirical mean and
variance of groups of activations.

The main layer in that family is batch normal-

ization [Ioffe and Szegedy, 2015] which is the
only standard layer to process batches instead
of individual samples. It is parameterized by a
meta-parameter D and two series of trainable
scalar parameters β1 ,...,βD and γ1 ,...,γD .

Given a batch of B samples x1 ,...,xB of dimen-

sion D, it first computes for each of the D com-
ponents an empirical mean m̂d and variance v̂d
across the batch:
B
1X
m̂d = xb,d
B
b=1
B
1 X
v̂d = (xb,d − m̂d )2 ,
B
b=1

from which it computes for every component

xb,d a normalized value zb,d , with empirical
mean 0 and variance 1, and from it the final
result value yb,d with mean βd and standard de-

78 161
 D
H,W

x⊙γ +β x⊙γ +β

√ √
(x − m̂)/ v̂ + ϵ (x − m̂)/ v̂ + ϵ

batchnorm layernorm

Figure 4.8: Batch normalization normalizes across the

sample index dimension B and all spatial dimensions
if any, so B,H,W for a B × D × H × W batch tensor,
and scales/shifts according to D, which is implemented
as a component-wise product by γ and a sum with β
of the corresponding sub-tensors (left). Layer normal-
ization normalizes across D and spatial dimensions,
and scales/shifts according to the same (right).

79 161
viation γd :
xb,d − m̂d
zb,d = √
v̂d + ϵ
yb,d = γd zb,d + βd .

Because this normalization is defined across a

batch, it is done only during training. During
testing, the layer transforms individual samples
according to the m̂d s and v̂d s estimated with a
moving average over the full training set, which
boils down to a fix affine transformation per com-
ponent.

The motivation behind batch normalization was

to avoid that a change in scaling in an early layer
of the network during training impacts all the
layers that follow, which then have to adapt their
trainable parameters accordingly. Although the
actual mode of action may be more complicated
than this initial motivation, this layer consider-
ably facilitates the training of deep models.

In the case of 2D tensors, to follow the prin-

ciple of convolutional layers of processing all
locations similarly, the normalization is done
per-channel across all 2D positions, and β and
γ remain vectors of dimension D so that the
scaling/shift does not depend on the 2D posi-
tion. Hence, if the tensor to process is of shape
80 161
B × D × H × W , the layer computes (m̂d , v̂d ),
for d = 1,...,D from the corresponding B ×
H × W slice, normalizes it accordingly, and fi-
nally scales and shifts its components with the
trainable parameters βd and γd .

So, given a B × D tensor, batch normalization

normalizes it across B and scales/shifts it ac-
cording to D, which can be implemented as a
component-wise product by γ and a sum with
β. Given a B × D × H × W it normalizes across
B,H,W and scales/shifts according to D (see
Figure 4.8, left).

This can be generalized depending on these di-

mensions. For instance, layer normalization [Ba
et al., 2016], computes moments and normalizes
across all components of individual samples, and
scales and shifts components individually (see
Figure 4.8, right). So, given a B × D tensor, it
normalizes across D and scales/shifts also ac-
cording to D. Given a B × D × H × W tensor,
it normalizes it across D,H,W and scales/shifts
according to the same.

Contrary to batch normalization, since it pro-

cesses samples individually, it behaves the same
during training and testing.

81 161
4.7 Skip connections
Another technique that mitigates the vanishing
gradient and allows the training of deep archi-
tectures are skip connections [Long et al., 2014;
Ronneberger et al., 2015]. They are not layers
per se, but an architectural design in which out-
puts of some layers are transported as-is to other
layers further in the model, bypassing process-
ing in-between. This unmodified signal can be
concatenated or added to the input to the layer
the connection branches into (see Figure 4.9). A
particular type of skip connections is the resid-
ual connection which combines the signal with
a sum, and usually skips only a few layers (see
Figure 4.9, right).

The most desirable property of this design is to

ensure that, even in the case of gradient-killing
processing at a certain stage, the gradient will
still propagate through the skip connections.
Residual connections, in particular, allow for the
building of deep models with up to several hun-
dred layers, and key models, such as the residual
networks [He et al., 2015] in computer vision
(see § 5.2), and the Transformers [Vaswani et al.,
2017] in natural language processing (see § 5.3),
are entirely composed of blocks of layers with
residual connections.
82 161
 ...

f (8)
...
(7)
...
f
(6)
f +
(6)
f
f (5) f (4)
(5)
f
f (4) f (3)
(4)
f
f (3) +
(3)
f
f (2) f (2)
f (2)
f (1) f (1)
f (1) ... ...
...

Figure 4.9: Skip connections, highlighted in red on this

figure, transport the signal unchanged across multiple
layers. Some architectures (center) that downscale and
re-upscale the representation size to operate at multiple
scales, have skip connections to feed outputs from the
early parts of the network to later layers operating at
the same scales [Long et al., 2014; Ronneberger et al.,
2015]. The residual connections (right) are a special
type of skip connections that sum the original signal
to the transformed one, and are usually short-term,
bypassing at max a handful of layers [He et al., 2015].

83 161
Their role can also be to facilitate multi-scale rea-
soning in models that reduce the signal size be-
fore re-expanding it, by connecting layers with
compatible sizes. In the case of residual con-
nections, they may also facilitate learning by
simplifying the task to finding a differential im-
provement instead of a full update.

84 161
4.8 Attention layers
In many applications, there is a need for an op-
eration able to combine local information at lo-
cations far apart in a tensor. For instance, this
could be distant details for coherent and realistic
image synthesis, or words at different positions
in a paragraph to make a grammatical or seman-
tic decision in natural language processing.

Fully connected layers cannot process large-

dimension signals, nor signals of variable size,
and convolutional layers are not able to prop-
agate information quickly. Strategies that ag-
gregate the results of convolutions, for instance,
by averaging them over large spatial areas, suf-
fer from mixing multiple signals into a limited
number of dimensions.

Attention layers specifically address this prob-

lem by computing an attention score for each
component of the resulting tensor to each com-
ponent of the input tensor, without locality con-
straints, and averaging features across the full
tensor accordingly [Vaswani et al., 2017].

Even though they are substantially more com-

plicated than other layers, they have become a
standard element in many recent models. They
are, in particular, the key building block of Trans-
85 161
 Q Y
K A V A

Computes Aq,1 ,...,Aq,N KV Computes Yq

Figure 4.10: The attention operator can be inter-
preted as matching every query Qq with all the
keys K1 ,...,KN KV to get normalized attention scores
Aq,1 ,...,Aq,N KV (left, and Equation 4.1), and then av-
eraging the values V1 ,...,VN KV with these scores to
compute the resulting Yq (right, and Equation 4.2).

formers, the dominant architecture for Large

Language Models. See § 5.3 and § 7.1.

Attention operator
Given

• a tensor Q of queries of size N Q × DQK ,

• a tensor K of keys of size N KV × DQK , and
• a tensor V of values of size N KV × DV ,

the attention operator computes a tensor

Y = att(K,Q,V )

of dimension N Q × DV . To do so, it first com-

putes for every query index q and every key in-
86 161
dex k an attention score Aq,k as the softargmax
of the dot products between the query Qq and
the keys:
 
exp √ 1 QK Q⊤ q K k
Aq,k = P D , (4.1)
exp √ 1 Q⊤ Kl
l QKD q

where the scaling factor √ 1 QK keeps the range

D
of values roughly unchanged even for large DQK .

Then a retrieved value is computed for each

query by averaging the values according to the
attention scores (see Figure 4.10):
X
Yq = Aq,k Vk . (4.2)
k

So if a query Qn matches one key Km far more

than all the others, the corresponding attention
score An,m will be close to one, and the retrieved
value Yn will be the value Vm associated to that
key. But, if it matches several keys equally, then
Yn will be the average of the associated values.

This can be implemented as

QK ⊤
 
att(Q,K,V ) = softargmax √ V.
DQK
| {z }
A

87 161
 Y

×
A

dropout

1/Σk
Masked
softargmax M ⊙
exp

Q K V

Figure 4.11: The attention operator Y = att(Q,K,V )

computes first an attention matrix A as the per-query
softargmax of QK ⊤ , which may be masked by a con-
stant matrix M before the normalization. This atten-
tion matrix goes through a dropout layer before being
multiplied by V to get the resulting Y . This operator
can be made causal by taking M full of 1s below the
diagonal and zero above.

88 161
This operator is usually extended in two ways,
as depicted in Figure 4.11. First, the attention
matrix can be masked by multiplying it before
the softargmax normalization by a Boolean ma-
trix M . This allows, for instance, to make the
operator causal by taking M full of 1s below the
diagonal and zero above, preventing Yq from de-
pending on keys and values of indices k greater
than q. Second, the attention matrix is processed
by a dropout layer (see § 4.5) before being multi-
plied by V , providing the usual benefits during
training.

Multi-head Attention Layer

This parameterless attention operator is the key
element in the Multi-Head Attention layer de-
picted in Figure 4.12. This layer has for meta-
parameters a number H of heads, and the shapes
of three series of H trainable weight matrices

• W Q of size H × D × DQK ,
• W K of size H × D × DQK , and
• W V of size H × D × DV ,

to compute respectively the queries, the keys,

and the values from the input, and a final weight
matrix W O of size HDV × D to aggregate the
per-head results.
89 161
 Y

×W O

(Y1 | ··· | YH )

attatt
attatt
att

Q K V
×W
×W1 2 Q×W
Q
1 2K K×W
×W 1 2V V
×W
×W×W3
Q ×W
Q ×W3 K
K×W×W3 4V V
×W4
H ×W4
H ×W H

×H

XQ XK XV
Figure 4.12: The Multi-head Attention layer applies
for each of its h = 1,...,H heads a parametrized lin-
ear transformation to individual elements of the input
sequences X Q ,X K ,X V to get sequences Q,K,V that
are processed by the attention operator to compute Yh .
These H sequences are concatenated along features,
and individual elements are passed through one last
linear operator to get the final result sequence Y .

90 161
It takes as input three sequences

• X Q of size N Q × D,
• X K of size N KV × D, and
• X V of size N KV × D,

from which it computes, for h = 1,...,H,

Yh = att X Q WhQ ,X K WhK ,X V WhV .

These sequences Y1 ,...,YH are concatenated

along the feature dimension and each individual
element of the resulting sequence is multiplied
by W O to get the final result:

Y = (Y1 | ··· | YH )W O .

As we will see in § 5.3 and in Figure 5.6, this

layer is used to build two model sub-structures:
self-attention blocks, in which the three input
sequences X Q , X K , and X V are the same, and
cross-attention blocks, where X K and X V are
the same.

It is noteworthy that the attention operator,

and consequently the multi-head attention layer
when there is no masking, is invariant to a per-
mutation of the keys and values, and equivariant
to a permutation of the queries, as it would per-
mute the resulting tensor similarly.
91 161
4.9 Token embedding
In many situations, we need to convert discrete
tokens into vectors. This can be done with an em-
bedding layer, which consists of a lookup table
that directly maps integers to vectors.

Such a layer is defined by two meta-parameters:

the number N of possible token values, and the
dimension D of the output vectors, and one train-
able N × D weight matrix M .

Given as input an integer tensor X of dimen-

sion D1 × ··· × DK and values in {0,...,N − 1}
such a layer returns a real-valued tensor Y of
dimension D1 × ··· × DK × D with

∀d1 ,...,dK ,
Y [d1 ,...,dK ] = M [X[d1 ,...,dK ]].

92 161
4.10 Positional encoding
While the processing of a fully connected layer
is specific to both the positions of the features
in the input tensor and to the position of the
resulting activation in the output tensor, con-
volutional layers and Multi-Head Attention lay-
ers are oblivious to the absolute position in the
tensor. This is key to their strong invariance and
inductive bias, which is beneficial for dealing
with a stationary signal.

However, this can be an issue in certain situ-

ations where proper processing has to access
the absolute positioning. This is the case, for
instance, for image synthesis, where the statis-
tics of a scene are not totally stationary, or in
natural language processing, where the relative
positions of words strongly modulate the mean-
ing of a sentence.

The standard way of coping with this problem

is to add or concatenate a positional encoding,
which is a feature vector that depends on the lo-
cation, to the feature representation at every po-
sition. This positional encoding can be learned as
other layer parameters, or defined analytically.

For instance, in the original Transformer model,

for a series of vectors of dimension D, Vaswani
93 161
et al. [2017] add an encoding of the sequence
index as a series of sines and cosines at various
frequencies:

pos-enc[t,d] =
  
 sin d/Dt
if d ∈ 2N
T 
t
 cos (d−1)/D
T
otherwise,

with T = 104 .

94 161
Chapter 5

Architectures

The field of deep learning has developed over

the years for each application domain multiple
deep architectures that exhibit good trade-offs
with respect to multiple criteria of interest: e.g.
ease of training, accuracy of prediction, memory
footprint, computational cost, scalability.

95 161
5.1 Multi-Layer Perceptrons
The simplest deep architecture is the Multi-Layer
Perceptron (MLP), which takes the form of a
succession of fully connected layers separated
by activation functions. See an example in Figure
5.1. For historical reasons, in such a model, the
number of hidden layers refers to the number of
linear layers, excluding the last one.

A key theoretical result is the universal approxi-

mation theorem [Cybenko, 1989] which states
that, if the activation function σ is continuous

Y
2
fully-conn

relu
10
Hidden fully-conn
layers
relu
25
fully-conn
50
X
Figure 5.1: This multi-layer perceptron takes as input
a one dimension tensor of size 50, is composed of three
fully connected layers with outputs of dimensions re-
spectively 25, 10, and 2, the two first followed by ReLU
layers.

96 161
and not polynomial, any continuous function f
can be approximated arbitrarily well uniformly
on a compact domain, that is bounded and con-
taining its boundary, by a model of the form
l2 ◦ σ ◦ l1 where l1 and l2 are affine. Such a model
is a MLP with a single hidden layer, and this re-
sult implies that it can approximate anything
of practical value. However, this approximation
holds if the dimension of the first linear layer’s
output can be arbitrarily large.

In spite of their simplicity, MLPs remain an im-

portant tool when the dimension of the signal
to be processed is not too large.

97 161
5.2 Convolutional networks
The standard architecture for processing images
is a convolutional network, or convnet, that com-
bines multiple convolutional layers, either to re-
duce the signal size before it can be processed by
fully connected layers, or to output a 2D signal
also of large size.

LeNet-like
The original LeNet model for image classifica-
tion [LeCun et al., 1998] combines a series of 2D
convolutional layers and max pooling layers that
play the role of feature extractor, with a series
of fully connected layers which act like a MLP
and perform the classification per se (see Figure
5.2).

This architecture was the blueprint for many

models that share its structure and are simply
larger, such as AlexNet [Krizhevsky et al., 2012]
or the VGG family [Simonyan and Zisserman,
2014].

Residual networks
Standard convolutional neural networks that fol-
low the architecture of the LeNet family are not
easily extended to deep architectures and suffer
98 161
 P̂ (Y )

10
fully-conn
Classifier
relu
200
fully-conn
256
reshape

relu
64 × 2 × 2
maxpool k=2
64 × 4 × 4
Feature conv-2d k=5
extractor
relu
32 × 8 × 8
maxpool k=3
32 × 24 × 24
conv-2d k=5
1 × 28 × 28
X
Figure 5.2: Example of a small LeNet-like network for
classifying 28 × 28 grayscale images of handwritten
digits [LeCun et al., 1998]. Its first half is convolutional,
and alternates convolutional layers per se and max
pooling layers, reducing the signal dimension for 28 ×
28 scalars to 256. Its second half processes this 256
dimension feature vector through a one hidden layer
perceptron to compute 10 logit scores corresponding to
the ten possible digits.

99 161
 Y
C ×H ×W
relu
+
batchnorm
C ×H ×W
conv-2d k=1

relu
batchnorm
conv-2d k=3 p=1

relu
batchnorm
C
2 ×H ×W
conv-2d k=1
C ×H ×W
X
Figure 5.3: A residual block.

from the vanishing gradient problem. The resid-

ual networks, or ResNets, proposed by He et al.
[2015] explicitly address the issue of the van-
ishing gradient with residual connections (see
§ 4.7), that allow hundreds of layers. They have
become standard architectures for computer vi-
sion applications, and exist in multiple versions
depending on the number of layers. We are go-
ing to look in detail at the architecture of the
ResNet-50 for classification.

100 161
 Y
4C H W
S × S × S
relu
+
batchnorm batchnorm
4C H W
S × S × S
conv-2d k=1 s=S conv-2d k=1

relu
batchnorm
C
S ×H
S ×
W
S
conv-2d k=3 s=S p=1

relu
batchnorm
C
S ×H ×W
conv-2d k=1

C ×H ×W
X
Figure 5.4: A downscaling residual block. It admits a
meta-parameter S, the stride of the first convolution
layer, which modulates the reduction of the tensor size.

As other ResNets, it is composed of a series of

residual blocks, each combining several convolu-
tional layers, batch norm layers, and ReLU layers,
wrapped in a residual connection. Such a block
is pictured in Figure 5.3.

A key requirement for high performance with

real images is to propagate a signal with a large
number of channels, to allow for a rich repre-

101 161
 P̂ (Y )

1000
fully-conn
2048
reshape
2048 × 1 × 1
avgpool k=7

resblock
×2
2048 × 7 × 7
dresblock
S=2

resblock
×5
1024 × 14 × 14
dresblock
S=2

resblock
×3
512 × 28 × 28
dresblock
S=2

resblock
×2
256 × 56 × 56
dresblock
S=1
64 × 56 × 56
maxpool k=3 s=2 p=1
relu
batchnorm
64 × 112 × 112
conv-2d k=7 s=2 p=3

3 × 224 × 224
X
Figure 5.5: Structure of the ResNet-50 [He et al., 2015].

102 161
sentation. However, the parameter count of a
convolutional layer, and its computational cost,
are quadratic with the number of channels. This
residual block mitigates this problem by first re-
ducing the number of channels with a 1 × 1 con-
volution, then operating spatially with a 3 × 3
convolution on this reduced number of chan-
nels, and then upscaling the number of channels,
again with a 1 × 1 convolution.

The network reduces the dimensionality of the

signal to finally compute the logits for the clas-
sification. This is done thanks to an architec-
ture composed of several sections, each starting
with a downscaling residual block that halves
the height and width of the signal, and doubles
the number of channels, followed by a series
of residual blocks. Such a downscaling resid-
ual block has a structure similar to a standard
residual block, except that it requires a residual
connection that changes the tensor shape. This
is achieved with a 1 × 1 convolution with a stride
of two (see Figure 5.4).

The overall structure of the ResNet-50 is pre-

sented in Figure 5.5. It starts with a 7 × 7 convo-
lutional layer that converts the three-channel in-
put image to a 64-channel image of half the size,
followed by four sections of residual blocks. Sur-

103 161
prisingly, in the first section, there is no down-
scaling, only an increase of the number of chan-
nels by a factor of 4. The output of the last resid-
ual block is 2048 × 7 × 7, which is converted to a
vector of dimension 2048 by an average pooling
of kernel size 7 × 7, and then processed through
a fully connected layer to get the final logits,
here for 1000 classes.

104 161
5.3 Attention models
As stated in § 4.8, many applications, in partic-
ular from natural language processing, greatly
benefit from models that include attention mech-
anisms. The architecture of choice for such tasks,
which has been instrumental in recent advances
in deep learning, is the Transformer proposed
by Vaswani et al. [2017].

Transformer
The original Transformer, pictured in Figure 5.7,
was designed for sequence-to-sequence trans-
lation. It combines an encoder that processes
the input sequence to get a refined representa-
tion, and an autoregressive decoder that gener-
ates each token of the result sequence, given the
encoder’s representation of the input sequence
and the output tokens generated so far. As the
residual convolutional networks of § 5.2, both
the encoder and the decoder of the Transformer
are sequences of compounded blocks built with
residual connections.

The self-attention block, pictured on the left of

Figure 5.6, combines a Multi-Head Attention
layer (see § 4.8), that recombines information
globally, allowing any position to collect infor-

105 161
 Y Y

+ +
dropout dropout
fully-conn fully-conn
MLP gelu gelu
fully-conn fully-conn
layernorm layernorm

+ +
mha mha
Q K V Q K V

layernorm layernorm

X QKV XQ X KV
Figure 5.6: Self-attention block (left) and cross-atten-
tion block (right). These specific structures proposed by
Radford et al. [2018] differ slightly from the original
architecture of Vaswani et al. [2017], in particular by
having the layer normalization first in the residual
blocks.

106 161
 P̂ (Y1 ),..., P̂ (YS | Ys<S )

S ×V
fully-conn
S ×D
cross-att
Q KV

Decoder causal
self-att ×N
pos-enc +
S ×D
embed

S
0,Y1 ,...,YS−1

Z1 ,...,ZT

T ×D
self-att
×N
Encoder
pos-enc +
T ×D
embed

T
X1 ,...,XT

Figure 5.7: Original encoder-decoder Transformer

model for sequence-to-sequence translation [Vaswani
et al., 2017].

107 161
mation from any other positions, with a one-
hidden-layer MLP that updates representations
at every position separately. This block can
be made causal by using an adequate attention
mask, as described in § 4.8

The cross-attention block, pictured on the right

of Figure 5.6, is similar except that it takes as
input two sequences, one to compute the queries
and one to compute the keys and values.

The encoder of the Transformer (see Figure

5.7, bottom), recodes the input sequence of dis-
crete tokens X1 ,...XT with an embedding layer
(see § 4.9), and adds a positional encoding (see
§ 4.10), before processing it with several self-
attention blocks to generate a refined represen-
tation Z1 ,...,ZT .

The decoder (see Figure 5.7, top), takes as in-

put the sequence Y1 ,...,YS−1 of result tokens
produced so far, similarly recodes them through
an embedding layer, adds a positional encoding,
and processes it through alternating causal self-
attention blocks and cross-attention blocks to
produce the logits predicting the next tokens.
These cross-attention blocks compute their keys
and values from the encoder’s result represen-
tation Z1 ,...,ZT , which allows the resulting se-

108 161
 P̂ (X1 ),..., P̂ (XT | Xt<T )

T ×V
fully-conn
T ×D
causal
self-att ×N
pos-enc +
T ×D
embed

T
0,X1 ,...,XT −1

Figure 5.8: GPT model [Radford et al., 2018].

quence to be a function of the original sequence

X1 ,...,XT .

As we saw in § 3.2 being causal ensures that

such a model can be trained by minimizing the
cross-entropy summed across the full sequence.

Generative Pre-trained Transformer

The Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)
[Radford et al., 2018, 2019], pictured in Figure 5.8
is a pure autoregressive model that consists of a
succession of causal self-attention blocks, hence
a causal version of the original Transformer en-
coder. We come back to how they are used for
text generation in § 7.1.

109 161
 P̂ (Y )

C
fully-conn
gelu
MLP
readout fully-conn
gelu
fully-conn

D
Z0 ,Z1 ,...,ZM

(M + 1) × D
self-att
×N
pos-enc +

(M + 1) × D
E0 ,E1 ,...,EM

Image E0 ×W E
encoder M × 3P 2
X1 ,...,XM

Figure 5.9: Vision Transformer model [Dosovitskiy

et al., 2020].

This class of models scales extremely well, up

to hundreds of billions of trainable parameters
[Brown et al., 2020].

110 161
Vision Transformer
Transformers have been put to use for image
classification with the Vision Transformer (ViT)
model [Dosovitskiy et al., 2020] (see Figure 5.9).

It splits the three-channel input image into M

patches of resolution P × P , which are then flat-
tened to create a sequence of vectors X1 ,...,XM
of shape M × 3P 2 . This sequence is multiplied
by a trainable matrix W E of shape 3P 2 × D to
map it to a M × D sequence, to which is con-
catenated one trainable vector E0 . The resulting
(M + 1) × D sequence E0 ,...,EM is then pro-
cessed through multiple self-attention blocks.
See § 5.3 and Figure 5.6.

The first element Z0 in the resultant sequence,

which corresponds to E0 and is not associated
which any part of the image, is finally processed
by a two-hidden-layer MLP to get the final C
logits. Such a token, added for a readout of a
class prediction, was introduced by Devlin et al.
[2018] in the BERT model and is referred to as a
CLS token.

111 161
 Part III

Applications

112 161
Chapter 6

Prediction

A first category of applications, such as face

recognition, sentiment analysis, object detection,
or speech recognition, requires predicting an un-
known value from an available signal.

113 161
6.1 Image denoising
A direct application of deep models to image
processing is to recover from degradation by
utilizing the redundancy in the statistical struc-
ture of images. The petals of a sunflower on a
grayscale picture can be colored with high confi-
dence, and the texture of a geometric shape such
as a table on a low-light grainy picture can be
corrected by averaging it over a large area likely
to be uniform.

A denoising autoencoder is a model that takes

as input a degraded signal X̃ and computes an
estimate of the original one X. For images, it
is a convolutional network that may integrate
skip-connections, in particular to combine repre-
sentations at the same resolution obtained early
and late in the model, and attention layers to
facilitate taking into account elements far away
from each other.

Such a model is trained by collecting a large num-

ber of clean samples paired with their degraded
inputs. The latter can be captured in degraded
conditions, such as low-light or inadequate fo-
cus, or generated algorithmically, for instance,
by converting the clean sample to grayscale, re-
ducing its size, or compressing it aggressively

114 161
with a lossy compression method.

The standard training procedure for denoising

autoencoders uses the MSE loss summed across
all pixels, in which case the model aims at com-
puting the best average clean picture, given the
degraded one, that is E[X | X̃]. This quantity
may be problematic when X is not completely
determined by X̃, in which case some parts
of the generated signal may be an unrealistic,
blurry average.

115 161
6.2 Image classification
Image classification is the simplest strategy for
extracting semantics from an image and consists
of predicting a class from a finite, predefined
number of classes, given an input image.

The standard models for this task are convolu-

tional networks, such as ResNets (see § 5.2), and
attention-based models such as ViT (see § 5.3).
Those models generate a vector of logits with as
many dimensions as there are classes.

The training procedure simply minimizes the

cross-entropy loss (see § 3.1). Usually, perfor-
mance can be improved with data augmenta-
tion, which consists of modifying the training
samples with hand-designed random transfor-
mations that do not change the semantic content
of the image, such as cropping, scaling, mirror-
ing, or color changes.

116 161
6.3 Object detection
A more complex task for image understanding is
object detection, in which the objective is, given
an input image, to predict the classes and posi-
tions of objects of interest.

An object position is formalized as the four coor-

dinates (x1 ,y1 ,x2 ,y2 ) of a rectangular bounding
box, and the ground truth associated with each
training image is a list of such bounding boxes,
each labeled with the class of the object in it.

The standard approach to solve this task, for in-

stance, by the Single Shot Detector (SSD) [Liu
et al., 2015]), is to use a convolutional neural
network that produces a sequence of image
representations Zs of size Ds × Hs × Ws , s =
1,...,S, with decreasing spatial resolution Hs ×
Ws down to 1 × 1 for s = S (see Figure 6.1). Each
of those tensors covers the input image in full,
so the h,w indices correspond to a partitioning
of the image lattice into regular squares that
gets coarser when s increases. As seen in § 4.2,
and illustrated in Figure 4.4, due to the succes-
sion of convolutional layers, a feature vector
(Zs [0,h,w],...,Zs [Ds − 1,h,w]) is a descriptor
of an area of the image, called its receptive field,
that is larger than this square but centered on

117 161
 X

Z1
Z2
ZS−1
ZS
...

...

Figure 6.1: A convolutional object detector processes the

input image to generate a sequence of representations
of decreasing resolutions. It computes for every h,w, at
every scale s, a pre-defined number of bounding boxes
whose centers are in the image area corresponding to
that cell, and whose size are such that they fit in its
receptive field. Each prediction takes the form of the
estimates (x̂1 , x̂2 , ŷ1 , ŷ2 ), represented by the red boxes
above, and a vector of C + 1 logits for the C classes of
interest, and an additional “no object” class.

118 161
Figure 6.2: Examples of object detection with the Single-
Shot Detector [Liu et al., 2015].

119 161
it. This results in a non-ambiguous matching of
any bounding box (x1 ,x2 ,y1 ,y2 ) to a s,h,w, de-
termined respectively by max(x2 − x1 ,y2 − y1 ),
y1 +y2
2 , and 2 .
x1 +x2

Detection is achieved by adding S convolutional

layers, each processing a Zs and computing for
every tensor indices h,w the coordinates of a
bounding box, and the associated logits. If there
are C object classes, there are C + 1 logits, the
additional one standing for “no object.” Hence,
each additional convolution layer has 4 + C + 1
output channels. The SSD algorithm in particu-
lar generates several bounding boxes per s,h,w,
each dedicated to a hard-coded range of aspect
ratios.

Training sets for object detection are costly to

create, since the labeling with bounding boxes
requires a slow human intervention. To mitigate
this issue, the standard approach is to start with
a convolutional model that has been pre-trained
on a large classification data set such as VGG-16
for the original SSD, and to replace its final fully
connected layers with additional convolutional
ones. Surprisingly, models trained for classifica-
tion only have learned feature representations
that can be repurposed for object detection, even
though that task involves the regression of geo-

120 161
metric quantities.

During training, every ground-truth bounding

box is associated with its s,h,w, and induces a
loss term composed of a cross-entropy loss for
the logits, and a regression loss such as MSE
for the bounding box coordinates. Every other
s,h,w free of bounding-box match induces a
cross-entropy only penalty to predict the class
“no object”.

121 161
6.4 Semantic segmentation
The finest-grain prediction task for image un-
derstanding is semantic segmentation, which
consists of predicting, for every pixel, the class
of the object to which it belongs. This can be
achieved with a standard convolutional neural
network that outputs a convolutional map with
as many channels as classes, carrying the esti-
mated logits for every pixel.

While a standard residual network, for instance,

can generate a dense output of the same reso-
lution as its input, as for object detection, this
task requires operating at multiple scales. This
is necessary so that any object, or sufficiently
informative sub-part, regardless of its size, is
captured somewhere in the model by the feature
representation at a single tensor position. Hence,
standard architectures for that task downscale
the image with a series of convolutional layers
to increase the receptive field of the activations,
and re-upscale it with a series of transposed con-
volutional layers, or other upscaling methods
such as bilinear interpolation, to make the pre-
diction at high resolution.

However, a strict downscaling-upscaling archi-

tecture does not allow for operating at a fine

122 161
Figure 6.3: Semantic segmentation results with the
Pyramid Scene Parsing Network [Zhao et al., 2016].

grain when making the final prediction, since all

the signal has been transmitted through a low-
resolution representation at some point. Models
that apply such downscaling-upscaling serially
mitigate these issues with skip connections from
layers at a certain resolution, before downscal-
ing, to layers at the same resolution, after upscal-
ing [Long et al., 2014; Ronneberger et al., 2015].
Models that do it in parallel, after a convolutional

123 161
backbone, concatenate the resulting multi-scale
representation after upscaling, before making
the final per-pixel prediction [Zhao et al., 2016].

Training is achieved with a standard cross-

entropy summed over all the pixels. As for object
detection, training can start from a network pre-
trained on a large-scale image classification data
set to compensate for the limited availability of
segmentation ground truth.

124 161
6.5 Speech recognition
Speech recognition consists of converting a
sound sample into a sequence of words. There
have been plenty of approaches to this problem
historically, but a conceptually simple and recent
one proposed by Radford et al. [2022] consists of
casting it as a sequence-to-sequence translation
and then solving it with a standard attention-
based Transformer, as described in § 5.3.

Their model first converts the sound signal into a

spectrogram, which is a one-dimensional series
T × D, that encodes at every time step a vector
of energies in D frequency bands. The associ-
ated text is encoded with the BPE tokenizer (see
§ 3.2).

The spectrogram is processed through a few 1D

convolutional layers, and the resulting repre-
sentation is fed into the encoder of the Trans-
former. The decoder directly generates a discrete
sequence of tokens, that correspond to one of the
possible tasks considered during training. Multi-
ple objectives are considered for training: tran-
scription of English or non-English text, transla-
tion from any language to English, or detection
of non-speech sequences, such as background
music or ambient noise.

125 161
This approach allows leveraging extremely large
data sets that combine multiple types of sound
sources with diverse ground truth.

It is noteworthy that even though the ultimate

goal of this approach is to produce a transla-
tion as deterministic as possible given the input
signal, it is formally the sampling of a text dis-
tribution conditioned on a sound sample, hence
a synthesis process. The decoder is in fact ex-
tremely similar to the generative model of § 7.1.

126 161
6.6 Text-image representations
A powerful approach to image understanding
consists of learning consistent image and text
representations, such that an image, or a textual
description of it, would be mapped to the same
feature vector.

The Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training

(CLIP) proposed by Radford et al. [2021] com-
bines an image encoder f , which is a ViT, and
a text encoder g, which is a GPT. See § 5.3 for
both.

To repurpose a GPT as a text encoder, instead

of a standard autoregressive model, they add to
the input sequence an “end of sentence” token,
and use the representation of this token in the
last layer as the embedding. Both embeddings
have the same dimension, which, depending on
the configuration, is between 512 and 1024.

Those two models are trained from scratch using

a data set of 400 million image-text pairs (ik ,tk )
collected from the internet. The training proce-
dure follows the standard mini-batch stochastic
gradient descent approach but relies on a con-
trastive loss. The embeddings are computed for
every image and every text of the N pairs in the
mini-batch, and a cosine similarity measure is
127 161
computed not only between text and image em-
beddings from each pair, but also across pairs, re-
sulting in an N × N matrix of similarity scores:

lm,n = f (im )⊤ g(tn ), m = 1,...,N,n = 1,...,N.

The model is trained with cross-entropy so that,

∀n the values l1,n ,...,lN,n interpreted as logit
scores predict n, and similarly for ln,1 ,...,ln,N .
This means that ∀n,m, s.t. n ̸= m the similarity
ln,n is unambiguously greater than both ln,m and
lm,n .

When it has been trained, this model can be used

to do zero-shot prediction, that is, classifying a
signal in the absence of training examples by
defining a series of candidate classes with text
descriptions, and computing the similarity of the
embedding of an image with the embedding of
each of those descriptions (see Figure 6.4).

Additionally, since the textual descriptions are of-

ten detailed, such a model has to capture a richer
representation of images and pick up cues over-
looked by classifier networks. This translates to
excellent performance on challenging datasets
such as ImageNet Adversarial [Hendrycks et al.,
2019] which was specifically designed to degrade
or erase cues on which standard predictors rely.
128 161
Figure 6.4: The CLIP text-image embedding [Radford
et al., 2021] allows to do zero-shot prediction by pre-
dicting what class description embedding is the most
consistent with the image embedding.

129 161
Chapter 7

Synthesis

A second category of applications distinct from

prediction is synthesis. It consists of fitting a
density model to training samples and providing
means to sample from this model.

130 161
7.1 Text generation
The standard approach to text synthesis is to
use an attention-based, autoregressive model.
The most successful in this domain is the GPT
[Radford et al., 2018], which we described in
§ 5.3.

The encoding into tokens and the decoding is

done with the BPE tokenizer (see § 3.2).

When it has been trained on very large datasets,

a Large Language Model (LLM) exhibits ex-
tremely powerful properties. Besides the syntac-
tic and grammatical structure of the language, it
has to integrate very diverse knowledge, e.g. to
predict the word following “The capital of Japan
is”, “if water is heated to 100 Celsius degrees it
turns into”, or “because her puppy was sick, Jane
was”.

This results in particular in the ability to solve

zero-shot prediction, where no training example
is available and the objective is defined in nat-
ural language, e.g. “In the following sentences,
indicate which ones are aggressive.” More sur-
prisingly, when such a model is put in a statistical
context by a “prompt” carefully crafted, it can
exhibit abilities for question answering, problem
solving, and chain-of-thought that appear eerily
131 161
close to high-level reasoning [Chowdhery et al.,
2022; Bubeck et al., 2023].

Due to these remarkable capabilities, these mod-

els are sometimes referred to as foundation mod-
els [Bommasani et al., 2021].

132 161
7.2 Image generation
Multiple deep methods have been developed to
model and sample from a high-dimensional den-
sity. A powerful approach for image synthesis
relies on inverting a diffusion process.

The principle consists of defining analytically

a process that gradually degrades any sample,
and consequently transforms the complex and
unknown density of the data into a simple and
well-known density such as a normal, and train-
ing a deep architecture to invert this degradation
process [Ho et al., 2020].

Given a fixed T , the diffusion process defines a

probabilities over series of T + 1 images as fol-
lows: samples x0 uniformly in the data set, and
then go on sampling xt+1 ∼ p(xt+1 | xt ) where
the conditional distribution p is defined analyti-
cally, and such that it gradually erases the struc-
ture that was in x0 . The setup should be such
that the distribution p(xT ) of xT has a simple,
known form, so in particular does not depend
on the complicated data distribution p(x0 ), and
can be sampled.

For instance, Ho et al. [2020] normalize the data

to have a mean of 0 and a variance of 1, and their
diffusion process consists of adding a bit of white
133 161
 xT

x0

Figure 7.1: Image synthesis with denoising diffusion

[Ho et al., 2020]. Each sample starts as a white noise
xT (top), and is gradually de-noised by sampling iter-
atively xt−1 | xt ∼ 𝒩 (xt + f (xt ,t;w),σt ).

134 161
noise and re-normalizing the variance to 1. This
process exponentially reduces the importance of
x0 , and xt ’s density can rapidly be approximated
with a normal.

The denoiser f is a deep architecture that

should model and allow sampling from,
f (xt−1 ,xt ,t;w) ≃ p(xt−1 | xt ). It can be shown,
thanks to a variational bound, that if this
one-step reverse process is accurate enough,
sampling xT ∼ p(xT ) and denoising T steps
with f results in a x0 that follows p(x0 ).

Training f can be achieved by generating a large

(n) (n)
number of sequences x0 ,...,xT , picking a tn
in each, and maximizing
(n) (n)
X
logf (xtn −1 ,xtn ,tn ;w).
n

Given their diffusion process, Ho et al. [2020]

have a denoising of the form:

xt−1 | xt ∼ 𝒩 (xt + f (xt ,t;w);σt ), (7.1)

where σt is defined analytically.

In practice, such a model initially hallucinates

structures by pure luck in the random noise, and
then gradually build more elements that emerge
135 161
from the noise by reinforcing the most likely
continuation of the image obtained thus far.

This approach can be extended to text-

conditioned synthesis, to generate images
that match a description. For instance, Nichol
et al. [2021] add to the mean of the denoising
distribution of Equation 7.1 a bias that goes in
the direction of increasing the CLIP matching
score (see § 6.6) between the produced image
and the conditioning text description.

136 161
The missing bits

For the sake of concision, this volume skips many

important topics, in particular:

Recurrent Neural Networks

Before attention models showed greater perfor-
mance, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) were
the standard approach for dealing with temporal
sequences such as text or sound samples. These
architectures possess an internal hidden state
that gets updated every time a component of
the sequence is processed. Their main compo-
nents are layers such as LSTM [Hochreiter and
Schmidhuber, 1997] or GRU [Cho et al., 2014].

Training a recurrent architecture amounts to

unfolding it in time, which results in a long
composition of operators. This has historically
prompted the design of key techniques now used
for deep architectures such as rectifiers and gat-
ing, a form of skip connections which are modu-
137 161
lated dynamically.

Autoencoder
An autoencoder is a model that maps an input
signal, possibly of high dimension, to a low-
dimension latent representation, and then maps
it back to the original signal, ensuring that infor-
mation has been preserved. We saw it in § 6.1
for denoising, but it can also be used to auto-
matically discover a meaningful low-dimension
parameterization of the data manifold.

The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) proposed by

Kingma and Welling [2013] is a generative model
with a similar structure. It imposes, through
the loss, a pre-defined distribution to the latent
representation. This allows, after training, the
generation of new samples by sampling the la-
tent representation according to this imposed
distribution and then mapping back through the
decoder.

Generative Adversarial Networks

Another approach to density modeling is the
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) intro-
duced by Goodfellow et al. [2014]. This method
combines a generator, which takes a random in-

138 161
put following a fixed distribution as input and
produces a structured signal such as an image,
and a discriminator, which takes as input a sam-
ple and predicts whether it comes from the train-
ing set or if it was generated by the generator.

Training optimizes the discriminator to mini-

mize a standard cross-entropy loss, and the gen-
erator to maximize the discriminator’s loss. It
can be shown that at equilibrium the gener-
ator produces samples indistinguishable from
real data. In practice, when the gradient flows
through the discriminator to the generator, it
informs the latter about the cues that the dis-
criminator uses that should be addressed.

Reinforcement Learning
Many problems require a model to estimate
an accumulated long-term reward given action
choices and an observable state, and what ac-
tions to choose to maximize that reward. Rein-
forcement Learning (RL) is the standard frame-
work to formalize such problems, and strategy
games or robotic control, for instance, can be
formulated within it. Deep models, particularly
convolutional neural networks, have demon-
strated excellent performance for this class of
tasks [Mnih et al., 2015].

139 161
Fine-tuning
As we saw in § 6.3 for object detection, and in
§ 6.4 for semantic segmentation, starting form a
pre-trained model and fine-tuning it to the task
at hand is an efficient strategy to deal with small
training sets.

Furthermore, due to the dramatic increase in the

size of architectures, particularly that of Large
Language Models (see Figure 3.7), training a sin-
gle model can cost several millions of dollars,
and fine-tuning is a crucial, and often the only
way, to achieve high performance on a specific
task.

Graph Neural Networks

Many applications require processing signals
which are not organized regularly on a grid. For
instance, molecules, proteins, 3D meshes, or ge-
ographic locations are more naturally structured
as graphs. Standard convolutional networks or
even attention models are poorly adapted to pro-
cess such data, and the tool of choice for such a
task is Graph Neural Networks (GNN) [Scarselli
et al., 2009].

These models are composed of layers that com-

pute activations at each vertex by combining
140 161
linearly the activations located at its immediate
neighboring vertices. This operation is very sim-
ilar to a standard convolution, except that the
data structure does not reflect any geometrical
information associated with the feature vectors
they carry.

Self-supervised training
As stated in § 7.1, even though they are trained
only to predict the next word, Large Language
Models trained on large unlabeled data sets such
as GPT (see § 5.3) are able to solve various tasks
such as identifying the grammatical role of a
word, answering questions, or even translating
from one language to another [Radford et al.,
2019].

Such models constitute one category of a larger

class of methods that fall under the name of self-
supervised learning, and try to take advantage
of unlabeled data sets [Balestriero et al., 2023].

The key principle of these methods is to define a

task that does not require labels but necessitates
feature representations which are useful for the
real task of interest, for which a small labeled
data set exists. In computer vision, for instance,
a standard approach consists of optimizing im-

141 161
age features so that they are invariant to data
transformations that do not change the semantic
content of the image, while being statistically
uncorrelated [Zbontar et al., 2021].

142 161
Afterword

Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence

have been incredibly exciting, and it is difficult
to comment on them without being overly dra-
matic. There are few doubts that these technolo-
gies will cause fundamental changes in how we
work, how we interact with knowledge and in-
formation, and that they will force us to rethink
concepts as fundamental as intelligence, under-
standing, and sentience.

In spite of its weaknesses, particularly its sheer

brutality and its computational cost, deep learn-
ing is likely to remain an important component
of AI systems for the foreseeable future and, as
such, a key element of this new era.

143 161
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Index

1D convolution, 64
2D convolution, 64

activation, 23, 40
function, 69, 96
map, 66
Adam, 38
affine operation, 59
artificial neural network, 8, 11
attention operator, 86
autoencoder, 138
denoising, 114
Autograd, 41
autoregressive model, see model, autoregressive
average pooling, 72

backpropagation, 41
backward pass, 41
basis function regression, 14
batch, 21, 37
batch normalization, 78, 101
bias vector, 59, 64
153 161
BPE, see Byte Pair Encoding
Byte Pair Encoding, 33, 125, 131

cache memory, 21
capacity, 16
causal, 32, 88, 108
model, see model, causal
chain rule (derivative), 39
chain rule (probability), 30
channel, 23
checkpointing, 42
classification, 18, 26, 98, 116
CLIP, see Contrastive Language-Image
Pre-training
CLS token, 111
computational cost, 42
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training, 127
contrastive loss, 27, 127
convnet, see convolutional network
convolution, 64
convolutional layer, see layer, convolutional
convolutional network, 98
cross-attention block, 91, 106, 108
cross-entropy, 27, 32, 44

data augmentation, 116

deep learning, 8, 11
denoising autoencoder, see autoencoder,
denoising
154 161
density modeling, 18
depth, 40
diffusion process, 133
dilation, 65, 72
discriminator, 139
downscaling residual block, 103
dropout, 75, 89

embedding layer, see layer, embedding

epoch, 47

filter, 64
fine-tuning, 140
flops, 22
forward pass, 40
foundation model, 132
FP32, 22
framework, 23

GAN, see Generative Adversarial Networks

GELU, 71
Generative Adversarial Networks, 138
Generative Pre-trained Transformer, 109, 127,
131, 141
generator, 138
GNN, see Graph Neural Network
GPT, see Generative Pre-trained Transformer
GPU, see Graphical Processing Unit
gradient descent, 34, 36, 39, 44
gradient step, 34
155 161
Graph Neural Network, 140
Graphical Processing Unit, 8, 20
ground truth, 18

hidden layer, see layer, hidden

hidden state, 137
hyperbolic tangent, 70

image processing, 98
image synthesis, 85, 133
inductive bias, 17, 48, 64

kernel size, 64, 72

key, 86

Large Language Model, 54, 86, 131, 140, 141

layer, 40, 57
attention, 85
convolutional, 64, 72, 85, 93, 98, 101, 117,
122, 125
embedding, 92, 108
fully connected, 59, 85, 93, 96, 98
hidden, 96
linear, 59
Multi-Head Attention, 89, 93, 105
normalizing, 78
reversible, 42
layer normalization, 81
Leaky ReLU, 70
learning rate, 34
156 161
learning rate schedule, 49
LeNet, 98, 99
linear layer, see layer, linear
LLM, see Large Language Model
local minimum, 34
logit, 26
loss, 12

machine learning, 11, 17, 18

max pooling, 72
mean squared error, 14, 26
memory requirement, 42
memory speed, 21
meta parameter, see parameter, meta
metric learning, 27
MLP, see multi-layer perceptron
model, 12
autoregressive, 30, 31, 131
causal, 31, 89, 108, 109
parametric, 12
pre-trained, 120, 124, 140
multi-layer perceptron, 44, 96, 108

natural language processing, 85

NLP, see natural language processing
non-linearity, 69
normalizing layer, see layer, normalizing

object detection, 117

overfitting, 17, 47
157 161
padding, 65, 72
parameter, 12
meta, 13, 47
parametric model, see model, parametric
peak performance, 22
pooling, 72
positional encoding, 93, 108
posterior probability, 26
pre-trained model, see model, pre-trained

query, 86

random initialization, 60
receptive field, 66, 117
rectified linear unit, 69, 137
recurrent neural network, 137
regression, 18
Reinforcement Learning, 139
ReLU, see rectified linear unit
residual
block, 101
connection, 82, 100
network, 46, 82, 100
ResNet-50, 100
reversible layer, see layer, reversible
RL, see Reinforcement Learning
RNN, see recurrent neural network

scaling laws, 50
self-attention block, 91, 105, 106
158 161
self-supervised learning, 141
semantic segmentation, 122
SGD, see stochastic gradient descent
Single Shot Detector, 117
skip connection, 82, 123, 137
softargmax, 26, 87
softmax, 26
speech recognition, 125
SSD, see Single Shot Detector
stochastic gradient descent, 37, 44, 50
stride, 65, 72
supervised learning, 19

Tanh, see hyperbolic tangent

tensor, 23
tensor cores, 21
Tensor Processing Unit, 21
test set, 47
text synthesis, 131
token, 30
tokenizer, 33, 125, 131
TPU, see Tensor Processing Unit
trainable parameter, 12, 23, 50
training, 12
training set, 12, 25, 47
Transformer, 46, 82, 86, 93, 105, 107, 125
transposed convolution, 67, 122

underfitting, 16
159 161
universal approximation theorem, 96
unsupervised learning, 19

VAE, see variational, autoencoder

validation set, 47
value, 86
vanishing gradient, 43, 56
variational
autoencoder, 138
bound, 135
Vision Transformer, 111, 127
ViT, see Vision Transformer
vocabulary, 30

weight, 13
decay, 28
matrix, 59

zero-shot prediction, 128, 131

160 161
This book is licensed under the Creative Com-
mons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.

Preprint–June 22, 2023

161 161