
Recurrent Neural Network Tutorial for Artists (2017) - hardmaru
http://blog.otoro.net/2017/01/01/recurrent-neural-network-artist/
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lego_bot
Some other resources:

The github repo for their JS handwriting prediction library:

[https://github.com/hardmaru/rnn-tutorial](https://github.com/hardmaru/rnn-
tutorial)

Experiments in Handwriting with a Neural Network:

[https://distill.pub/2016/handwriting/](https://distill.pub/2016/handwriting/)

Related work, Draw Together with a Neural Network:

[https://magenta.tensorflow.org/sketch-rnn-
demo](https://magenta.tensorflow.org/sketch-rnn-demo)

Previous HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14372628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14372628)

~~~
baylearn
also related, this blog post

[https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/teaching-machines-
to...](https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/teaching-machines-to-draw.html)

prev discussion

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14114706](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14114706)

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sabertoothed
hardmaru! David, I am a big admirer of your work.

I am a PhD student and currently writing a blog post on how Deep Learning can
be used in combination with vector graphics.

Do you have any ideas / remarks on this? What are the general options of
applying Deep Learning to vector graphics (as input and/or output)?

~~~
jefft255
I'm not OP, but my take on this is that it would be quite difficult to design
a DNN working directly with vector graphics. I'd say you should rasterize your
image before inputting it to the network. Same with outputs. CNNs would
definitely struggle with continuous images. This is from what I personally
know, and I did not bother to google before writing this, so I might also be
very wrong.

~~~
sabertoothed
Hi jefft255,

I think you are totally right. As far as I understand, CNNs rely on the
correlation of neighbouring pixels. And so directly applying them to vector
graphics won't work.

However, vectorisation has massive downsides as well.

I will try to summarise it in some article. This had nerd-sniped my brain and
so I need to write it down. Even if I have no solution for the problem yet.

Happy to send you a link to the draft once I have it so you can comment.

~~~
kevinwang
In my pretty untrained opinion, it feels like something that outputs vector
images might well be trained using reinforcement learning, since it seems like
the problem can be well modeled with a policy: "given what I want to produce
and what I've produced so far, the next vector object I want to draw is x"

