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IBM Patented Euler's 200 Year Old Math Technique for 'AI Interpretability'

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LeetArxiv is a successor to Papers With Code after the latter shutdown.

Quick Summary

IBM owns the patent to the use of derivatives to find the convergents of a generalized continued fraction.

Here’s the bizarre thing: all they did was implement a number theory technique by Gauss, Euler and Ramanujan in PyTorch and call backward() on the computation graph.

Now IBM’s patent trolls can charge rent on a math technique that’s existed for over 200 years.

As always, code is available on Google Colab and GitHub.

1.0 Paper Introduction

The 2021 paper CoFrNets: Interpretable Neural Architecture Inspired by Continued Fractions (Puri et al., 2021) investigates the use of continued fractions in neural network design.

The paper takes 13 pages to assert: continued fractions (just like mlps) are universal approximators.

The authors reinvent the wheel countless times:

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