Plato

Allegories

The Cave

There’s various interpretations, but I was particularly struck by the context of this allegory for Representation Learning in Machine Learning. This was described in the ICML 2020 tutorial “Representation Learning Without Labels” by S. M. Ali Eslami, Irina Higgins, Danilo J. Rezende.

This distinguishes between a “true reality” and an “observed reality”. This is a notion central to generative processes induced by probabilistic models.