I agree that ostracizing researchers using neural networks is not a good path for anyone to go down. However, even though NNs are great at modeling problems…we usually have no idea how those learned models actually work. So NNs are great at solving problems in the short term, but aren’t terribly useful for developing long term solutions due to data requirements and regular retraining.
In this instance, I’m going to choose to take an optimistic stance and believe the authors were talking a friendly elbow jab rather than fueling a mini culture war. The researchers leveraging DNNs are doing great work, but perhaps could be wrangled in just a bit :)
It is incorrect that we don’t understand how NeRFs work. Unlike language models etc., they are not using deep neural networks; they are using shallow multi-layer perceptrons as function optimizers. The behavior of these is well-understood.
In this instance, I’m going to choose to take an optimistic stance and believe the authors were talking a friendly elbow jab rather than fueling a mini culture war. The researchers leveraging DNNs are doing great work, but perhaps could be wrangled in just a bit :)