Studying the interplay between the geometry of the loss landscape and the optimization trajectories of simple neural networks is a fundamental step for understanding their behavior in more complex settings. This paper reveals the presence of topological obstruction in the loss landscape of shallow ReLU neural networks trained using gradient flow. We discuss how the homogeneous nature of the ReLU activation function constrains the training trajectories to lie on a product of quadric hypersurfaces whose shape depends on the particular initialization of the network's parameters. When the neural network's output is a single scalar, we prove that these quadrics can have multiple connected components, limiting the set of reachable parameters during training. We analytically compute the number of these components and discuss the possibility of mapping one to the other through neuron rescaling and permutation. In this simple setting, we find that the non-connectedness results in a topological obstruction, which, depending on the initialization, can make the global optimum unreachable. We validate this result with numerical experiments.
We study the dynamics of gradient flow in high dimensions for the multi-spiked tensor problem, where the goal is to estimate $r$ unknown signal vectors (spikes) from noisy Gaussian tensor observations. Specifically, we analyze the maximum likelihood estimation procedure, which involves optimizing a highly nonconvex random function. We determine the sample complexity required for gradient flow to efficiently recover all spikes, without imposing any assumptions on the separation of the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). More precisely, our results provide the sample complexity required to guarantee recovery of the spikes up to a permutation. Our work builds on our companion paper [Ben Arous, Gerbelot, Piccolo 2024], which studies Langevin dynamics and determines the sample complexity and separation conditions for the SNRs necessary for ensuring exact recovery of the spikes (where the recovered permutation matches the identity). During the recovery process, the correlations between the estimators and the hidden vectors increase in a sequential manner. The order in which these correlations become significant depends on their initial values and the corresponding SNRs, which ultimately determines the permutation of the recovered spikes.
Equivariant neural networks are neural networks with symmetry. Motivated by the theory of group representations, we decompose the layers of an equivariant neural network into simple representations. The nonlinear activation functions lead to interesting nonlinear equivariant maps between simple representations. For example, the rectified linear unit (ReLU) gives rise to piecewise linear maps. We show that these considerations lead to a filtration of equivariant neural networks, generalizing Fourier series. This observation might provide a useful tool for interpreting equivariant neural networks.
An important challenge in machine learning is to predict the initial conditions under which a given neural network will be trainable. We present a method for predicting the trainable regime in parameter space for deep feedforward neural networks (DNNs) based on reconstructing the input from subsequent activation layers via a cascade of single-layer auxiliary networks. We show that a single epoch of training of the shallow cascade networks is sufficient to predict the trainability of the deep feedforward network on a range of datasets (MNIST, CIFAR10, FashionMNIST, and white noise), thereby providing a significant reduction in overall training time. We achieve this by computing the relative entropy between reconstructed images and the original inputs, and show that this probe of information loss is sensitive to the phase behaviour of the network. We further demonstrate that this method generalizes to residual neural networks (ResNets) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Moreover, our method illustrates the network's decision making process by displaying the changes performed on the input data at each layer, which we demonstrate for both a DNN trained on MNIST and the vgg16 CNN trained on the ImageNet dataset. Our results provide a technique for significantly accelerating the training of large neural networks.
We propose a method utilizing physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to solve Poisson equations that serve as control variates in the computation of transport coefficients via fluctuation formulas, such as the Green--Kubo and generalized Einstein-like formulas. By leveraging approximate solutions to the Poisson equation constructed through neural networks, our approach significantly reduces the variance of the estimator at hand. We provide an extensive numerical analysis of the estimators and detail a methodology for training neural networks to solve these Poisson equations. The approximate solutions are then incorporated into Monte Carlo simulations as effective control variates, demonstrating the suitability of the method for moderately high-dimensional problems where fully deterministic solutions are computationally infeasible.
A statistical network model with overlapping communities can be generated as a superposition of mutually independent random graphs of varying size. The model is parameterized by the number of nodes, the number of communities, and the joint distribution of the community size and the edge probability. This model admits sparse parameter regimes with power-law limiting degree distributions and non-vanishing clustering coefficients. This article presents large-scale approximations of clique and cycle frequencies for graph samples generated by the model, which are valid for regimes with unbounded numbers of overlapping communities. Our results reveal the growth rates of these subgraph frequencies and show that their theoretical densities can be reliably estimated from data.
Composite materials often exhibit mechanical anisotropy owing to the material properties or geometrical configurations of the microstructure. This makes their inverse design a two-fold problem. First, we must learn the type and orientation of anisotropy and then find the optimal design parameters to achieve the desired mechanical response. In our work, we solve this challenge by first training a forward surrogate model based on the macroscopic stress-strain data obtained via computational homogenization for a given multiscale material. To this end, we use partially Input Convex Neural Networks (pICNNs) to obtain a polyconvex representation of the strain energy in terms of the invariants of the Cauchy-Green deformation tensor. The network architecture and the strain energy function are modified to incorporate, by construction, physics and mechanistic assumptions into the framework. While training the neural network, we find the type of anisotropy, if any, along with the preferred directions. Once the model is trained, we solve the inverse problem using an evolution strategy to obtain the design parameters that give a desired mechanical response. We test the framework against synthetic macroscale and also homogenized data. For cases where polyconvexity might be violated during the homogenization process, we present viable alternate formulations. The trained model is also integrated into a finite element framework to invert design parameters that result in a desired macroscopic response. We show that the invariant-based model is able to solve the inverse problem for a stress-strain dataset with a different preferred direction than the one it was trained on and is able to not only learn the polyconvex potentials of hyperelastic materials but also recover the correct parameters for the inverse design problem.
We hypothesize that due to the greedy nature of learning in multi-modal deep neural networks, these models tend to rely on just one modality while under-fitting the other modalities. Such behavior is counter-intuitive and hurts the models' generalization, as we observe empirically. To estimate the model's dependence on each modality, we compute the gain on the accuracy when the model has access to it in addition to another modality. We refer to this gain as the conditional utilization rate. In the experiments, we consistently observe an imbalance in conditional utilization rates between modalities, across multiple tasks and architectures. Since conditional utilization rate cannot be computed efficiently during training, we introduce a proxy for it based on the pace at which the model learns from each modality, which we refer to as the conditional learning speed. We propose an algorithm to balance the conditional learning speeds between modalities during training and demonstrate that it indeed addresses the issue of greedy learning. The proposed algorithm improves the model's generalization on three datasets: Colored MNIST, Princeton ModelNet40, and NVIDIA Dynamic Hand Gesture.
Artificial neural networks thrive in solving the classification problem for a particular rigid task, acquiring knowledge through generalized learning behaviour from a distinct training phase. The resulting network resembles a static entity of knowledge, with endeavours to extend this knowledge without targeting the original task resulting in a catastrophic forgetting. Continual learning shifts this paradigm towards networks that can continually accumulate knowledge over different tasks without the need to retrain from scratch. We focus on task incremental classification, where tasks arrive sequentially and are delineated by clear boundaries. Our main contributions concern 1) a taxonomy and extensive overview of the state-of-the-art, 2) a novel framework to continually determine the stability-plasticity trade-off of the continual learner, 3) a comprehensive experimental comparison of 11 state-of-the-art continual learning methods and 4 baselines. We empirically scrutinize method strengths and weaknesses on three benchmarks, considering Tiny Imagenet and large-scale unbalanced iNaturalist and a sequence of recognition datasets. We study the influence of model capacity, weight decay and dropout regularization, and the order in which the tasks are presented, and qualitatively compare methods in terms of required memory, computation time, and storage.
The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, if not better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity can reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field.
Recent advances in 3D fully convolutional networks (FCN) have made it feasible to produce dense voxel-wise predictions of volumetric images. In this work, we show that a multi-class 3D FCN trained on manually labeled CT scans of several anatomical structures (ranging from the large organs to thin vessels) can achieve competitive segmentation results, while avoiding the need for handcrafting features or training class-specific models. To this end, we propose a two-stage, coarse-to-fine approach that will first use a 3D FCN to roughly define a candidate region, which will then be used as input to a second 3D FCN. This reduces the number of voxels the second FCN has to classify to ~10% and allows it to focus on more detailed segmentation of the organs and vessels. We utilize training and validation sets consisting of 331 clinical CT images and test our models on a completely unseen data collection acquired at a different hospital that includes 150 CT scans, targeting three anatomical organs (liver, spleen, and pancreas). In challenging organs such as the pancreas, our cascaded approach improves the mean Dice score from 68.5 to 82.2%, achieving the highest reported average score on this dataset. We compare with a 2D FCN method on a separate dataset of 240 CT scans with 18 classes and achieve a significantly higher performance in small organs and vessels. Furthermore, we explore fine-tuning our models to different datasets. Our experiments illustrate the promise and robustness of current 3D FCN based semantic segmentation of medical images, achieving state-of-the-art results. Our code and trained models are available for download: //github.com/holgerroth/3Dunet_abdomen_cascade.