It is often useful to compactly summarize important properties of model parameters and training data so that they can be used later without storing and/or iterating over the entire dataset. As a specific case, we consider estimating the Function Space Distance (FSD) over a training set, i.e. the average discrepancy between the outputs of two neural networks. We propose a Linearized Activation Function TRick (LAFTR) and derive an efficient approximation to FSD for ReLU neural networks. The key idea is to approximate the architecture as a linear network with stochastic gating. Despite requiring only one parameter per unit of the network, our approach outcompetes other parametric approximations with larger memory requirements. Applied to continual learning, our parametric approximation is competitive with state-of-the-art nonparametric approximations, which require storing many training examples. Furthermore, we show its efficacy in estimating influence functions accurately and detecting mislabeled examples without expensive iterations over the entire dataset.
In this work we develop a novel approach using deep neural networks to reconstruct the conductivity distribution in elliptic problems from one internal measurement. The approach is based on a mixed reformulation of the governing equation and utilizes the standard least-squares objective to approximate the conductivity and flux simultaneously, with deep neural networks as ansatz functions. We provide a thorough analysis of the neural network approximations for both continuous and empirical losses, including rigorous error estimates that are explicit in terms of the noise level, various penalty parameters and neural network architectural parameters (depth, width and parameter bound). We also provide extensive numerical experiments in two- and multi-dimensions to illustrate distinct features of the approach, e.g., excellent stability with respect to data noise and capability of solving high-dimensional problems.
Minimum distance estimation methodology based on an empirical distribution function has been popular due to its desirable properties including robustness. Even though the statistical literature is awash with the research on the minimum distance estimation, the most of it is confined to the theoretical findings: only few statisticians conducted research on the application of the method to real world problems. Through this paper, we extend the domain of application of this methodology to various applied fields by providing a solution to a rather challenging and complicated computational problem. The problem this paper tackles is an image segmentation which has been used in various fields. We propose a novel method based on the classical minimum distance estimation theory to solve the image segmentation problem. The performance of the proposed method is then further elevated by integrating it with the ``segmenting-together" strategy. We demonstrate that the proposed method combined with the segmenting-together strategy successfully completes the segmentation problem when it is applied to the complex, real images such as magnetic resonance images.
Neural operators are gaining attention in computational science and engineering. PCA-Net is a recently proposed neural operator architecture which combines principal component analysis (PCA) with neural networks to approximate an underlying operator. The present work develops approximation theory for this approach, improving and significantly extending previous work in this direction. In terms of qualitative bounds, this paper derives a novel universal approximation result, under minimal assumptions on the underlying operator and the data-generating distribution. In terms of quantitative bounds, two potential obstacles to efficient operator learning with PCA-Net are identified, and made rigorous through the derivation of lower complexity bounds; the first relates to the complexity of the output distribution, measured by a slow decay of the PCA eigenvalues. The other obstacle relates the inherent complexity of the space of operators between infinite-dimensional input and output spaces, resulting in a rigorous and quantifiable statement of the curse of dimensionality. In addition to these lower bounds, upper complexity bounds are derived; first, a suitable smoothness criterion is shown to ensure a algebraic decay of the PCA eigenvalues. Then, it is shown that PCA-Net can overcome the general curse of dimensionality for specific operators of interest, arising from the Darcy flow and Navier-Stokes equations.
Bilevel optimization has been applied to a wide variety of machine learning models, and numerous stochastic bilevel optimization algorithms have been developed in recent years. However, most existing algorithms restrict their focus on the single-machine setting so that they are incapable of handling the distributed data. To address this issue, under the setting where all participants compose a network and perform peer-to-peer communication in this network, we developed two novel decentralized stochastic bilevel optimization algorithms based on the gradient tracking communication mechanism and two different gradient estimators. Additionally, we established their convergence rates for nonconvex-strongly-convex problems with novel theoretical analysis strategies. To our knowledge, this is the first work achieving these theoretical results. Finally, we applied our algorithms to practical machine learning models, and the experimental results confirmed the efficacy of our algorithms.
Face parsing is defined as the per-pixel labeling of images containing human faces. The labels are defined to identify key facial regions like eyes, lips, nose, hair, etc. In this work, we make use of the structural consistency of the human face to propose a lightweight face-parsing method using a Local Implicit Function network, FP-LIIF. We propose a simple architecture having a convolutional encoder and a pixel MLP decoder that uses 1/26th number of parameters compared to the state-of-the-art models and yet matches or outperforms state-of-the-art models on multiple datasets, like CelebAMask-HQ and LaPa. We do not use any pretraining, and compared to other works, our network can also generate segmentation at different resolutions without any changes in the input resolution. This work enables the use of facial segmentation on low-compute or low-bandwidth devices because of its higher FPS and smaller model size.
Stochastic Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient (SPDHG) is an algorithm to efficiently solve a wide class of nonsmooth large-scale optimization problems. In this paper we contribute to its theoretical foundations and prove its almost sure convergence for convex but neither necessarily strongly convex nor smooth functionals. We also prove its convergence for any sampling. In addition, we study SPDHG for parallel Magnetic Resonance Imaging reconstruction, where data from different coils are randomly selected at each iteration. We apply SPDHG using a wide range of random sampling methods and compare its performance across a range of settings, including mini-batch size and step size parameters. We show that the sampling can significantly affect the convergence speed of SPDHG and for many cases an optimal sampling can be identified.
Backpropagation algorithm has been widely used as a mainstream learning procedure for neural networks in the past decade, and has played a significant role in the development of deep learning. However, there exist some limitations associated with this algorithm, such as getting stuck in local minima and experiencing vanishing/exploding gradients, which have led to questions about its biological plausibility. To address these limitations, alternative algorithms to backpropagation have been preliminarily explored, with the Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm being one of the most well-known. In this paper we propose a new learning framework for neural networks, namely Cascaded Forward (CaFo) algorithm, which does not rely on BP optimization as that in FF. Unlike FF, our framework directly outputs label distributions at each cascaded block, which does not require generation of additional negative samples and thus leads to a more efficient process at both training and testing. Moreover, in our framework each block can be trained independently, so it can be easily deployed into parallel acceleration systems. The proposed method is evaluated on four public image classification benchmarks, and the experimental results illustrate significant improvement in prediction accuracy in comparison with the baseline.
The solution of the governing equation representing the drawdown in a horizontal confined aquifer, where groundwater flow is unsteady, is provided in terms of the exponential integral, which is famously known as the Well function. For the computation of this function in practical applications, it is important to develop not only accurate but also a simple approximation that requires evaluation of the fewest possible terms. To that end, introducing Ramanujan's series expression, this work proposes a full-range approximation to the exponential integral using Ramanujan's series for the small argument (u \leq 1) and an approximation based on the bound of the integral for the other range (u \in (1,100]). The evaluation of the proposed approximation results in the most accurate formulae compared to the existing studies, which possess the maximum percentage error of 0.05\%. Further, the proposed formula is much simpler to apply as it contains just the product of exponential and logarithm functions. To further check the efficiency of the proposed approximation, we consider a practical example for evaluating the discrete pumping kernel, which shows the superiority of this approximation over the others. Finally, the authors hope that the proposed efficient approximation can be useful for groundwater and hydrogeological applications.
The conjoining of dynamical systems and deep learning has become a topic of great interest. In particular, neural differential equations (NDEs) demonstrate that neural networks and differential equation are two sides of the same coin. Traditional parameterised differential equations are a special case. Many popular neural network architectures, such as residual networks and recurrent networks, are discretisations. NDEs are suitable for tackling generative problems, dynamical systems, and time series (particularly in physics, finance, ...) and are thus of interest to both modern machine learning and traditional mathematical modelling. NDEs offer high-capacity function approximation, strong priors on model space, the ability to handle irregular data, memory efficiency, and a wealth of available theory on both sides. This doctoral thesis provides an in-depth survey of the field. Topics include: neural ordinary differential equations (e.g. for hybrid neural/mechanistic modelling of physical systems); neural controlled differential equations (e.g. for learning functions of irregular time series); and neural stochastic differential equations (e.g. to produce generative models capable of representing complex stochastic dynamics, or sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions). Further topics include: numerical methods for NDEs (e.g. reversible differential equations solvers, backpropagation through differential equations, Brownian reconstruction); symbolic regression for dynamical systems (e.g. via regularised evolution); and deep implicit models (e.g. deep equilibrium models, differentiable optimisation). We anticipate this thesis will be of interest to anyone interested in the marriage of deep learning with dynamical systems, and hope it will provide a useful reference for the current state of the art.
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.