Implicit neural networks, a.k.a., deep equilibrium networks, are a class of implicit-depth learning models where function evaluation is performed by solving a fixed point equation. They generalize classic feedforward models and are equivalent to infinite-depth weight-tied feedforward networks. While implicit models show improved accuracy and significant reduction in memory consumption, they can suffer from ill-posedness and convergence instability. This paper provides a new framework, which we call Non-Euclidean Monotone Operator Network (NEMON), to design well-posed and robust implicit neural networks based upon contraction theory for the non-Euclidean norm $\ell_{\infty}$. Our framework includes (i) a novel condition for well-posedness based on one-sided Lipschitz constants, (ii) an average iteration for computing fixed-points, and (iii) explicit estimates on input-output Lipschitz constants. Additionally, we design a training problem with the well-posedness condition and the average iteration as constraints and, to achieve robust models, with the input-output Lipschitz constant as a regularizer. Our $\ell_{\infty}$ well-posedness condition leads to a larger polytopic training search space than existing conditions and our average iteration enjoys accelerated convergence. Finally, we evaluate our framework in image classification through the MNIST and the CIFAR-10 datasets. Our numerical results demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness of the implicit models with smaller input-output Lipschitz bounds. Code is available at //github.com/davydovalexander/Non-Euclidean_Mon_Op_Net.
In optical fiber communication, due to the random variation of the environment, the state of polarization (SOP) fluctuates randomly with time leading to distortion and performance degradation. The memory-less SOP fluctuations can be regarded as a two-by-two random unitary matrix. In this paper, for what we believe to be the first time, the capacity of the polarization drift channel under an average power constraint with imperfect channel knowledge is characterized. An achievable information rate (AIR) is derived when imperfect channel knowledge is available and is shown to be highly dependent on the channel estimation technique. It is also shown that a tighter lower bound can be achieved when a unitary estimation of the channel is available. However, the conventional estimation algorithms do not guarantee a unitary channel estimation. Therefore, by considering the unitary constraint of the channel, a data-aided channel estimator based on the Kabsch algorithm is proposed, and its performance is numerically evaluated in terms of AIR. Monte Carlo simulations show that Kabsch outperforms the least-square error algorithm. In particular, with complex, Gaussian inputs and eight pilot symbols per block, Kabsch improves the AIR by 0:2 to 0:35 bits/symbol throughout the range of studied signal-to-noise ratios.
Despite their overwhelming capacity to overfit, deep neural networks trained by specific optimization algorithms tend to generalize well to unseen data. Recently, researchers explained it by investigating the implicit regularization effect of optimization algorithms. A remarkable progress is the work (Lyu&Li, 2019), which proves gradient descent (GD) maximizes the margin of homogeneous deep neural networks. Except GD, adaptive algorithms such as AdaGrad, RMSProp and Adam are popular owing to their rapid training process. However, theoretical guarantee for the generalization of adaptive optimization algorithms is still lacking. In this paper, we study the implicit regularization of adaptive optimization algorithms when they are optimizing the logistic loss on homogeneous deep neural networks. We prove that adaptive algorithms that adopt exponential moving average strategy in conditioner (such as Adam and RMSProp) can maximize the margin of the neural network, while AdaGrad that directly sums historical squared gradients in conditioner can not. It indicates superiority on generalization of exponential moving average strategy in the design of the conditioner. Technically, we provide a unified framework to analyze convergent direction of adaptive optimization algorithms by constructing novel adaptive gradient flow and surrogate margin. Our experiments can well support the theoretical findings on convergent direction of adaptive optimization algorithms.
Single image dehazing is a challenging ill-posed problem due to the severe information degeneration. However, existing deep learning based dehazing methods only adopt clear images as positive samples to guide the training of dehazing network while negative information is unexploited. Moreover, most of them focus on strengthening the dehazing network with an increase of depth and width, leading to a significant requirement of computation and memory. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive regularization (CR) built upon contrastive learning to exploit both the information of hazy images and clear images as negative and positive samples, respectively. CR ensures that the restored image is pulled to closer to the clear image and pushed to far away from the hazy image in the representation space. Furthermore, considering trade-off between performance and memory storage, we develop a compact dehazing network based on autoencoder-like (AE) framework. It involves an adaptive mixup operation and a dynamic feature enhancement module, which can benefit from preserving information flow adaptively and expanding the receptive field to improve the network's transformation capability, respectively. We term our dehazing network with autoencoder and contrastive regularization as AECR-Net. The extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our AECR-Net surpass the state-of-the-art approaches. The code is released in //github.com/GlassyWu/AECR-Net.
Self-training algorithms, which train a model to fit pseudolabels predicted by another previously-learned model, have been very successful for learning with unlabeled data using neural networks. However, the current theoretical understanding of self-training only applies to linear models. This work provides a unified theoretical analysis of self-training with deep networks for semi-supervised learning, unsupervised domain adaptation, and unsupervised learning. At the core of our analysis is a simple but realistic ``expansion'' assumption, which states that a low-probability subset of the data must expand to a neighborhood with large probability relative to the subset. We also assume that neighborhoods of examples in different classes have minimal overlap. We prove that under these assumptions, the minimizers of population objectives based on self-training and input-consistency regularization will achieve high accuracy with respect to ground-truth labels. By using off-the-shelf generalization bounds, we immediately convert this result to sample complexity guarantees for neural nets that are polynomial in the margin and Lipschitzness. Our results help explain the empirical successes of recently proposed self-training algorithms which use input consistency regularization.
In this article, we introduce a new mode for training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Rather than minimizing the distance of evidence distribution $\tilde{p}(x)$ and the generative distribution $q(x)$, we minimize the distance of $\tilde{p}(x_r)q(x_f)$ and $\tilde{p}(x_f)q(x_r)$. This adversarial pattern can be interpreted as a Turing test in GANs. It allows us to use information of real samples during training generator and accelerates the whole training procedure. We even find that just proportionally increasing the size of discriminator and generator, it succeeds on 256x256 resolution without adjusting hyperparameters carefully.
This paper addresses the problem of formally verifying desirable properties of neural networks, i.e., obtaining provable guarantees that neural networks satisfy specifications relating their inputs and outputs (robustness to bounded norm adversarial perturbations, for example). Most previous work on this topic was limited in its applicability by the size of the network, network architecture and the complexity of properties to be verified. In contrast, our framework applies to a general class of activation functions and specifications on neural network inputs and outputs. We formulate verification as an optimization problem (seeking to find the largest violation of the specification) and solve a Lagrangian relaxation of the optimization problem to obtain an upper bound on the worst case violation of the specification being verified. Our approach is anytime i.e. it can be stopped at any time and a valid bound on the maximum violation can be obtained. We develop specialized verification algorithms with provable tightness guarantees under special assumptions and demonstrate the practical significance of our general verification approach on a variety of verification tasks.
For the challenging semantic image segmentation task the most efficient models have traditionally combined the structured modelling capabilities of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) with the feature extraction power of CNNs. In more recent works however, CRF post-processing has fallen out of favour. We argue that this is mainly due to the slow training and inference speeds of CRFs, as well as the difficulty of learning the internal CRF parameters. To overcome both issues we propose to add the assumption of conditional independence to the framework of fully-connected CRFs. This allows us to reformulate the inference in terms of convolutions, which can be implemented highly efficiently on GPUs. Doing so speeds up inference and training by a factor of more then 100. All parameters of the convolutional CRFs can easily be optimized using backpropagation. To facilitating further CRF research we make our implementation publicly available. Please visit: //github.com/MarvinTeichmann/ConvCRF
The robust and efficient recognition of visual relations in images is a hallmark of biological vision. Here, we argue that, despite recent progress in visual recognition, modern machine vision algorithms are severely limited in their ability to learn visual relations. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate that visual-relation problems strain convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The networks eventually break altogether when rote memorization becomes impossible such as when the intra-class variability exceeds their capacity. We further show that another type of feedforward network, called a relational network (RN), which was shown to successfully solve seemingly difficult visual question answering (VQA) problems on the CLEVR datasets, suffers similar limitations. Motivated by the comparable success of biological vision, we argue that feedback mechanisms including working memory and attention are the key computational components underlying abstract visual reasoning.
Discrete correlation filter (DCF) based trackers have shown considerable success in visual object tracking. These trackers often make use of low to mid level features such as histogram of gradients (HoG) and mid-layer activations from convolution neural networks (CNNs). We argue that including semantically higher level information to the tracked features may provide further robustness to challenging cases such as viewpoint changes. Deep salient object detection is one example of such high level features, as it make use of semantic information to highlight the important regions in the given scene. In this work, we propose an improvement over DCF based trackers by combining saliency based and other features based filter responses. This combination is performed with an adaptive weight on the saliency based filter responses, which is automatically selected according to the temporal consistency of visual saliency. We show that our method consistently improves a baseline DCF based tracker especially in challenging cases and performs superior to the state-of-the-art. Our improved tracker operates at 9.3 fps, introducing a small computational burden over the baseline which operates at 11 fps.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful generative models, but suffer from training instability. The recently proposed Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) makes progress toward stable training of GANs, but sometimes can still generate only low-quality samples or fail to converge. We find that these problems are often due to the use of weight clipping in WGAN to enforce a Lipschitz constraint on the critic, which can lead to undesired behavior. We propose an alternative to clipping weights: penalize the norm of gradient of the critic with respect to its input. Our proposed method performs better than standard WGAN and enables stable training of a wide variety of GAN architectures with almost no hyperparameter tuning, including 101-layer ResNets and language models over discrete data. We also achieve high quality generations on CIFAR-10 and LSUN bedrooms.