Polynomial expansions are important in the analysis of neural network nonlinearities. They have been applied thereto addressing well-known difficulties in verification, explainability, and security. Existing approaches span classical Taylor and Chebyshev methods, asymptotics, and many numerical approaches. We find that while these individually have useful properties such as exact error formulas, adjustable domain, and robustness to undefined derivatives, there are no approaches that provide a consistent method yielding an expansion with all these properties. To address this, we develop an analytically modified integral transform expansion (AMITE), a novel expansion via integral transforms modified using derived criteria for convergence. We show the general expansion and then demonstrate application for two popular activation functions, hyperbolic tangent and rectified linear units. Compared with existing expansions (i.e., Chebyshev, Taylor, and numerical) employed to this end, AMITE is the first to provide six previously mutually exclusive desired expansion properties such as exact formulas for the coefficients and exact expansion errors (Table II). We demonstrate the effectiveness of AMITE in two case studies. First, a multivariate polynomial form is efficiently extracted from a single hidden layer black-box Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) to facilitate equivalence testing from noisy stimulus-response pairs. Second, a variety of Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFNN) architectures having between 3 and 7 layers are range bounded using Taylor models improved by the AMITE polynomials and error formulas. AMITE presents a new dimension of expansion methods suitable for analysis/approximation of nonlinearities in neural networks, opening new directions and opportunities for the theoretical analysis and systematic testing of neural networks.
Learning mapping between two function spaces has attracted considerable research attention. However, learning the solution operator of partial differential equations (PDEs) remains a challenge in scientific computing. Therefore, in this study, we propose a novel pseudo-differential integral operator (PDIO) inspired by a pseudo-differential operator, which is a generalization of a differential operator and characterized by a certain symbol. We parameterize the symbol by using a neural network and show that the neural-network-based symbol is contained in a smooth symbol class. Subsequently, we prove that the PDIO is a bounded linear operator, and thus is continuous in the Sobolev space. We combine the PDIO with the neural operator to develop a pseudo-differential neural operator (PDNO) to learn the nonlinear solution operator of PDEs. We experimentally validate the effectiveness of the proposed model by using Burgers' equation, Darcy flow, and the Navier-Stokes equation. The results reveal that the proposed PDNO outperforms the existing neural operator approaches in most experiments.
Recently, many studies have shed light on the high adaptivity of deep neural network methods in nonparametric regression models, and their superior performance has been established for various function classes. Motivated by this development, we study a deep neural network method to estimate the drift coefficient of a multi-dimensional diffusion process from discrete observations. We derive generalization error bounds for least squares estimates based on deep neural networks and show that they achieve the minimax rate of convergence up to a logarithmic factor when the drift function has a compositional structure.
Interpretation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) training as an optimal control problem with nonlinear dynamical systems has received considerable attention recently, yet the algorithmic development remains relatively limited. In this work, we make an attempt along this line by reformulating the training procedure from the trajectory optimization perspective. We first show that most widely-used algorithms for training DNNs can be linked to the Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP), a celebrated second-order trajectory optimization algorithm rooted in the Approximate Dynamic Programming. In this vein, we propose a new variant of DDP that can accept batch optimization for training feedforward networks, while integrating naturally with the recent progress in curvature approximation. The resulting algorithm features layer-wise feedback policies which improve convergence rate and reduce sensitivity to hyper-parameter over existing methods. We show that the algorithm is competitive against state-ofthe-art first and second order methods. Our work opens up new avenues for principled algorithmic design built upon the optimal control theory.
Graph deep learning has recently emerged as a powerful ML concept allowing to generalize successful deep neural architectures to non-Euclidean structured data. Such methods have shown promising results on a broad spectrum of applications ranging from social science, biomedicine, and particle physics to computer vision, graphics, and chemistry. One of the limitations of the majority of the current graph neural network architectures is that they are often restricted to the transductive setting and rely on the assumption that the underlying graph is known and fixed. In many settings, such as those arising in medical and healthcare applications, this assumption is not necessarily true since the graph may be noisy, partially- or even completely unknown, and one is thus interested in inferring it from the data. This is especially important in inductive settings when dealing with nodes not present in the graph at training time. Furthermore, sometimes such a graph itself may convey insights that are even more important than the downstream task. In this paper, we introduce Differentiable Graph Module (DGM), a learnable function predicting the edge probability in the graph relevant for the task, that can be combined with convolutional graph neural network layers and trained in an end-to-end fashion. We provide an extensive evaluation of applications from the domains of healthcare (disease prediction), brain imaging (gender and age prediction), computer graphics (3D point cloud segmentation), and computer vision (zero-shot learning). We show that our model provides a significant improvement over baselines both in transductive and inductive settings and achieves state-of-the-art results.
The classification of sentences is very challenging, since sentences contain the limited contextual information. In this paper, we proposed an Attention-Gated Convolutional Neural Network (AGCNN) for sentence classification, which generates attention weights from the feature's context windows of different sizes by using specialized convolution encoders. It makes full use of limited contextual information to extract and enhance the influence of important features in predicting the sentence's category. Experimental results demonstrated that our model can achieve up to 3.1% higher accuracy than standard CNN models, and gain competitive results over the baselines on four out of the six tasks. Besides, we designed an activation function, namely, Natural Logarithm rescaled Rectified Linear Unit (NLReLU). Experiments showed that NLReLU can outperform ReLU and is comparable to other well-known activation functions on AGCNN.
We introduce a new family of deep neural network models. Instead of specifying a discrete sequence of hidden layers, we parameterize the derivative of the hidden state using a neural network. The output of the network is computed using a black-box differential equation solver. These continuous-depth models have constant memory cost, adapt their evaluation strategy to each input, and can explicitly trade numerical precision for speed. We demonstrate these properties in continuous-depth residual networks and continuous-time latent variable models. We also construct continuous normalizing flows, a generative model that can train by maximum likelihood, without partitioning or ordering the data dimensions. For training, we show how to scalably backpropagate through any ODE solver, without access to its internal operations. This allows end-to-end training of ODEs within larger models.
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.
Autoencoders provide a powerful framework for learning compressed representations by encoding all of the information needed to reconstruct a data point in a latent code. In some cases, autoencoders can "interpolate": By decoding the convex combination of the latent codes for two datapoints, the autoencoder can produce an output which semantically mixes characteristics from the datapoints. In this paper, we propose a regularization procedure which encourages interpolated outputs to appear more realistic by fooling a critic network which has been trained to recover the mixing coefficient from interpolated data. We then develop a simple benchmark task where we can quantitatively measure the extent to which various autoencoders can interpolate and show that our regularizer dramatically improves interpolation in this setting. We also demonstrate empirically that our regularizer produces latent codes which are more effective on downstream tasks, suggesting a possible link between interpolation abilities and learning useful representations.
Tumor growth is associated with cell invasion and mass-effect, which are traditionally formulated by mathematical models, namely reaction-diffusion equations and biomechanics. Such models can be personalized based on clinical measurements to build the predictive models for tumor growth. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) to directly represent and learn the cell invasion and mass-effect, and to predict the subsequent involvement regions of a tumor. The invasion network learns the cell invasion from information related to metabolic rate, cell density and tumor boundary derived from multimodal imaging data. The expansion network models the mass-effect from the growing motion of tumor mass. We also study different architectures that fuse the invasion and expansion networks, in order to exploit the inherent correlations among them. Our network can easily be trained on population data and personalized to a target patient, unlike most previous mathematical modeling methods that fail to incorporate population data. Quantitative experiments on a pancreatic tumor data set show that the proposed method substantially outperforms a state-of-the-art mathematical model-based approach in both accuracy and efficiency, and that the information captured by each of the two subnetworks are complementary.
Spectral clustering is a leading and popular technique in unsupervised data analysis. Two of its major limitations are scalability and generalization of the spectral embedding (i.e., out-of-sample-extension). In this paper we introduce a deep learning approach to spectral clustering that overcomes the above shortcomings. Our network, which we call SpectralNet, learns a map that embeds input data points into the eigenspace of their associated graph Laplacian matrix and subsequently clusters them. We train SpectralNet using a procedure that involves constrained stochastic optimization. Stochastic optimization allows it to scale to large datasets, while the constraints, which are implemented using a special-purpose output layer, allow us to keep the network output orthogonal. Moreover, the map learned by SpectralNet naturally generalizes the spectral embedding to unseen data points. To further improve the quality of the clustering, we replace the standard pairwise Gaussian affinities with affinities leaned from unlabeled data using a Siamese network. Additional improvement can be achieved by applying the network to code representations produced, e.g., by standard autoencoders. Our end-to-end learning procedure is fully unsupervised. In addition, we apply VC dimension theory to derive a lower bound on the size of SpectralNet. State-of-the-art clustering results are reported on the Reuters dataset. Our implementation is publicly available at //github.com/kstant0725/SpectralNet .