Frequency analysis is useful for understanding the mechanisms of representation learning in neural networks (NNs). Most research in this area focuses on the learning dynamics of NNs for regression tasks, while little for classification. This study empirically investigates the latter and expands the understanding of frequency shortcuts. First, we perform experiments on synthetic datasets, designed to have a bias in different frequency bands. Our results demonstrate that NNs tend to find simple solutions for classification, and what they learn first during training depends on the most distinctive frequency characteristics, which can be either low- or high-frequencies. Second, we confirm this phenomenon on natural images. We propose a metric to measure class-wise frequency characteristics and a method to identify frequency shortcuts. The results show that frequency shortcuts can be texture-based or shape-based, depending on what best simplifies the objective. Third, we validate the transferability of frequency shortcuts on out-of-distribution (OOD) test sets. Our results suggest that frequency shortcuts can be transferred across datasets and cannot be fully avoided by larger model capacity and data augmentation. We recommend that future research should focus on effective training schemes mitigating frequency shortcut learning.
Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is a critical task in location-based services that aim to provide personalized suggestions for the user's next destination. Previous works on POI recommendation have laid focused on modeling the user's spatial preference. However, existing works that leverage spatial information are only based on the aggregation of users' previous visited positions, which discourages the model from recommending POIs in novel areas. This trait of position-based methods will harm the model's performance in many situations. Additionally, incorporating sequential information into the user's spatial preference remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose Diff-POI: a Diffusion-based model that samples the user's spatial preference for the next POI recommendation. Inspired by the wide application of diffusion algorithm in sampling from distributions, Diff-POI encodes the user's visiting sequence and spatial character with two tailor-designed graph encoding modules, followed by a diffusion-based sampling strategy to explore the user's spatial visiting trends. We leverage the diffusion process and its reversed form to sample from the posterior distribution and optimized the corresponding score function. We design a joint training and inference framework to optimize and evaluate the proposed Diff-POI. Extensive experiments on four real-world POI recommendation datasets demonstrate the superiority of our Diff-POI over state-of-the-art baseline methods. Further ablation and parameter studies on Diff-POI reveal the functionality and effectiveness of the proposed diffusion-based sampling strategy for addressing the limitations of existing methods.
A common phenomenon in spatial regression models is spatial confounding. This phenomenon occurs when spatially indexed covariates modeling the mean of the response are correlated with a spatial effect included in the model. spatial+ Dupont et al. (2022) is a popular approach to reducing spatial confounding. spatial+ is a two-stage frequentist approach that explicitly models the spatial structure in the confounded covariate, removes it, and uses the corresponding residuals in the second stage. In a frequentist setting, there is no uncertainty propagation from the first stage estimation determining the residuals since only point estimates are used. Inference can also be cumbersome in a frequentist setting, and some of the gaps in the original approach can easily be remedied in a Bayesian framework. First, a Bayesian joint model can easily achieve uncertainty propagation from the first to the second stage of the model. In a Bayesian framework, we also have the tools to infer the model's parameters directly. Notably, another advantage of using a Bayesian framework we thoroughly explore is the ability to use prior information to impose restrictions on the spatial effects rather than applying them directly to their posterior. We build a joint prior for the smoothness of all spatial effects that simultaneously shrinks towards a high smoothness of the response and imposes that the spatial effect in the response is a smoother of the confounded covariates' spatial effect. This prevents the response from operating at a smaller scale than the covariate and can help to avoid situations where there is insufficient variation in the residuals resulting from the first stage model. We evaluate the performance of the Bayesian spatial+ via both simulated and real datasets.
The 3D reconstruction of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is an important topic in the field for transport systems such as drones, service robots and mobile AR/VR devices. Compared to a point cloud representation, the 3D reconstruction based on meshes and voxels is particularly useful for high-level functions, like obstacle avoidance or interaction with the physical environment. This article reviews the implementation of a visual-based 3D scene reconstruction pipeline on resource-constrained hardware platforms. Real-time performances, memory management and low power consumption are critical for embedded systems. A conventional SLAM pipeline from sensors to 3D reconstruction is described, including the potential use of deep learning. The implementation of advanced functions with limited resources is detailed. Recent systems propose the embedded implementation of 3D reconstruction methods with different granularities. The trade-off between required accuracy and resource consumption for real-time localization and reconstruction is one of the open research questions identified and discussed in this paper.
With the increasing availability of large scale datasets, computational power and tools like automatic differentiation and expressive neural network architectures, sequential data are now often treated in a data-driven way, with a dynamical model trained from the observation data. While neural networks are often seen as uninterpretable black-box architectures, they can still benefit from physical priors on the data and from mathematical knowledge. In this paper, we use a neural network architecture which leverages the long-known Koopman operator theory to embed dynamical systems in latent spaces where their dynamics can be described linearly, enabling a number of appealing features. We introduce methods that enable to train such a model for long-term continuous reconstruction, even in difficult contexts where the data comes in irregularly-sampled time series. The potential for self-supervised learning is also demonstrated, as we show the promising use of trained dynamical models as priors for variational data assimilation techniques, with applications to e.g. time series interpolation and forecasting.
In recent years, there has been an intense debate about how learning in biological neural networks (BNNs) differs from learning in artificial neural networks. It is often argued that the updating of connections in the brain relies only on local information, and therefore a stochastic gradient-descent type optimization method cannot be used. In this paper, we study a stochastic model for supervised learning in BNNs. We show that a (continuous) gradient step occurs approximately when each learning opportunity is processed by many local updates. This result suggests that stochastic gradient descent may indeed play a role in optimizing BNNs.
We study a system of nonlocal aggregation cross-diffusion PDEs that describe the evolution of opinion densities on a network. The PDEs are coupled with a system of ODEs that describe the time evolution of the agents on the network. Firstly, we apply the Deterministic Particle Approximation (DPA) method to the aforementioned system in order to prove the existence of solutions under suitable assumptions on the interactions between agents. Later on, we present an explicit model for opinion formation on an evolving network. The opinions evolve based on both the distance between the agents on the network and the 'attitude areas,' which depend on the distance between the agents' opinions. The position of the agents on the network evolves based on the distance between the agents' opinions. The goal is to study radicalization, polarization, and fragmentation of the population while changing its open-mindedness and the radius of interaction.
Linearization of the dynamics of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is often used to study their properties. The same RNN dynamics can be written in terms of the ``activations" (the net inputs to each unit, before its pointwise nonlinearity) or in terms of the ``activities" (the output of each unit, after its pointwise nonlinearity); the two corresponding linearizations are different from each other. This brief and informal technical note describes the relationship between the two linearizations, between the left and right eigenvectors of their dynamics matrices, and shows that some context-dependent effects are readily apparent under linearization of activity dynamics but not linearization of activation dynamics.
Deep neural networks employing error back-propagation for learning can suffer from exploding and vanishing gradient problems. Numerous solutions have been proposed such as normalisation techniques or limiting activation functions to linear rectifying units. In this work we follow a different approach which is particularly applicable to closed-loop learning of forward models where back-propagation makes exclusive use of the sign of the error signal to prime the learning, whilst a global relevance signal modulates the rate of learning. This is inspired by the interaction between local plasticity and a global neuromodulation. For example, whilst driving on an empty road, one can allow for slow step-wise optimisation of actions, whereas, at a busy junction, an error must be corrected at once. Hence, the error is the priming signal and the intensity of the experience is a modulating factor in the weight change. The advantages of this Prime and Modulate paradigm is twofold: it is free from normalisation and it makes use of relevant cues from the environment to enrich the learning. We present a mathematical derivation of the learning rule in z-space and demonstrate the real-time performance with a robotic platform. The results show a significant improvement in the speed of convergence compared to that of the conventional back-propagation.
The remarkable practical success of deep learning has revealed some major surprises from a theoretical perspective. In particular, simple gradient methods easily find near-optimal solutions to non-convex optimization problems, and despite giving a near-perfect fit to training data without any explicit effort to control model complexity, these methods exhibit excellent predictive accuracy. We conjecture that specific principles underlie these phenomena: that overparametrization allows gradient methods to find interpolating solutions, that these methods implicitly impose regularization, and that overparametrization leads to benign overfitting. We survey recent theoretical progress that provides examples illustrating these principles in simpler settings. We first review classical uniform convergence results and why they fall short of explaining aspects of the behavior of deep learning methods. We give examples of implicit regularization in simple settings, where gradient methods lead to minimal norm functions that perfectly fit the training data. Then we review prediction methods that exhibit benign overfitting, focusing on regression problems with quadratic loss. For these methods, we can decompose the prediction rule into a simple component that is useful for prediction and a spiky component that is useful for overfitting but, in a favorable setting, does not harm prediction accuracy. We focus specifically on the linear regime for neural networks, where the network can be approximated by a linear model. In this regime, we demonstrate the success of gradient flow, and we consider benign overfitting with two-layer networks, giving an exact asymptotic analysis that precisely demonstrates the impact of overparametrization. We conclude by highlighting the key challenges that arise in extending these insights to realistic deep learning settings.
Deep learning is usually described as an experiment-driven field under continuous criticizes of lacking theoretical foundations. This problem has been partially fixed by a large volume of literature which has so far not been well organized. This paper reviews and organizes the recent advances in deep learning theory. The literature is categorized in six groups: (1) complexity and capacity-based approaches for analyzing the generalizability of deep learning; (2) stochastic differential equations and their dynamic systems for modelling stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which characterize the optimization and generalization of deep learning, partially inspired by Bayesian inference; (3) the geometrical structures of the loss landscape that drives the trajectories of the dynamic systems; (4) the roles of over-parameterization of deep neural networks from both positive and negative perspectives; (5) theoretical foundations of several special structures in network architectures; and (6) the increasingly intensive concerns in ethics and security and their relationships with generalizability.