Neural network (NN) denoisers are an essential building block in many common tasks, ranging from image reconstruction to image generation. However, the success of these models is not well understood from a theoretical perspective. In this paper, we aim to characterize the functions realized by shallow ReLU NN denoisers -- in the common theoretical setting of interpolation (i.e., zero training loss) with a minimal representation cost (i.e., minimal $\ell^2$ norm weights). First, for univariate data, we derive a closed form for the NN denoiser function, find it is contractive toward the clean data points, and prove it generalizes better than the empirical MMSE estimator at a low noise level. Next, for multivariate data, we find the NN denoiser functions in a closed form under various geometric assumptions on the training data: data contained in a low-dimensional subspace, data contained in a union of one-sided rays, or several types of simplexes. These functions decompose into a sum of simple rank-one piecewise linear interpolations aligned with edges and/or faces connecting training samples. We empirically verify this alignment phenomenon on synthetic data and real images.
Despite the impressive performance in a variety of complex tasks, modern large language models (LLMs) still have trouble dealing with some math problems that are simple and intuitive for humans, such as addition. While we can easily learn basic rules of addition and apply them to new problems of any length, LLMs struggle to do the same. Instead, they may rely on similar "cases" seen in the training corpus for help. We define these two different reasoning mechanisms as "rule-based reasoning" and "case-based reasoning". Since rule-based reasoning is essential for acquiring the systematic generalization ability, we aim to explore exactly whether transformers use rule-based or case-based reasoning for math problems. Through carefully designed intervention experiments on five math tasks, we confirm that transformers are performing case-based reasoning, no matter whether scratchpad is used, which aligns with the previous observations that transformers use subgraph matching/shortcut learning to reason. To mitigate such problems, we propose a Rule-Following Fine-Tuning (RFFT) technique to teach transformers to perform rule-based reasoning. Specifically, we provide explicit rules in the input and then instruct transformers to recite and follow the rules step by step. Through RFFT, we successfully enable LLMs fine-tuned on 1-5 digit addition to generalize to up to 12-digit addition with over 95% accuracy, which is over 40% higher than scratchpad. The significant improvement demonstrates that teaching LLMs to explicitly use rules helps them learn rule-based reasoning and generalize better in length.
Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have shown remarkable performance in high-resolution image synthesis, but their sampling efficiency is still to be desired due to the typically large number of sampling steps. Recent advancements in high-order numerical ODE solvers for DPMs have enabled the generation of high-quality images with much fewer sampling steps. While this is a significant development, most sampling methods still employ uniform time steps, which is not optimal when using a small number of steps. To address this issue, we propose a general framework for designing an optimization problem that seeks more appropriate time steps for a specific numerical ODE solver for DPMs. This optimization problem aims to minimize the distance between the ground-truth solution to the ODE and an approximate solution corresponding to the numerical solver. It can be efficiently solved using the constrained trust region method, taking less than $15$ seconds. Our extensive experiments on both unconditional and conditional sampling using pixel- and latent-space DPMs demonstrate that, when combined with the state-of-the-art sampling method UniPC, our optimized time steps significantly improve image generation performance in terms of FID scores for datasets such as CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, compared to using uniform time steps.
Deep neural networks are typically trained using global error signals that backpropagate (BP) end-to-end, which is not only biologically implausible but also suffers from the update locking problem and requires huge memory consumption. Local learning, which updates each layer independently with a gradient-isolated auxiliary network, offers a promising alternative to address the above problems. However, existing local learning methods are confronted with a large accuracy gap with the BP counterpart, particularly for large-scale networks. This is due to the weak coupling between local layers and their subsequent network layers, as there is no gradient communication across layers. To tackle this issue, we put forward an augmented local learning method, dubbed AugLocal. AugLocal constructs each hidden layer's auxiliary network by uniformly selecting a small subset of layers from its subsequent network layers to enhance their synergy. We also propose to linearly reduce the depth of auxiliary networks as the hidden layer goes deeper, ensuring sufficient network capacity while reducing the computational cost of auxiliary networks. Our extensive experiments on four image classification datasets (i.e., CIFAR-10, SVHN, STL-10, and ImageNet) demonstrate that AugLocal can effectively scale up to tens of local layers with a comparable accuracy to BP-trained networks while reducing GPU memory usage by around 40%. The proposed AugLocal method, therefore, opens up a myriad of opportunities for training high-performance deep neural networks on resource-constrained platforms.Code is available at //github.com/ChenxiangMA/AugLocal.
Data plane verification (DPV) analyzes routing tables and detects routing abnormalities and policy violations during network operation and planning. Thus, it has become an important tool to harden the networking infrastructure and the computing systems building on top. Substantial advancements have been made in the last decade and state-of-the-art DPV systems can achieve sub-us verification for an update of a single forwarding rule. In this paper, we introduce fast inverse model transformation (FIMT), the first theoretical framework to systematically model and analyze centralized DPV systems. FIMT reveals the algebraic structure in the model update process, a key step in fast DPV systems. Thus, it can systematically analyze the correctness of several DPV systems, using algebraic properties. The theory also guides the design and implementation of NeoFlash, a refactored version of Flash with new optimization techniques. Evaluations show that NeoFlash outperforms existing state-of-the-art centralized DPV systems in various datasets and reveal insights to key techniques towards fast DPV.
Prompt Engineering has garnered significant attention for enhancing the performance of large language models across a multitude of tasks. Techniques such as the Chain-of-Thought not only bolster task performance but also delineate a clear trajectory of reasoning steps, offering a tangible form of explanation for the audience. Prior works on interpretability assess the reasoning chains yielded by Chain-of-Thought solely along a singular axis, namely faithfulness. We present a comprehensive and multifaceted evaluation of interpretability, examining not only faithfulness but also robustness and utility across multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks. Likewise, our investigation is not confined to a single prompting technique; it expansively covers a multitude of prevalent prompting techniques employed in large language models, thereby ensuring a wide-ranging and exhaustive evaluation. In addition, we introduce a simple interpretability alignment technique, termed Self-Entailment-Alignment Chain-of-thought, that yields more than 70\% improvements across multiple dimensions of interpretability. Code is available at //github.com/wj210/CoT_interpretability
Oversmoothing is a common phenomenon observed in graph neural networks (GNNs), in which an increase in the network depth leads to a deterioration in their performance. Graph contrastive learning (GCL) is emerging as a promising way of leveraging vast unlabeled graph data. As a marriage between GNNs and contrastive learning, it remains unclear whether GCL inherits the same oversmoothing defect from GNNs. This work undertakes a fundamental analysis of GCL from the perspective of oversmoothing on the first hand. We demonstrate empirically that increasing network depth in GCL also leads to oversmoothing in their deep representations, and surprisingly, the shallow ones. We refer to this phenomenon in GCL as `long-range starvation', wherein lower layers in deep networks suffer from degradation due to the lack of sufficient guidance from supervision. Based on our findings, we present BlockGCL, a remarkably simple yet effective blockwise training framework to prevent GCL from notorious oversmoothing. Without bells and whistles, BlockGCL consistently improves robustness and stability for well-established GCL methods with increasing numbers of layers on several real-world graph benchmarks.
The LSTM network was proposed to overcome the difficulty in learning long-term dependence, and has made significant advancements in applications. With its success and drawbacks in mind, this paper raises the question - do RNN and LSTM have long memory? We answer it partially by proving that RNN and LSTM do not have long memory from a statistical perspective. A new definition for long memory networks is further introduced, and it requires the model weights to decay at a polynomial rate. To verify our theory, we convert RNN and LSTM into long memory networks by making a minimal modification, and their superiority is illustrated in modeling long-term dependence of various datasets.
A large number of real-world graphs or networks are inherently heterogeneous, involving a diversity of node types and relation types. Heterogeneous graph embedding is to embed rich structural and semantic information of a heterogeneous graph into low-dimensional node representations. Existing models usually define multiple metapaths in a heterogeneous graph to capture the composite relations and guide neighbor selection. However, these models either omit node content features, discard intermediate nodes along the metapath, or only consider one metapath. To address these three limitations, we propose a new model named Metapath Aggregated Graph Neural Network (MAGNN) to boost the final performance. Specifically, MAGNN employs three major components, i.e., the node content transformation to encapsulate input node attributes, the intra-metapath aggregation to incorporate intermediate semantic nodes, and the inter-metapath aggregation to combine messages from multiple metapaths. Extensive experiments on three real-world heterogeneous graph datasets for node classification, node clustering, and link prediction show that MAGNN achieves more accurate prediction results than state-of-the-art baselines.
Compared with cheap addition operation, multiplication operation is of much higher computation complexity. The widely-used convolutions in deep neural networks are exactly cross-correlation to measure the similarity between input feature and convolution filters, which involves massive multiplications between float values. In this paper, we present adder networks (AdderNets) to trade these massive multiplications in deep neural networks, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), for much cheaper additions to reduce computation costs. In AdderNets, we take the $\ell_1$-norm distance between filters and input feature as the output response. The influence of this new similarity measure on the optimization of neural network have been thoroughly analyzed. To achieve a better performance, we develop a special back-propagation approach for AdderNets by investigating the full-precision gradient. We then propose an adaptive learning rate strategy to enhance the training procedure of AdderNets according to the magnitude of each neuron's gradient. As a result, the proposed AdderNets can achieve 74.9% Top-1 accuracy 91.7% Top-5 accuracy using ResNet-50 on the ImageNet dataset without any multiplication in convolution layer.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.