What makes waveform-based deep learning so hard? Despite numerous attempts at training convolutional neural networks (convnets) for filterbank design, they often fail to outperform hand-crafted baselines. These baselines are linear time-invariant systems: as such, they can be approximated by convnets with wide receptive fields. Yet, in practice, gradient-based optimization leads to suboptimal approximations. In our article, we approach this phenomenon from the perspective of initialization. We present a theory of large deviations for the energy response of FIR filterbanks with random Gaussian weights. We find that deviations worsen for large filters and locally periodic input signals, which are both typical for audio signal processing applications. Numerical simulations align with our theory and suggest that the condition number of a convolutional layer follows a logarithmic scaling law between the number and length of the filters, which is reminiscent of discrete wavelet bases.
Spiking neural networks (SNNs), inspired by the spiking behavior of biological neurons, provide a unique pathway for capturing the intricacies of temporal data. However, applying SNNs to time-series forecasting is challenging due to difficulties in effective temporal alignment, complexities in encoding processes, and the absence of standardized guidelines for model selection. In this paper, we propose a framework for SNNs in time-series forecasting tasks, leveraging the efficiency of spiking neurons in processing temporal information. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed SNN-based approaches achieve comparable or superior results to traditional time-series forecasting methods on diverse benchmarks with much less energy consumption. Furthermore, we conduct detailed analysis experiments to assess the SNN's capacity to capture temporal dependencies within time-series data, offering valuable insights into its nuanced strengths and effectiveness in modeling the intricate dynamics of temporal data. Our study contributes to the expanding field of SNNs and offers a promising alternative for time-series forecasting tasks, presenting a pathway for the development of more biologically inspired and temporally aware forecasting models. Our code is available at //github.com/microsoft/SeqSNN.
Continual learning with deep neural networks presents challenges distinct from both the fixed-dataset and convex continual learning regimes. One such challenge is plasticity loss, wherein a neural network trained in an online fashion displays a degraded ability to fit new tasks. This problem has been extensively studied in both supervised learning and off-policy reinforcement learning (RL), where a number of remedies have been proposed. Still, plasticity loss has received less attention in the on-policy deep RL setting. Here we perform an extensive set of experiments examining plasticity loss and a variety of mitigation methods in on-policy deep RL. We demonstrate that plasticity loss is pervasive under domain shift in this regime, and that a number of methods developed to resolve it in other settings fail, sometimes even resulting in performance that is worse than performing no intervention at all. In contrast, we find that a class of ``regenerative'' methods are able to consistently mitigate plasticity loss in a variety of contexts, including in gridworld tasks and more challenging environments like Montezuma's Revenge and ProcGen.
Backpropagation (BP) remains the dominant and most successful method for training parameters of deep neural network models. However, BP relies on two computationally distinct phases, does not provide a satisfactory explanation of biological learning, and can be challenging to apply for training of networks with discontinuities or noisy node dynamics. By comparison, node perturbation (NP) proposes learning by the injection of noise into network activations, and subsequent measurement of the induced loss change. NP relies on two forward (inference) passes, does not make use of network derivatives, and has been proposed as a model for learning in biological systems. However, standard NP is highly data inefficient and unstable due to its unguided noise-based search process. In this work, we investigate different formulations of NP and relate it to the concept of directional derivatives as well as combining it with a decorrelating mechanism for layer-wise inputs. We find that a closer alignment with directional derivatives together with input decorrelation at every layer strongly enhances performance of NP learning with large improvements in parameter convergence and much higher performance on the test data, approaching that of BP. Furthermore, our novel formulation allows for application to noisy systems in which the noise process itself is inaccessible.
Unsupervised learning (UL)-based solvers for combinatorial optimization (CO) train a neural network whose output provides a soft solution by directly optimizing the CO objective using a continuous relaxation strategy. These solvers offer several advantages over traditional methods and other learning-based methods, particularly for large-scale CO problems. However, UL-based solvers face two practical issues: (I) an optimization issue where UL-based solvers are easily trapped at local optima, and (II) a rounding issue where UL-based solvers require artificial post-learning rounding from the continuous space back to the original discrete space, undermining the robustness of the results. This study proposes a Continuous Relaxation Annealing (CRA) strategy, an effective rounding-free learning method for UL-based solvers. CRA introduces a penalty term that dynamically shifts from prioritizing continuous solutions, effectively smoothing the non-convexity of the objective function, to enforcing discreteness, eliminating the artificial rounding. Experimental results demonstrate that CRA significantly enhances the performance of UL-based solvers, outperforming existing UL-based solvers and greedy algorithms in complex CO problems. It also effectively eliminates the artificial rounding and accelerates the learning.
Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) detect intrusion attacks in network traffic. In particular, machine-learning-based NIDSs have attracted attention because of their high detection rates of unknown attacks. A distributed processing framework for machine-learning-based NIDSs employing a scalable distributed stream processing system has been proposed in the literature. However, its performance, when machine-learning-based classifiers are implemented has not been comprehensively evaluated. In this study, we implement five representative classifiers (Decision Tree, Random Forest, Naive Bayes, SVM, and kNN) based on this framework and evaluate their throughput and latency. By conducting the experimental measurements, we investigate the difference in the processing performance among these classifiers and the bottlenecks in the processing performance of the framework.
Spatio-temporal representation learning is critical for video self-supervised representation. Recent approaches mainly use contrastive learning and pretext tasks. However, these approaches learn representation by discriminating sampled instances via feature similarity in the latent space while ignoring the intermediate state of the learned representations, which limits the overall performance. In this work, taking into account the degree of similarity of sampled instances as the intermediate state, we propose a novel pretext task - spatio-temporal overlap rate (STOR) prediction. It stems from the observation that humans are capable of discriminating the overlap rates of videos in space and time. This task encourages the model to discriminate the STOR of two generated samples to learn the representations. Moreover, we employ a joint optimization combining pretext tasks with contrastive learning to further enhance the spatio-temporal representation learning. We also study the mutual influence of each component in the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed STOR task can favor both contrastive learning and pretext tasks. The joint optimization scheme can significantly improve the spatio-temporal representation in video understanding. The code is available at //github.com/Katou2/CSTP.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) is widely used to learn a powerful representation of graph-structured data. Recent work demonstrates that transferring knowledge from self-supervised tasks to downstream tasks could further improve graph representation. However, there is an inherent gap between self-supervised tasks and downstream tasks in terms of optimization objective and training data. Conventional pre-training methods may be not effective enough on knowledge transfer since they do not make any adaptation for downstream tasks. To solve such problems, we propose a new transfer learning paradigm on GNNs which could effectively leverage self-supervised tasks as auxiliary tasks to help the target task. Our methods would adaptively select and combine different auxiliary tasks with the target task in the fine-tuning stage. We design an adaptive auxiliary loss weighting model to learn the weights of auxiliary tasks by quantifying the consistency between auxiliary tasks and the target task. In addition, we learn the weighting model through meta-learning. Our methods can be applied to various transfer learning approaches, it performs well not only in multi-task learning but also in pre-training and fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that the proposed methods can effectively combine auxiliary tasks with the target task and significantly improve the performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been proven to be effective in various network-related tasks. Most existing GNNs usually exploit the low-frequency signals of node features, which gives rise to one fundamental question: is the low-frequency information all we need in the real world applications? In this paper, we first present an experimental investigation assessing the roles of low-frequency and high-frequency signals, where the results clearly show that exploring low-frequency signal only is distant from learning an effective node representation in different scenarios. How can we adaptively learn more information beyond low-frequency information in GNNs? A well-informed answer can help GNNs enhance the adaptability. We tackle this challenge and propose a novel Frequency Adaptation Graph Convolutional Networks (FAGCN) with a self-gating mechanism, which can adaptively integrate different signals in the process of message passing. For a deeper understanding, we theoretically analyze the roles of low-frequency signals and high-frequency signals on learning node representations, which further explains why FAGCN can perform well on different types of networks. Extensive experiments on six real-world networks validate that FAGCN not only alleviates the over-smoothing problem, but also has advantages over the state-of-the-arts.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.