We propose an experimental study of adaptive time-stepping methods for efficient modeling of the aggregation-fragmentation kinetics. Precise modeling of this phenomena usually requires utilization of the large systems of nonlinear ordinary differential equations and intensive computations. We concentrate on performance of three explicit Runge-Kutta time-integration methods and provide simulations for two types of problems: finding of equilibrium solutions and simulations for kinetics with periodic solutions. The first class of problems may be analyzed through the relaxation of the solution to the stationary state after large time. In this case, the adaptive time-stepping may help to reach it using big steps reducing cost of the calculations without loss of accuracy. In the second case, the problem becomes numerically unstable at certain points of the phase space and may require tiny steps making the simulations very time-consuming. Adaptive criteria allows to increase the steps for most of points and speedup simulations significantly.
Most state-of-the-art machine learning techniques revolve around the optimisation of loss functions. Defining appropriate loss functions is therefore critical to successfully solving problems in this field. We present a survey of the most commonly used loss functions for a wide range of different applications, divided into classification, regression, ranking, sample generation and energy based modelling. Overall, we introduce 33 different loss functions and we organise them into an intuitive taxonomy. Each loss function is given a theoretical backing and we describe where it is best used. This survey aims to provide a reference of the most essential loss functions for both beginner and advanced machine learning practitioners.
Graph-centric artificial intelligence (graph AI) has achieved remarkable success in modeling interacting systems prevalent in nature, from dynamical systems in biology to particle physics. The increasing heterogeneity of data calls for graph neural architectures that can combine multiple inductive biases. However, combining data from various sources is challenging because appropriate inductive bias may vary by data modality. Multimodal learning methods fuse multiple data modalities while leveraging cross-modal dependencies to address this challenge. Here, we survey 140 studies in graph-centric AI and realize that diverse data types are increasingly brought together using graphs and fed into sophisticated multimodal models. These models stratify into image-, language-, and knowledge-grounded multimodal learning. We put forward an algorithmic blueprint for multimodal graph learning based on this categorization. The blueprint serves as a way to group state-of-the-art architectures that treat multimodal data by choosing appropriately four different components. This effort can pave the way for standardizing the design of sophisticated multimodal architectures for highly complex real-world problems.
This dissertation studies a fundamental open challenge in deep learning theory: why do deep networks generalize well even while being overparameterized, unregularized and fitting the training data to zero error? In the first part of the thesis, we will empirically study how training deep networks via stochastic gradient descent implicitly controls the networks' capacity. Subsequently, to show how this leads to better generalization, we will derive {\em data-dependent} {\em uniform-convergence-based} generalization bounds with improved dependencies on the parameter count. Uniform convergence has in fact been the most widely used tool in deep learning literature, thanks to its simplicity and generality. Given its popularity, in this thesis, we will also take a step back to identify the fundamental limits of uniform convergence as a tool to explain generalization. In particular, we will show that in some example overparameterized settings, {\em any} uniform convergence bound will provide only a vacuous generalization bound. With this realization in mind, in the last part of the thesis, we will change course and introduce an {\em empirical} technique to estimate generalization using unlabeled data. Our technique does not rely on any notion of uniform-convergece-based complexity and is remarkably precise. We will theoretically show why our technique enjoys such precision. We will conclude by discussing how future work could explore novel ways to incorporate distributional assumptions in generalization bounds (such as in the form of unlabeled data) and explore other tools to derive bounds, perhaps by modifying uniform convergence or by developing completely new tools altogether.
We derive information-theoretic generalization bounds for supervised learning algorithms based on the information contained in predictions rather than in the output of the training algorithm. These bounds improve over the existing information-theoretic bounds, are applicable to a wider range of algorithms, and solve two key challenges: (a) they give meaningful results for deterministic algorithms and (b) they are significantly easier to estimate. We show experimentally that the proposed bounds closely follow the generalization gap in practical scenarios for deep learning.
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.
We study few-shot acoustic event detection (AED) in this paper. Few-shot learning enables detection of new events with very limited labeled data. Compared to other research areas like computer vision, few-shot learning for audio recognition has been under-studied. We formulate few-shot AED problem and explore different ways of utilizing traditional supervised methods for this setting as well as a variety of meta-learning approaches, which are conventionally used to solve few-shot classification problem. Compared to supervised baselines, meta-learning models achieve superior performance, thus showing its effectiveness on generalization to new audio events. Our analysis including impact of initialization and domain discrepancy further validate the advantage of meta-learning approaches in few-shot AED.
Graph representation learning for hypergraphs can be used to extract patterns among higher-order interactions that are critically important in many real world problems. Current approaches designed for hypergraphs, however, are unable to handle different types of hypergraphs and are typically not generic for various learning tasks. Indeed, models that can predict variable-sized heterogeneous hyperedges have not been available. Here we develop a new self-attention based graph neural network called Hyper-SAGNN applicable to homogeneous and heterogeneous hypergraphs with variable hyperedge sizes. We perform extensive evaluations on multiple datasets, including four benchmark network datasets and two single-cell Hi-C datasets in genomics. We demonstrate that Hyper-SAGNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on traditional tasks while also achieving great performance on a new task called outsider identification. Hyper-SAGNN will be useful for graph representation learning to uncover complex higher-order interactions in different applications.
Due to their inherent capability in semantic alignment of aspects and their context words, attention mechanism and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely applied for aspect-based sentiment classification. However, these models lack a mechanism to account for relevant syntactical constraints and long-range word dependencies, and hence may mistakenly recognize syntactically irrelevant contextual words as clues for judging aspect sentiment. To tackle this problem, we propose to build a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) over the dependency tree of a sentence to exploit syntactical information and word dependencies. Based on it, a novel aspect-specific sentiment classification framework is raised. Experiments on three benchmarking collections illustrate that our proposed model has comparable effectiveness to a range of state-of-the-art models, and further demonstrate that both syntactical information and long-range word dependencies are properly captured by the graph convolution structure.
Most deep learning-based models for speech enhancement have mainly focused on estimating the magnitude of spectrogram while reusing the phase from noisy speech for reconstruction. This is due to the difficulty of estimating the phase of clean speech. To improve speech enhancement performance, we tackle the phase estimation problem in three ways. First, we propose Deep Complex U-Net, an advanced U-Net structured model incorporating well-defined complex-valued building blocks to deal with complex-valued spectrograms. Second, we propose a polar coordinate-wise complex-valued masking method to reflect the distribution of complex ideal ratio masks. Third, we define a novel loss function, weighted source-to-distortion ratio (wSDR) loss, which is designed to directly correlate with a quantitative evaluation measure. Our model was evaluated on a mixture of the Voice Bank corpus and DEMAND database, which has been widely used by many deep learning models for speech enhancement. Ablation experiments were conducted on the mixed dataset showing that all three proposed approaches are empirically valid. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in all metrics, outperforming previous approaches by a large margin.