We study the distribution of a fully connected neural network with random Gaussian weights and biases in which the hidden layer widths are proportional to a large constant $n$. Under mild assumptions on the non-linearity, we obtain quantitative bounds on normal approximations valid at large but finite $n$ and any fixed network depth. Our theorems show both for the finite-dimensional distributions and the entire process, that the distance between a random fully connected network (and its derivatives) to the corresponding infinite width Gaussian process scales like $n^{-\gamma}$ for $\gamma>0$, with the exponent depending on the metric used to measure discrepancy. Our bounds are strictly stronger in terms of their dependence on network width than any previously available in the literature; in the one-dimensional case, we also prove that they are optimal, i.e., we establish matching lower bounds.
Neuromorphic computing holds the promise to achieve the energy efficiency and robust learning performance of biological neural systems. To realize the promised brain-like intelligence, it needs to solve the challenges of the neuromorphic hardware architecture design of biological neural substrate and the hardware amicable algorithms with spike-based encoding and learning. Here we introduce a neural spike coding model termed spiketrum, to characterize and transform the time-varying analog signals, typically auditory signals, into computationally efficient spatiotemporal spike patterns. It minimizes the information loss occurring at the analog-to-spike transformation and possesses informational robustness to neural fluctuations and spike losses. The model provides a sparse and efficient coding scheme with precisely controllable spike rate that facilitates training of spiking neural networks in various auditory perception tasks. We further investigate the algorithm-hardware co-designs through a neuromorphic cochlear prototype which demonstrates that our approach can provide a systematic solution for spike-based artificial intelligence by fully exploiting its advantages with spike-based computation.
Neural networks often suffer from a feature preference problem, where they tend to overly rely on specific features to solve a task while disregarding other features, even if those neglected features are essential for the task. Feature preference problems have primarily been investigated in classification task. However, we observe that feature preference occurs in high-dimensional regression task, specifically, source separation. To mitigate feature preference in source separation, we propose FEAture BAlancing by Suppressing Easy feature (FEABASE). This approach enables efficient data utilization by learning hidden information about the neglected feature. We evaluate our method in a multi-channel source separation task, where feature preference between spatial feature and timbre feature appears.
Community Question Answering (CQA) in different domains is growing at a large scale because of the availability of several platforms and huge shareable information among users. With the rapid growth of such online platforms, a massive amount of archived data makes it difficult for moderators to retrieve possible duplicates for a new question and identify and confirm existing question pairs as duplicates at the right time. This problem is even more critical in CQAs corresponding to large software systems like askubuntu where moderators need to be experts to comprehend something as a duplicate. Note that the prime challenge in such CQA platforms is that the moderators are themselves experts and are therefore usually extremely busy with their time being extraordinarily expensive. To facilitate the task of the moderators, in this work, we have tackled two significant issues for the askubuntu CQA platform: (1) retrieval of duplicate questions given a new question and (2) duplicate question confirmation time prediction. In the first task, we focus on retrieving duplicate questions from a question pool for a particular newly posted question. In the second task, we solve a regression problem to rank a pair of questions that could potentially take a long time to get confirmed as duplicates. For duplicate question retrieval, we propose a Siamese neural network based approach by exploiting both text and network-based features, which outperforms several state-of-the-art baseline techniques. Our method outperforms DupPredictor and DUPE by 5% and 7% respectively. For duplicate confirmation time prediction, we have used both the standard machine learning models and neural network along with the text and graph-based features. We obtain Spearman's rank correlation of 0.20 and 0.213 (statistically significant) for text and graph based features respectively.
Geometric deep learning (GDL), which is based on neural network architectures that incorporate and process symmetry information, has emerged as a recent paradigm in artificial intelligence. GDL bears particular promise in molecular modeling applications, in which various molecular representations with different symmetry properties and levels of abstraction exist. This review provides a structured and harmonized overview of molecular GDL, highlighting its applications in drug discovery, chemical synthesis prediction, and quantum chemistry. Emphasis is placed on the relevance of the learned molecular features and their complementarity to well-established molecular descriptors. This review provides an overview of current challenges and opportunities, and presents a forecast of the future of GDL for molecular sciences.
Residual networks (ResNets) have displayed impressive results in pattern recognition and, recently, have garnered considerable theoretical interest due to a perceived link with neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs). This link relies on the convergence of network weights to a smooth function as the number of layers increases. We investigate the properties of weights trained by stochastic gradient descent and their scaling with network depth through detailed numerical experiments. We observe the existence of scaling regimes markedly different from those assumed in neural ODE literature. Depending on certain features of the network architecture, such as the smoothness of the activation function, one may obtain an alternative ODE limit, a stochastic differential equation or neither of these. These findings cast doubts on the validity of the neural ODE model as an adequate asymptotic description of deep ResNets and point to an alternative class of differential equations as a better description of the deep network limit.
Transformer is a type of deep neural network mainly based on self-attention mechanism which is originally applied in natural language processing field. Inspired by the strong representation ability of transformer, researchers propose to extend transformer for computer vision tasks. Transformer-based models show competitive and even better performance on various visual benchmarks compared to other network types such as convolutional networks and recurrent networks. In this paper we provide a literature review of these visual transformer models by categorizing them in different tasks and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of these methods. In particular, the main categories include the basic image classification, high-level vision, low-level vision and video processing. Self-attention in computer vision is also briefly revisited as self-attention is the base component in transformer. Efficient transformer methods are included for pushing transformer into real applications. Finally, we give a discussion about the further research directions for visual transformer.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generalize deep neural networks to graph-structured data, have drawn considerable attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous graph related tasks. However, existing GNN models mainly focus on designing graph convolution operations. The graph pooling (or downsampling) operations, that play an important role in learning hierarchical representations, are usually overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel graph pooling operator, called Hierarchical Graph Pooling with Structure Learning (HGP-SL), which can be integrated into various graph neural network architectures. HGP-SL incorporates graph pooling and structure learning into a unified module to generate hierarchical representations of graphs. More specifically, the graph pooling operation adaptively selects a subset of nodes to form an induced subgraph for the subsequent layers. To preserve the integrity of graph's topological information, we further introduce a structure learning mechanism to learn a refined graph structure for the pooled graph at each layer. By combining HGP-SL operator with graph neural networks, we perform graph level representation learning with focus on graph classification task. Experimental results on six widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have revolutionized the field of graph representation learning through effectively learned node embeddings, and achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, current GNN methods are inherently flat and do not learn hierarchical representations of graphs---a limitation that is especially problematic for the task of graph classification, where the goal is to predict the label associated with an entire graph. Here we propose DiffPool, a differentiable graph pooling module that can generate hierarchical representations of graphs and can be combined with various graph neural network architectures in an end-to-end fashion. DiffPool learns a differentiable soft cluster assignment for nodes at each layer of a deep GNN, mapping nodes to a set of clusters, which then form the coarsened input for the next GNN layer. Our experimental results show that combining existing GNN methods with DiffPool yields an average improvement of 5-10% accuracy on graph classification benchmarks, compared to all existing pooling approaches, achieving a new state-of-the-art on four out of five benchmark data sets.
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.
The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.