Lipschitz continuity is a simple yet crucial functional property of any predictive model for it lies at the core of the model's robustness, generalisation, as well as adversarial vulnerability. Our aim is to thoroughly investigate and characterise the Lipschitz behaviour of the functions realised by neural networks. Thus, we carry out an empirical investigation in a range of different settings (namely, architectures, losses, optimisers, label noise, and more) by exhausting the limits of the simplest and the most general lower and upper bounds. Although motivated primarily by computational hardness results, this choice nevertheless turns out to be rather resourceful and sheds light on several fundamental and intriguing traits of the Lipschitz continuity of neural network functions, which we also supplement with suitable theoretical arguments. As a highlight of this investigation, we identify a striking double descent trend in both upper and lower bounds to the Lipschitz constant with increasing network width -- which tightly aligns with the typical double descent trend in the test loss. Lastly, we touch upon the seeming (counter-intuitive) decline of the Lipschitz constant in the presence of label noise.
We extend three related results from the analysis of influences of Boolean functions to the quantum setting, namely the KKL Theorem, Friedgut's Junta Theorem and Talagrand's variance inequality for geometric influences. Our results are derived by a joint use of recently studied hypercontractivity and gradient estimates. These generic tools also allow us to derive generalizations of these results in a general von Neumann algebraic setting beyond the case of the quantum hypercube, including examples in infinite dimensions relevant to quantum information theory such as continuous variables quantum systems. Finally, we comment on the implications of our results as regards to noncommutative extensions of isoperimetric type inequalities, quantum circuit complexity lower bounds and the learnability of quantum observables.
Combinatorial algorithms are widely used for decision-making and knowledge discovery, and it is important to ensure that their output remains stable even when subjected to small perturbations in the input. Failure to do so can lead to several problems, including costly decisions, reduced user trust, potential security concerns, and lack of replicability. Unfortunately, many fundamental combinatorial algorithms are vulnerable to small input perturbations. To address the impact of input perturbations on algorithms for weighted graph problems, Kumabe and Yoshida (FOCS'23) recently introduced the concept of Lipschitz continuity of algorithms. This work explores this approach and designs Lipschitz continuous algorithms for covering problems, such as the minimum vertex cover, set cover, and feedback vertex set problems. Our algorithm for the feedback vertex set problem is based on linear programming, and in the rounding process, we develop and use a technique called cycle sparsification, which may be of independent interest.
We present a neural network approach to compute stream functions, which are scalar functions with gradients orthogonal to a given vector field. As a result, isosurfaces of the stream function extract stream surfaces, which can be visualized to analyze flow features. Our approach takes a vector field as input and trains an implicit neural representation to learn a stream function for that vector field. The network learns to map input coordinates to a stream function value by minimizing the inner product of the gradient of the neural network's output and the vector field. Since stream function solutions may not be unique, we give optional constraints for the network to learn particular stream functions of interest. Specifically, we introduce regularizing loss functions that can optionally be used to generate stream function solutions whose stream surfaces follow the flow field's curvature, or that can learn a stream function that includes a stream surface passing through a seeding rake. We also discuss considerations for properly visualizing the trained implicit network and extracting artifact-free surfaces. We compare our results with other implicit solutions and present qualitative and quantitative results for several synthetic and simulated vector fields.
The theory of influences in product measures has profound applications in theoretical computer science, combinatorics, and discrete probability. This deep theory is intimately connected to functional inequalities and to the Fourier analysis of discrete groups. Originally, influences of functions were motivated by the study of social choice theory, wherein a Boolean function represents a voting scheme, its inputs represent the votes, and its output represents the outcome of the elections. Thus, product measures represent a scenario in which the votes of the parties are randomly and independently distributed, which is often far from the truth in real-life scenarios. We begin to develop the theory of influences for more general measures under mixing or correlation decay conditions. More specifically, we prove analogues of the KKL and Talagrand influence theorems for Markov Random Fields on bounded degree graphs with correlation decay. We show how some of the original applications of the theory of in terms of voting and coalitions extend to general measures with correlation decay. Our results thus shed light both on voting with correlated voters and on the behavior of general functions of Markov Random Fields (also called ``spin-systems") with correlation decay.
A foundational theory of compositional categorical rewriting theory is presented, based on a collection of fibration-like properties that collectively induce and intrinsically structure the large collection of lemmata used in the proofs of theorems such as concurrency and associativity. The resulting highly generic proofs of these theorems are given. It is noteworthy that the proof of the concurrency theorem takes only a few lines and, while that of associativity remains somewhat longer, it would be unreadably long if written directly in terms of the basic lemmata. In essence, our framework improves the readability and ease of comprehension of these proofs by exposing latent modularity. A curated list of known instances of our framework is used to conclude the paper with a detailed discussion of the conditions under which the Double Pushout and Sesqui-Pushout semantics of graph transformation are compositional.
In recent years, the integration of Machine Learning (ML) models with Operation Research (OR) tools has gained popularity across diverse applications, including cancer treatment, algorithmic configuration, and chemical process optimization. In this domain, the combination of ML and OR often relies on representing the ML model output using Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) formulations. Numerous studies in the literature have developed such formulations for many ML predictors, with a particular emphasis on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their significant interest in many applications. However, ANNs frequently contain a large number of parameters, resulting in MIP formulations that are impractical to solve, thereby impeding scalability. In fact, the ML community has already introduced several techniques to reduce the parameter count of ANNs without compromising their performance, since the substantial size of modern ANNs presents challenges for ML applications as it significantly impacts computational efforts during training and necessitates significant memory resources for storage. In this paper, we showcase the effectiveness of pruning, one of these techniques, when applied to ANNs prior to their integration into MIPs. By pruning the ANN, we achieve significant improvements in the speed of the solution process. We discuss why pruning is more suitable in this context compared to other ML compression techniques, and we identify the most appropriate pruning strategies. To highlight the potential of this approach, we conduct experiments using feed-forward neural networks with multiple layers to construct adversarial examples. Our results demonstrate that pruning offers remarkable reductions in solution times without hindering the quality of the final decision, enabling the resolution of previously unsolvable instances.
The generalization performance of deep neural networks with regard to the optimization algorithm is one of the major concerns in machine learning. This performance can be affected by various factors. In this paper, we theoretically prove that the Lipschitz constant of a loss function is an important factor to diminish the generalization error of the output model obtained by Adam or AdamW. The results can be used as a guideline for choosing the loss function when the optimization algorithm is Adam or AdamW. In addition, to evaluate the theoretical bound in a practical setting, we choose the human age estimation problem in computer vision. For assessing the generalization better, the training and test datasets are drawn from different distributions. Our experimental evaluation shows that the loss function with a lower Lipschitz constant and maximum value improves the generalization of the model trained by Adam or AdamW.
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 neural networks generalize conventional neural networks to graph-structured data and have received widespread attention due to their impressive representation ability. In spite of the remarkable achievements, the performance of Euclidean models in graph-related learning is still bounded and limited by the representation ability of Euclidean geometry, especially for datasets with highly non-Euclidean latent anatomy. Recently, hyperbolic space has gained increasing popularity in processing graph data with tree-like structure and power-law distribution, owing to its exponential growth property. In this survey, we comprehensively revisit the technical details of the current hyperbolic graph neural networks, unifying them into a general framework and summarizing the variants of each component. More importantly, we present various HGNN-related applications. Last, we also identify several challenges, which potentially serve as guidelines for further flourishing the achievements of graph learning in hyperbolic spaces.
With the advent of deep neural networks, learning-based approaches for 3D reconstruction have gained popularity. However, unlike for images, in 3D there is no canonical representation which is both computationally and memory efficient yet allows for representing high-resolution geometry of arbitrary topology. Many of the state-of-the-art learning-based 3D reconstruction approaches can hence only represent very coarse 3D geometry or are limited to a restricted domain. In this paper, we propose occupancy networks, a new representation for learning-based 3D reconstruction methods. Occupancy networks implicitly represent the 3D surface as the continuous decision boundary of a deep neural network classifier. In contrast to existing approaches, our representation encodes a description of the 3D output at infinite resolution without excessive memory footprint. We validate that our representation can efficiently encode 3D structure and can be inferred from various kinds of input. Our experiments demonstrate competitive results, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for the challenging tasks of 3D reconstruction from single images, noisy point clouds and coarse discrete voxel grids. We believe that occupancy networks will become a useful tool in a wide variety of learning-based 3D tasks.