In this paper, we present a spectral-based approach to study the linear approximation of two-layer neural networks. We first consider the case of single neuron and show that the linear approximability, quantified by the Kolmogorov width, is controlled by the eigenvalue decay of an associate kernel. Then, we show that similar results also hold for two-layer neural networks. This spectral-based approach allows us to obtain upper bounds, lower bounds, and explicit hard examples in a united manner. In particular, these bounds imply that for networks activated by smooth functions, restricting the norms of inner-layer weights may significantly impair the expressiveness. By contrast, for non-smooth activation functions, such as ReLU, the network expressiveness is independent of the inner-layer weight norms. In addition, we prove that for a family of non-smooth activation functions, including ReLU, approximating any single neuron with random features suffers from the \emph{curse of dimensionality}. This provides an explicit separation of expressiveness between neural networks and random feature models.
This paper is on the construction of structure-preserving, online-efficient reduced models for the barotropic Euler equations with a friction term on networks. The nonlinear flow problem finds broad application in the context of gas distribution networks. We propose a snapshot-based reduction approach that consists of a mixed variational Galerkin approximation combined with quadrature-type complexity reduction. Its main feature is that certain compatibility conditions are assured during the training phase, which make our approach structure-preserving. The resulting reduced models are locally mass conservative and inherit an energy-bound and port-Hamiltonian structure. We also derive a well-posedness result for them. In the training phase, the compatibility conditions pose challenges, we face constrained data approximation problems as opposed to the unconstrained training problems in the conventional reduction methods. The training of our model order reduction consists of a principal component analysis under a compatibility constraint and, notably, yields reduced models that fulfill an optimality condition for the snapshot data. The training of our quadrature-type complexity reduction involves a semi-definite program with combinatorial aspects, which we approach by a greedy procedure.
We present a uniform description of sets of $m$ linear forms in $n$ variables over the field of rational numbers whose computation requires $m(n - 1)$ additions.
The paper presents transfer functions for limited memory time-invariant linear integral predictors for continuous time processes such that the corresponding predicting kernels have bounded support. It is shown that processes with exponentially decaying Fourier transforms are predictable with these predictors in some weak sense, meaning that convolution integrals over the future times can be approximated by causal convolutions over past times. For a given predicting horizon, the predictors are based on polynomial approximation of a periodic exponent (complex sinusoid) in a weighted $L_2$-space.
A well-known line of work (Barron, 1993; Breiman, 1993; Klusowski & Barron, 2018) provides bounds on the width $n$ of a ReLU two-layer neural network needed to approximate a function $f$ over the ball $\mathcal{B}_R(\R^d)$ up to error $\epsilon$, when the Fourier based quantity $C_f = \int_{\R^d} \|\xi\|^2 |\hat{f}(\xi)| \ d\xi$ is finite. More recently Ongie et al. (2019) used the Radon transform as a tool for analysis of infinite-width ReLU two-layer networks. In particular, they introduce the concept of Radon-based $\mathcal{R}$-norms and show that a function defined on $\R^d$ can be represented as an infinite-width two-layer neural network if and only if its $\mathcal{R}$-norm is finite. In this work, we extend the framework of Ongie et al. (2019) and define similar Radon-based semi-norms ($\mathcal{R}, \mathcal{U}$-norms) such that a function admits an infinite-width neural network representation on a bounded open set $\mathcal{U} \subseteq \R^d$ when its $\mathcal{R}, \mathcal{U}$-norm is finite. Building on this, we derive sparse (finite-width) neural network approximation bounds that refine those of Breiman (1993); Klusowski & Barron (2018). Finally, we show that infinite-width neural network representations on bounded open sets are not unique and study their structure, providing a functional view of mode connectivity.
Neural networks have shown tremendous growth in recent years to solve numerous problems. Various types of neural networks have been introduced to deal with different types of problems. However, the main goal of any neural network is to transform the non-linearly separable input data into more linearly separable abstract features using a hierarchy of layers. These layers are combinations of linear and nonlinear functions. The most popular and common non-linearity layers are activation functions (AFs), such as Logistic Sigmoid, Tanh, ReLU, ELU, Swish and Mish. In this paper, a comprehensive overview and survey is presented for AFs in neural networks for deep learning. Different classes of AFs such as Logistic Sigmoid and Tanh based, ReLU based, ELU based, and Learning based are covered. Several characteristics of AFs such as output range, monotonicity, and smoothness are also pointed out. A performance comparison is also performed among 18 state-of-the-art AFs with different networks on different types of data. The insights of AFs are presented to benefit the researchers for doing further research and practitioners to select among different choices. The code used for experimental comparison is released at: \url{//github.com/shivram1987/ActivationFunctions}.
Spectral clustering (SC) is a popular clustering technique to find strongly connected communities on a graph. SC can be used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to implement pooling operations that aggregate nodes belonging to the same cluster. However, the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian is expensive and, since clustering results are graph-specific, pooling methods based on SC must perform a new optimization for each new sample. In this paper, we propose a graph clustering approach that addresses these limitations of SC. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the normalized minCUT problem and train a GNN to compute cluster assignments that minimize this objective. Our GNN-based implementation is differentiable, does not require to compute the spectral decomposition, and learns a clustering function that can be quickly evaluated on out-of-sample graphs. From the proposed clustering method, we design a graph pooling operator that overcomes some important limitations of state-of-the-art graph pooling techniques and achieves the best performance in several supervised and unsupervised tasks.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and their variants have experienced significant attention and have become the de facto methods for learning graph representations. GCNs derive inspiration primarily from recent deep learning approaches, and as a result, may inherit unnecessary complexity and redundant computation. In this paper, we reduce this excess complexity through successively removing nonlinearities and collapsing weight matrices between consecutive layers. We theoretically analyze the resulting linear model and show that it corresponds to a fixed low-pass filter followed by a linear classifier. Notably, our experimental evaluation demonstrates that these simplifications do not negatively impact accuracy in many downstream applications. Moreover, the resulting model scales to larger datasets, is naturally interpretable, and yields up to two orders of magnitude speedup over FastGCN.
We propose the Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU), a high-performing neural network activation function. The GELU nonlinearity is the expected transformation of a stochastic regularizer which randomly applies the identity or zero map to a neuron's input. The GELU nonlinearity weights inputs by their magnitude, rather than gates inputs by their sign as in ReLUs. We perform an empirical evaluation of the GELU nonlinearity against the ReLU and ELU activations and find performance improvements across all considered computer vision, natural language processing, and speech tasks.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning of graphs broadly follow a neighborhood aggregation framework, where the representation vector of a node is computed by recursively aggregating and transforming feature vectors of its neighboring nodes. Many GNN variants have been proposed and have achieved state-of-the-art results on both node and graph classification tasks. However, despite GNNs revolutionizing graph representation learning, there is limited understanding of their representational properties and limitations. Here, we present a theoretical framework for analyzing the expressive power of GNNs in capturing different graph structures. Our results characterize the discriminative power of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Networks and GraphSAGE, and show that they cannot learn to distinguish certain simple graph structures. We then develop a simple architecture that is provably the most expressive among the class of GNNs and is as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph isomorphism test. We empirically validate our theoretical findings on a number of graph classification benchmarks, and demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.
This paper addresses the problem of formally verifying desirable properties of neural networks, i.e., obtaining provable guarantees that neural networks satisfy specifications relating their inputs and outputs (robustness to bounded norm adversarial perturbations, for example). Most previous work on this topic was limited in its applicability by the size of the network, network architecture and the complexity of properties to be verified. In contrast, our framework applies to a general class of activation functions and specifications on neural network inputs and outputs. We formulate verification as an optimization problem (seeking to find the largest violation of the specification) and solve a Lagrangian relaxation of the optimization problem to obtain an upper bound on the worst case violation of the specification being verified. Our approach is anytime i.e. it can be stopped at any time and a valid bound on the maximum violation can be obtained. We develop specialized verification algorithms with provable tightness guarantees under special assumptions and demonstrate the practical significance of our general verification approach on a variety of verification tasks.