We prove the converse of the universal approximation theorem, i.e. a neural network (NN) encoding theorem which shows that for every stably converged NN of continuous activation functions, its weight matrix actually encodes a continuous function that approximates its training dataset to within a finite margin of error over a bounded domain. We further show that using the Eckart-Young theorem for truncated singular value decomposition of the weight matrix for every NN layer, we can illuminate the nature of the latent space manifold of the training dataset encoded and represented by every NN layer, and the geometric nature of the mathematical operations performed by each NN layer. Our results have implications for understanding how NNs break the curse of dimensionality by harnessing memory capacity for expressivity, and that the two are complementary. This Layer Matrix Decomposition (LMD) further suggests a close relationship between eigen-decomposition of NN layers and the latest advances in conceptualizations of Hopfield networks and Transformer NN models.
In some settings neural networks exhibit a phenomenon known as grokking, where they achieve perfect or near-perfect accuracy on the validation set long after the same performance has been achieved on the training set. In this paper, we discover that grokking is not limited to neural networks but occurs in other settings such as Gaussian process (GP) classification, GP regression and linear regression. We also uncover a mechanism by which to induce grokking on algorithmic datasets via the addition of dimensions containing spurious information. The presence of the phenomenon in non-neural architectures provides evidence that grokking is not specific to SGD or weight norm regularisation. Instead, grokking may be possible in any setting where solution search is guided by complexity and error. Based on this insight and further trends we see in the training trajectories of a Bayesian neural network (BNN) and GP regression model, we make progress towards a more general theory of grokking. Specifically, we hypothesise that the phenomenon is governed by the accessibility of certain regions in the error and complexity landscapes.
Previous approaches for automatic lay summarisation are exclusively reliant on the source article that, given it is written for a technical audience (e.g., researchers), is unlikely to explicitly define all technical concepts or state all of the background information that is relevant for a lay audience. We address this issue by augmenting eLife, an existing biomedical lay summarisation dataset, with article-specific knowledge graphs, each containing detailed information on relevant biomedical concepts. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we systematically investigate the effectiveness of three different approaches for incorporating knowledge graphs within lay summarisation models, with each method targeting a distinct area of the encoder-decoder model architecture. Our results confirm that integrating graph-based domain knowledge can significantly benefit lay summarisation by substantially increasing the readability of generated text and improving the explanation of technical concepts.
Backpropagation within neural networks leverages a fundamental element of automatic differentiation, which is referred to as the reverse mode differentiation, or vector Jacobian Product (VJP) or, in the context of differential geometry, known as the pull-back process. The computation of gradient is important as update of neural network parameters is performed using gradient descent method. In this study, we present a genric randomized method, which updates the parameters of neural networks by using directional derivatives of loss functions computed efficiently by using forward mode AD or Jacobian vector Product (JVP). These JVP are computed along the random directions sampled from different probability distributions e.g., Bernoulli, Normal, Wigner, Laplace and Uniform distributions. The computation of gradient is performed during the forward pass of the neural network. We also present a rigorous analysis of the presented methods providing the rate of convergence along with the computational experiments deployed in scientific Machine learning in particular physics-informed neural networks and Deep Operator Networks.
Online gradient descent (OGD) is well known to be doubly optimal under strong convexity or monotonicity assumptions: (1) in the single-agent setting, it achieves an optimal regret of $\Theta(\log T)$ for strongly convex cost functions; and (2) in the multi-agent setting of strongly monotone games, with each agent employing OGD, we obtain last-iterate convergence of the joint action to a unique Nash equilibrium at an optimal rate of $\Theta(\frac{1}{T})$. While these finite-time guarantees highlight its merits, OGD has the drawback that it requires knowing the strong convexity/monotonicity parameters. In this paper, we design a fully adaptive OGD algorithm, \textsf{AdaOGD}, that does not require a priori knowledge of these parameters. In the single-agent setting, our algorithm achieves $O(\log^2(T))$ regret under strong convexity, which is optimal up to a log factor. Further, if each agent employs \textsf{AdaOGD} in strongly monotone games, the joint action converges in a last-iterate sense to a unique Nash equilibrium at a rate of $O(\frac{\log^3 T}{T})$, again optimal up to log factors. We illustrate our algorithms in a learning version of the classical newsvendor problem, where due to lost sales, only (noisy) gradient feedback can be observed. Our results immediately yield the first feasible and near-optimal algorithm for both the single-retailer and multi-retailer settings. We also extend our results to the more general setting of exp-concave cost functions and games, using the online Newton step (ONS) algorithm.
One principal approach for illuminating a black-box neural network is feature attribution, i.e. identifying the importance of input features for the network's prediction. The predictive information of features is recently proposed as a proxy for the measure of their importance. So far, the predictive information is only identified for latent features by placing an information bottleneck within the network. We propose a method to identify features with predictive information in the input domain. The method results in fine-grained identification of input features' information and is agnostic to network architecture. The core idea of our method is leveraging a bottleneck on the input that only lets input features associated with predictive latent features pass through. We compare our method with several feature attribution methods using mainstream feature attribution evaluation experiments. The code is publicly available.
We consider the problem of explaining the predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs), which otherwise are considered as black boxes. Existing methods invariably focus on explaining the importance of graph nodes or edges but ignore the substructures of graphs, which are more intuitive and human-intelligible. In this work, we propose a novel method, known as SubgraphX, to explain GNNs by identifying important subgraphs. Given a trained GNN model and an input graph, our SubgraphX explains its predictions by efficiently exploring different subgraphs with Monte Carlo tree search. To make the tree search more effective, we propose to use Shapley values as a measure of subgraph importance, which can also capture the interactions among different subgraphs. To expedite computations, we propose efficient approximation schemes to compute Shapley values for graph data. Our work represents the first attempt to explain GNNs via identifying subgraphs explicitly and directly. Experimental results show that our SubgraphX achieves significantly improved explanations, while keeping computations at a reasonable level.
Ensembles over neural network weights trained from different random initialization, known as deep ensembles, achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and calibration. The recently introduced batch ensembles provide a drop-in replacement that is more parameter efficient. In this paper, we design ensembles not only over weights, but over hyperparameters to improve the state of the art in both settings. For best performance independent of budget, we propose hyper-deep ensembles, a simple procedure that involves a random search over different hyperparameters, themselves stratified across multiple random initializations. Its strong performance highlights the benefit of combining models with both weight and hyperparameter diversity. We further propose a parameter efficient version, hyper-batch ensembles, which builds on the layer structure of batch ensembles and self-tuning networks. The computational and memory costs of our method are notably lower than typical ensembles. On image classification tasks, with MLP, LeNet, and Wide ResNet 28-10 architectures, our methodology improves upon both deep and batch ensembles.
Automatic KB completion for commonsense knowledge graphs (e.g., ATOMIC and ConceptNet) poses unique challenges compared to the much studied conventional knowledge bases (e.g., Freebase). Commonsense knowledge graphs use free-form text to represent nodes, resulting in orders of magnitude more nodes compared to conventional KBs (18x more nodes in ATOMIC compared to Freebase (FB15K-237)). Importantly, this implies significantly sparser graph structures - a major challenge for existing KB completion methods that assume densely connected graphs over a relatively smaller set of nodes. In this paper, we present novel KB completion models that can address these challenges by exploiting the structural and semantic context of nodes. Specifically, we investigate two key ideas: (1) learning from local graph structure, using graph convolutional networks and automatic graph densification and (2) transfer learning from pre-trained language models to knowledge graphs for enhanced contextual representation of knowledge. We describe our method to incorporate information from both these sources in a joint model and provide the first empirical results for KB completion on ATOMIC and evaluation with ranking metrics on ConceptNet. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of language model representations in boosting link prediction performance and the advantages of learning from local graph structure (+1.5 points in MRR for ConceptNet) when training on subgraphs for computational efficiency. Further analysis on model predictions shines light on the types of commonsense knowledge that language models capture well.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for embedding-based entity alignment due to their capability of identifying isomorphic subgraphs. However, in real knowledge graphs (KGs), the counterpart entities usually have non-isomorphic neighborhood structures, which easily causes GNNs to yield different representations for them. To tackle this problem, we propose a new KG alignment network, namely AliNet, aiming at mitigating the non-isomorphism of neighborhood structures in an end-to-end manner. As the direct neighbors of counterpart entities are usually dissimilar due to the schema heterogeneity, AliNet introduces distant neighbors to expand the overlap between their neighborhood structures. It employs an attention mechanism to highlight helpful distant neighbors and reduce noises. Then, it controls the aggregation of both direct and distant neighborhood information using a gating mechanism. We further propose a relation loss to refine entity representations. We perform thorough experiments with detailed ablation studies and analyses on five entity alignment datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of AliNet.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.