Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been attached great importance due to the distinctive properties of low power consumption, biological plausibility, and adversarial robustness. The most effective way to train deep SNNs is through ANN-to-SNN conversion, which have yielded the best performance in deep network structure and large-scale datasets. However, there is a trade-off between accuracy and latency. In order to achieve high precision as original ANNs, a long simulation time is needed to match the firing rate of a spiking neuron with the activation value of an analog neuron, which impedes the practical application of SNN. In this paper, we aim to achieve high-performance converted SNNs with extremely low latency (fewer than 32 time-steps). We start by theoretically analyzing ANN-to-SNN conversion and show that scaling the thresholds does play a similar role as weight normalization. Instead of introducing constraints that facilitate ANN-to-SNN conversion at the cost of model capacity, we applied a more direct way by optimizing the initial membrane potential to reduce the conversion loss in each layer. Besides, we demonstrate that optimal initialization of membrane potentials can implement expected error-free ANN-to-SNN conversion. We evaluate our algorithm on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, using fewer time-steps. For example, we reach top-1 accuracy of 93.38\% on CIFAR-10 with 16 time-steps. Moreover, our method can be applied to other ANN-SNN conversion methodologies and remarkably promote performance when the time-steps is small.
Feature propagation in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) can be associated to nonlinear discrete dynamical systems. The novelty, in this paper, lies in letting the discretization parameter (time step-size) vary from layer to layer, which needs to be learned, in an optimization framework. The proposed framework can be applied to any of the existing networks such as ResNet, DenseNet or Fractional-DNN. This framework is shown to help overcome the vanishing and exploding gradient issues. Stability of some of the existing continuous DNNs such as Fractional-DNN is also studied. The proposed approach is applied to an ill-posed 3D-Maxwell's equation.
This paper studies node classification in the inductive setting, i.e., aiming to learn a model on labeled training graphs and generalize it to infer node labels on unlabeled test graphs. This problem has been extensively studied with graph neural networks (GNNs) by learning effective node representations, as well as traditional structured prediction methods for modeling the structured output of node labels, e.g., conditional random fields (CRFs). In this paper, we present a new approach called the Structured Proxy Network (SPN), which combines the advantages of both worlds. SPN defines flexible potential functions of CRFs with GNNs. However, learning such a model is nontrivial as it involves optimizing a maximin game with high-cost inference. Inspired by the underlying connection between joint and marginal distributions defined by Markov networks, we propose to solve an approximate version of the optimization problem as a proxy, which yields a near-optimal solution, making learning more efficient. Extensive experiments on two settings show that our approach outperforms many competitive baselines.
Deep learning approaches have demonstrated success in modeling analog audio effects. Nevertheless, challenges remain in modeling more complex effects that involve time-varying nonlinear elements, such as dynamic range compressors. Existing neural network approaches for modeling compression either ignore the device parameters, do not attain sufficient accuracy, or otherwise require large noncausal models prohibiting real-time operation. In this work, we propose a modification to temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) enabling greater efficiency without sacrificing performance. By utilizing very sparse convolutional kernels through rapidly growing dilations, our model attains a significant receptive field using fewer layers, reducing computation. Through a detailed evaluation we demonstrate our efficient and causal approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in modeling the analog LA-2A, is capable of real-time operation on CPU, and only requires 10 minutes of training data.
Equivariances provide useful inductive biases in neural network modeling, with the translation equivariance of convolutional neural networks being a canonical example. Equivariances can be embedded in architectures through weight-sharing and place symmetry constraints on the functions a neural network can represent. The type of symmetry is typically fixed and has to be chosen in advance. Although some tasks are inherently equivariant, many tasks do not strictly follow such symmetries. In such cases, equivariance constraints can be overly restrictive. In this work, we propose a parameter-efficient relaxation of equivariance that can effectively interpolate between a (i) non-equivariant linear product, (ii) a strict-equivariant convolution, and (iii) a strictly-invariant mapping. The proposed parameterization can be thought of as a building block to allow adjustable symmetry structure in neural networks. Compared to non-equivariant or strict-equivariant baselines, we experimentally verify that soft equivariance leads to improved performance in terms of test accuracy on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 image classification tasks.
Many real-world applications require the prediction of long sequence time-series, such as electricity consumption planning. Long sequence time-series forecasting (LSTF) demands a high prediction capacity of the model, which is the ability to capture precise long-range dependency coupling between output and input efficiently. Recent studies have shown the potential of Transformer to increase the prediction capacity. However, there are several severe issues with Transformer that prevent it from being directly applicable to LSTF, such as quadratic time complexity, high memory usage, and inherent limitation of the encoder-decoder architecture. To address these issues, we design an efficient transformer-based model for LSTF, named Informer, with three distinctive characteristics: (i) a $ProbSparse$ Self-attention mechanism, which achieves $O(L \log L)$ in time complexity and memory usage, and has comparable performance on sequences' dependency alignment. (ii) the self-attention distilling highlights dominating attention by halving cascading layer input, and efficiently handles extreme long input sequences. (iii) the generative style decoder, while conceptually simple, predicts the long time-series sequences at one forward operation rather than a step-by-step way, which drastically improves the inference speed of long-sequence predictions. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets demonstrate that Informer significantly outperforms existing methods and provides a new solution to the LSTF problem.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
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.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a special type of Neural Networks, which have shown state-of-the-art results on various competitive benchmarks. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is largely achieved with the use of multiple non-linear feature extraction stages that can automatically learn hierarchical representation from the data. Availability of a large amount of data and improvements in the hardware processing units have accelerated the research in CNNs and recently very interesting deep CNN architectures are reported. The recent race in deep CNN architectures for achieving high performance on the challenging benchmarks has shown that the innovative architectural ideas, as well as parameter optimization, can improve the CNN performance on various vision-related tasks. In this regard, different ideas in the CNN design have been explored such as use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and restructuring of processing units. However, the major improvement in representational capacity is achieved by the restructuring of the processing units. Especially, the idea of using a block as a structural unit instead of a layer is gaining substantial appreciation. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported CNN architectures and consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature map exploitation, channel boosting and attention. Additionally, it covers the elementary understanding of the CNN components and sheds light on the current challenges and applications of CNNs.
We propose a Bayesian convolutional neural network built upon Bayes by Backprop and elaborate how this known method can serve as the fundamental construct of our novel, reliable variational inference method for convolutional neural networks. First, we show how Bayes by Backprop can be applied to convolutional layers where weights in filters have probability distributions instead of point-estimates; and second, how our proposed framework leads with various network architectures to performances comparable to convolutional neural networks with point-estimates weights. In the past, Bayes by Backprop has been successfully utilised in feedforward and recurrent neural networks, but not in convolutional ones. This work symbolises the extension of the group of Bayesian neural networks which encompasses all three aforementioned types of network architectures now.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.