We study algorithms for learning low-rank neural networks -- networks where the weight parameters are re-parameterized by products of two low-rank matrices. First, we present a provably efficient algorithm which learns an optimal low-rank approximation to a single-hidden-layer ReLU network up to additive error $\epsilon$ with probability $\ge 1 - \delta$, given access to noiseless samples with Gaussian marginals in polynomial time and samples. Thus, we provide the first example of an algorithm which can efficiently learn a neural network up to additive error without assuming the ground truth is realizable. To solve this problem, we introduce an efficient SVD-based $\textit{Nonlinear Kernel Projection}$ algorithm for solving a nonlinear low-rank approximation problem over Gaussian space. Inspired by the efficiency of our algorithm, we propose a novel low-rank initialization framework for training low-rank $\textit{deep}$ networks, and prove that for ReLU networks, the gap between our method and existing schemes widens as the desired rank of the approximating weights decreases, or as the dimension of the inputs increases (the latter point holds when network width is superlinear in dimension). Finally, we validate our theory by training ResNet and EfficientNet models on ImageNet.
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying Markov random processes parameterized by the underlying optimization variable. These time-varying samples make gradient directions in our update biased and dependent, which can potentially lead to the divergence of the iterates. In our two-time-scale approach, one scale is to estimate the true gradient from these samples, which is then used to update the estimate of the optimal solution. While these two iterates are implemented simultaneously, the former is updated "faster" (using bigger step sizes) than the latter (using smaller step sizes). Our first contribution is to characterize the finite-time complexity of the proposed two-time-scale stochastic gradient method. In particular, we provide explicit formulas for the convergence rates of this method under different structural assumptions, namely, strong convexity, convexity, the Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition, and general non-convexity. We apply our framework to two problems in control and reinforcement learning. First, we look at the standard online actor-critic algorithm over finite state and action spaces and derive a convergence rate of O(k^(-2/5)), which recovers the best known rate derived specifically for this problem. Second, we study an online actor-critic algorithm for the linear-quadratic regulator and show that a convergence rate of O(k^(-2/3)) is achieved. This is the first time such a result is known in the literature. Finally, we support our theoretical analysis with numerical simulations where the convergence rates are visualized.
We study reinforcement learning for two-player zero-sum Markov games with simultaneous moves in the finite-horizon setting, where the transition kernel of the underlying Markov games can be parameterized by a linear function over the current state, both players' actions and the next state. In particular, we assume that we can control both players and aim to find the Nash Equilibrium by minimizing the duality gap. We propose an algorithm Nash-UCRL based on the principle "Optimism-in-Face-of-Uncertainty". Our algorithm only needs to find a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE), which is computationally efficient. Specifically, we show that Nash-UCRL can provably achieve an $\tilde{O}(dH\sqrt{T})$ regret, where $d$ is the linear function dimension, $H$ is the length of the game and $T$ is the total number of steps in the game. To assess the optimality of our algorithm, we also prove an $\tilde{\Omega}( dH\sqrt{T})$ lower bound on the regret. Our upper bound matches the lower bound up to logarithmic factors, which suggests the optimality of our algorithm.
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.
In the storied Colonel Blotto game, two colonels allocate $a$ and $b$ troops, respectively, to $k$ distinct battlefields. A colonel wins a battle if they assign more troops to that particular battle, and each colonel seeks to maximize their total number of victories. Despite the problem's formulation in 1921, the first polynomial-time algorithm to compute Nash equilibrium (NE) strategies for this game was discovered only quite recently. In 2016, \citep{ahmadinejad_dehghani_hajiaghayi_lucier_mahini_seddighin_2019} formulated a breakthrough algorithm to compute NE strategies for the Colonel Blotto game\footnote{To the best of our knowledge, the algorithm from \citep{ahmadinejad_dehghani_hajiaghayi_lucier_mahini_seddighin_2019} has computational complexity $O(k^{14}\max\{a,b\}^{13})$}, receiving substantial media coverage (e.g. \citep{Insider}, \citep{NSF}, \citep{ScienceDaily}). In this work, we present the first known $\epsilon$-approximation algorithm to compute NE strategies in the two-player Colonel Blotto game in runtime $\widetilde{O}(\epsilon^{-4} k^8 \max\{a,b\}^2)$ for arbitrary settings of these parameters. Moreover, this algorithm computes approximate coarse correlated equilibrium strategies in the multiplayer (continuous and discrete) Colonel Blotto game (when there are $\ell > 2$ colonels) with runtime $\widetilde{O}(\ell \epsilon^{-4} k^8 n^2 + \ell^2 \epsilon^{-2} k^3 n (n+k))$, where $n$ is the maximum troop count. Before this work, no polynomial-time algorithm was known to compute exact or approximate equilibrium (in any sense) strategies for multiplayer Colonel Blotto with arbitrary parameters. Our algorithm computes these approximate equilibria by a novel (to the author's knowledge) sampling technique with which we implicitly perform multiplicative weights update over the exponentially many strategies available to each player.
Low-rank matrix estimation under heavy-tailed noise is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs, especially since robust loss functions are usually non-smooth. More recently, computationally fast non-convex approaches via sub-gradient descent are proposed, which, unfortunately, fail to deliver a statistically consistent estimator even under sub-Gaussian noise. In this paper, we introduce a novel Riemannian sub-gradient (RsGrad) algorithm which is not only computationally efficient with linear convergence but also is statistically optimal, be the noise Gaussian or heavy-tailed. Convergence theory is established for a general framework and specific applications to absolute loss, Huber loss, and quantile loss are investigated. Compared with existing non-convex methods, ours reveals a surprising phenomenon of dual-phase convergence. In phase one, RsGrad behaves as in a typical non-smooth optimization that requires gradually decaying stepsizes. However, phase one only delivers a statistically sub-optimal estimator which is already observed in the existing literature. Interestingly, during phase two, RsGrad converges linearly as if minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function and thus a constant stepsize suffices. Underlying the phase-two convergence is the smoothing effect of random noise to the non-smooth robust losses in an area close but not too close to the truth. Lastly, RsGrad is applicable for low-rank tensor estimation under heavy-tailed noise where a statistically optimal rate is attainable with the same phenomenon of dual-phase convergence, and a novel shrinkage-based second-order moment method is guaranteed to deliver a warm initialization. Numerical simulations confirm our theoretical discovery and showcase the superiority of RsGrad over prior methods.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are composed of layers consisting of graph convolutions and pointwise nonlinearities. Due to their invariance and stability properties, GNNs are provably successful at learning representations from data supported on moderate-scale graphs. However, they are difficult to learn on large-scale graphs. In this paper, we study the problem of training GNNs on graphs of moderate size and transferring them to large-scale graphs. We use graph limits called graphons to define limit objects for graph filters and GNNs -- graphon filters and graphon neural networks (WNNs) -- which we interpret as generative models for graph filters and GNNs. We then show that graphon filters and WNNs can be approximated by graph filters and GNNs sampled from them on weighted and stochastic graphs. Because the error of these approximations can be upper bounded, by a triangle inequality argument we can further bound the error of transferring a graph filter or a GNN across graphs. Our results show that (i) the transference error decreases with the graph size, and (ii) that graph filters have a transferability-discriminability tradeoff that in GNNs is alleviated by the scattering behavior of the nonlinearity. These findings are demonstrated empirically in a movie recommendation problem and in a decentralized control task.
The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, if not better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity can reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
When and why can a neural network be successfully trained? This article provides an overview of optimization algorithms and theory for training neural networks. First, we discuss the issue of gradient explosion/vanishing and the more general issue of undesirable spectrum, and then discuss practical solutions including careful initialization and normalization methods. Second, we review generic optimization methods used in training neural networks, such as SGD, adaptive gradient methods and distributed methods, and theoretical results for these algorithms. Third, we review existing research on the global issues of neural network training, including results on bad local minima, mode connectivity, lottery ticket hypothesis and infinite-width analysis.