Neuroevolution has greatly promoted Deep Neural Network (DNN) architecture design and its applications, while there is a lack of methods available across different DNN types concerning both their scale and performance. In this study, we propose a self-adaptive neuroevolution (SANE) approach to automatically construct various lightweight DNN architectures for different tasks. One of the key settings in SANE is the search space defined by cells and organs self-adapted to different DNN types. Based on this search space, a constructive evolution strategy with uniform evolution settings and operations is designed to grow DNN architectures gradually. SANE is able to self-adaptively adjust evolution exploration and exploitation to improve search efficiency. Moreover, a speciation scheme is developed to protect evolution from early convergence by restricting selection competition within species. To evaluate SANE, we carry out neuroevolution experiments to generate different DNN architectures including convolutional neural network, generative adversarial network and long short-term memory. The results illustrate that the obtained DNN architectures could have smaller scale with similar performance compared to existing DNN architectures. Our proposed SANE provides an efficient approach to self-adaptively search DNN architectures across different types.
Backpropagation algorithm has been widely used as a mainstream learning procedure for neural networks in the past decade, and has played a significant role in the development of deep learning. However, there exist some limitations associated with this algorithm, such as getting stuck in local minima and experiencing vanishing/exploding gradients, which have led to questions about its biological plausibility. To address these limitations, alternative algorithms to backpropagation have been preliminarily explored, with the Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm being one of the most well-known. In this paper we propose a new learning framework for neural networks, namely Cascaded Forward (CaFo) algorithm, which does not rely on BP optimization as that in FF. Unlike FF, our framework directly outputs label distributions at each cascaded block, which does not require generation of additional negative samples and thus leads to a more efficient process at both training and testing. Moreover, in our framework each block can be trained independently, so it can be easily deployed into parallel acceleration systems. The proposed method is evaluated on four public image classification benchmarks, and the experimental results illustrate significant improvement in prediction accuracy in comparison with the baseline.
Deep point cloud registration methods face challenges to partial overlaps and rely on labeled data. To address these issues, we propose UDPReg, an unsupervised deep probabilistic registration framework for point clouds with partial overlaps. Specifically, we first adopt a network to learn posterior probability distributions of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) from point clouds. To handle partial point cloud registration, we apply the Sinkhorn algorithm to predict the distribution-level correspondences under the constraint of the mixing weights of GMMs. To enable unsupervised learning, we design three distribution consistency-based losses: self-consistency, cross-consistency, and local contrastive. The self-consistency loss is formulated by encouraging GMMs in Euclidean and feature spaces to share identical posterior distributions. The cross-consistency loss derives from the fact that the points of two partially overlapping point clouds belonging to the same clusters share the cluster centroids. The cross-consistency loss allows the network to flexibly learn a transformation-invariant posterior distribution of two aligned point clouds. The local contrastive loss facilitates the network to extract discriminative local features. Our UDPReg achieves competitive performance on the 3DMatch/3DLoMatch and ModelNet/ModelLoNet benchmarks.
We propose DyGFormer, a new Transformer-based architecture for dynamic graph learning that solely learns from the sequences of nodes' historical first-hop interactions. DyGFormer incorporates two distinct designs: a neighbor co-occurrence encoding scheme that explores the correlations of the source node and destination node based on their sequences; a patching technique that divides each sequence into multiple patches and feeds them to Transformer, allowing the model to effectively and efficiently benefit from longer histories. We also introduce DyGLib, a unified library with standard training pipelines, extensible coding interfaces, and comprehensive evaluating protocols to promote reproducible, scalable, and credible dynamic graph learning research. By performing extensive experiments on thirteen datasets from various domains for transductive/inductive dynamic link prediction and dynamic node classification tasks, we observe that: DyGFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on most of the datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of capturing nodes' correlations and long-term temporal dependencies; the results of baselines vary across different datasets and some findings are inconsistent with previous reports, which may be caused by their diverse pipelines and problematic implementations. We hope our work can provide new insights and facilitate the development of the dynamic graph learning field. All the resources including datasets, data loaders, algorithms, and executing scripts are publicly available at //github.com/yule-BUAA/DyGLib.
With the wide and deep adoption of deep learning models in real applications, there is an increasing need to model and learn the representations of the neural networks themselves. These models can be used to estimate attributes of different neural network architectures such as the accuracy and latency, without running the actual training or inference tasks. In this paper, we propose a neural architecture representation model that can be used to estimate these attributes holistically. Specifically, we first propose a simple and effective tokenizer to encode both the operation and topology information of a neural network into a single sequence. Then, we design a multi-stage fusion transformer to build a compact vector representation from the converted sequence. For efficient model training, we further propose an information flow consistency augmentation and correspondingly design an architecture consistency loss, which brings more benefits with less augmentation samples compared with previous random augmentation strategies. Experiment results on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, DARTS search space and NNLQP show that our proposed framework can be used to predict the aforementioned latency and accuracy attributes of both cell architectures and whole deep neural networks, and achieves promising performance. Code is available at //github.com/yuny220/NAR-Former.
Despite attractive theoretical guarantees and practical successes, Predictive Interval (PI) given by Conformal Prediction (CP) may not reflect the uncertainty of a given model. This limitation arises from CP methods using a constant correction for all test points, disregarding their individual uncertainties, to ensure coverage properties. To address this issue, we propose using a Quantile Regression Forest (QRF) to learn the distribution of nonconformity scores and utilizing the QRF's weights to assign more importance to samples with residuals similar to the test point. This approach results in PI lengths that are more aligned with the model's uncertainty. In addition, the weights learnt by the QRF provide a partition of the features space, allowing for more efficient computations and improved adaptiveness of the PI through groupwise conformalization. Our approach enjoys an assumption-free finite sample marginal and training-conditional coverage, and under suitable assumptions, it also ensures conditional coverage. Our methods work for any nonconformity score and are available as a Python package. We conduct experiments on simulated and real-world data that demonstrate significant improvements compared to existing methods.
The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be alleviated if we could partially predict a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the overlap of activations between datapoints in untrained networks and motivate how this can give a measure which is usefully indicative of a network's trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench, and Network Design Spaces. Our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods; we examine a simple adaptation of regularised evolutionary search. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at //github.com/BayesWatch/nas-without-training.
Knowledge is a formal way of understanding the world, providing a human-level cognition and intelligence for the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI). One of the representations of knowledge is the structural relations between entities. An effective way to automatically acquire this important knowledge, called Relation Extraction (RE), a sub-task of information extraction, plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Its purpose is to identify semantic relations between entities from natural language text. To date, there are several studies for RE in previous works, which have documented these techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) become a prevailing technique in this research. Especially, the supervised and distant supervision methods based on DNNs are the most popular and reliable solutions for RE. This article 1)introduces some general concepts, and further 2)gives a comprehensive overview of DNNs in RE from two points of view: supervised RE, which attempts to improve the standard RE systems, and distant supervision RE, which adopts DNNs to design the sentence encoder and the de-noise method. We further 3)cover some novel methods and describe some recent trends and discuss possible future research directions for this task.
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.
Deep Learning has enabled remarkable progress over the last years on a variety of tasks, such as image recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation. One crucial aspect for this progress are novel neural architectures. Currently employed architectures have mostly been developed manually by human experts, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Because of this, there is growing interest in automated neural architecture search methods. We provide an overview of existing work in this field of research and categorize them according to three dimensions: search space, search strategy, and performance estimation strategy.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.