We introduce a new general-purpose approach to deep learning on 3D surfaces, based on the insight that a simple diffusion layer is highly effective for spatial communication. The resulting networks are automatically robust to changes in resolution and sampling of a surface -- a basic property which is crucial for practical applications. Our networks can be discretized on various geometric representations such as triangle meshes or point clouds, and can even be trained on one representation then applied to another. We optimize the spatial support of diffusion as a continuous network parameter ranging from purely local to totally global, removing the burden of manually choosing neighborhood sizes. The only other ingredients in the method are a multi-layer perceptron applied independently at each point, and spatial gradient features to support directional filters. The resulting networks are simple, robust, and efficient. Here, we focus primarily on triangle mesh surfaces, and demonstrate state-of-the-art results for a variety of tasks including surface classification, segmentation, and non-rigid correspondence.
Despite significant advances in the field of deep learning in applications to various fields, explaining the inner processes of deep learning models remains an important and open question. The purpose of this article is to describe and substantiate the geometric and topological view of the learning process of neural networks. Our attention is focused on the internal representation of neural networks and on the dynamics of changes in the topology and geometry of the data manifold on different layers. We also propose a method for assessing the generalizing ability of neural networks based on topological descriptors. In this paper, we use the concepts of topological data analysis and intrinsic dimension, and we present a wide range of experiments on different datasets and different configurations of convolutional neural network architectures. In addition, we consider the issue of the geometry of adversarial attacks in the classification task and spoofing attacks on face recognition systems. Our work is a contribution to the development of an important area of explainable and interpretable AI through the example of computer vision.
If robots could reliably manipulate the shape of 3D deformable objects, they could find applications in fields ranging from home care to warehouse fulfillment to surgical assistance. Analytic models of elastic, 3D deformable objects require numerous parameters to describe the potentially infinite degrees of freedom present in determining the object's shape. Previous attempts at performing 3D shape control rely on hand-crafted features to represent the object shape and require training of object-specific control models. We overcome these issues through the use of our novel DeformerNet neural network architecture, which operates on a partial-view point cloud of the object being manipulated and a point cloud of the goal shape to learn a low-dimensional representation of the object shape. This shape embedding enables the robot to learn to define a visual servo controller that provides Cartesian pose changes to the robot end-effector causing the object to deform towards its target shape. Crucially, we demonstrate both in simulation and on a physical robot that DeformerNet reliably generalizes to object shapes and material stiffness not seen during training and outperforms comparison methods for both the generic shape control and the surgical task of retraction.
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.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are lately deployed for orchestrating wireless communications empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs), leveraging their online optimization capabilities. Most commonly, in RL-based formulations for realistic RISs with low resolution phase-tunable elements, each configuration is modeled as a distinct reflection action, resulting to inefficient exploration due to the exponential nature of the search space. In this paper, we consider RISs with 1-bit phase resolution elements, and model the action of each of them as a binary vector including the feasible reflection coefficients. We then introduce two variations of the well-established Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) agents, aiming for effective exploration of the binary action spaces. For the case of DQN, we make use of an efficient approximation of the Q-function, whereas a discretization post-processing step is applied to the output of DDPG. Our simulation results showcase that the proposed techniques greatly outperform the baseline in terms of the rate maximization objective, when large-scale RISs are considered. In addition, when dealing with moderate scale RIS sizes, where the conventional DQN based on configuration-based action spaces is feasible, the performance of the latter technique is similar to the proposed learning approach.
Emulators that can bypass computationally expensive scientific calculations with high accuracy and speed can enable new studies of fundamental science as well as more potential applications. In this work we discuss solving a system of constraint equations efficiently using a self-learning emulator. A self-learning emulator is an active learning protocol that can be used with any emulator that faithfully reproduces the exact solution at selected training points. The key ingredient is a fast estimate of the emulator error that becomes progressively more accurate as the emulator is improved, and the accuracy of the error estimate can be corrected using machine learning. We illustrate with three examples. The first uses cubic spline interpolation to find the solution of a transcendental equation with variable coefficients. The second example compares a spline emulator and a reduced basis method emulator to find solutions of a parameterized differential equation. The third example uses eigenvector continuation to find the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of a large Hamiltonian matrix that depends on several control parameters.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
In recent years, larger and deeper models are springing up and continuously pushing state-of-the-art (SOTA) results across various fields like natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). However, despite promising results, it needs to be noted that the computations required by SOTA models have been increased at an exponential rate. Massive computations not only have a surprisingly large carbon footprint but also have negative effects on research inclusiveness and deployment on real-world applications. Green deep learning is an increasingly hot research field that appeals to researchers to pay attention to energy usage and carbon emission during model training and inference. The target is to yield novel results with lightweight and efficient technologies. Many technologies can be used to achieve this goal, like model compression and knowledge distillation. This paper focuses on presenting a systematic review of the development of Green deep learning technologies. We classify these approaches into four categories: (1) compact networks, (2) energy-efficient training strategies, (3) energy-efficient inference approaches, and (4) efficient data usage. For each category, we discuss the progress that has been achieved and the unresolved challenges.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.
Graph classification aims to perform accurate information extraction and classification over graphstructured data. In the past few years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved satisfactory performance on graph classification tasks. However, most GNNs based methods focus on designing graph convolutional operations and graph pooling operations, overlooking that collecting or labeling graph-structured data is more difficult than grid-based data. We utilize meta-learning for fewshot graph classification to alleviate the scarce of labeled graph samples when training new tasks.More specifically, to boost the learning of graph classification tasks, we leverage GNNs as graph embedding backbone and meta-learning as training paradigm to capture task-specific knowledge rapidly in graph classification tasks and transfer them to new tasks. To enhance the robustness of meta-learner, we designed a novel step controller driven by Reinforcement Learning. The experiments demonstrate that our framework works well compared to baselines.
Few-shot image classification aims to classify unseen classes with limited labeled samples. Recent works benefit from the meta-learning process with episodic tasks and can fast adapt to class from training to testing. Due to the limited number of samples for each task, the initial embedding network for meta learning becomes an essential component and can largely affects the performance in practice. To this end, many pre-trained methods have been proposed, and most of them are trained in supervised way with limited transfer ability for unseen classes. In this paper, we proposed to train a more generalized embedding network with self-supervised learning (SSL) which can provide slow and robust representation for downstream tasks by learning from the data itself. We evaluate our work by extensive comparisons with previous baseline methods on two few-shot classification datasets ({\em i.e.,} MiniImageNet and CUB). Based on the evaluation results, the proposed method achieves significantly better performance, i.e., improve 1-shot and 5-shot tasks by nearly \textbf{3\%} and \textbf{4\%} on MiniImageNet, by nearly \textbf{9\%} and \textbf{3\%} on CUB. Moreover, the proposed method can gain the improvement of (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{13\%}) on MiniImageNet and (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{8\%}) on CUB by pretraining using more unlabeled data. Our code will be available at \hyperref[//github.com/phecy/SSL-FEW-SHOT.]{//github.com/phecy/ssl-few-shot.}