No Arabic abstract
While neuroevolution (evolving neural networks) has a successful track record across a variety of domains from reinforcement learning to artificial life, it is rarely applied to large, deep neural networks. A central reason is that while random mutation generally works in low dimensions, a random perturbation of thousands or millions of weights is likely to break existing functionality, providing no learning signal even if some individual weight changes were beneficial. This paper proposes a solution by introducing a family of safe mutation (SM) operators that aim within the mutation operator itself to find a degree of change that does not alter network behavior too much, but still facilitates exploration. Importantly, these SM operators do not require any additional interactions with the environment. The most effective SM variant capitalizes on the intriguing opportunity to scale the degree of mutation of each individual weight according to the sensitivity of the networks outputs to that weight, which requires computing the gradient of outputs with respect to the weights (instead of the gradient of error, as in conventional deep learning). This safe mutation through gradients (SM-G) operator dramatically increases the ability of a simple genetic algorithm-based neuroevolution method to find solutions in high-dimensional domains that require deep and/or recurrent neural networks (which tend to be particularly brittle to mutation), including domains that require processing raw pixels. By improving our ability to evolve deep neural networks, this new safer approach to mutation expands the scope of domains amenable to neuroevolution.
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been attached great importance due to their biological plausibility and high energy-efficiency on neuromorphic chips. As these chips are usually resource-constrained, the compression of SNNs is thus crucial along the road of practical use of SNNs. Most existing methods directly apply pruning approaches in artificial neural networks (ANNs) to SNNs, which ignore the difference between ANNs and SNNs, thus limiting the performance of the pruned SNNs. Besides, these methods are only suitable for shallow SNNs. In this paper, inspired by synaptogenesis and synapse elimination in the neural system, we propose gradient rewiring (Grad R), a joint learning algorithm of connectivity and weight for SNNs, that enables us to seamlessly optimize network structure without retraining. Our key innovation is to redefine the gradient to a new synaptic parameter, allowing better exploration of network structures by taking full advantage of the competition between pruning and regrowth of connections. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves minimal loss of SNNs performance on MNIST and CIFAR-10 dataset so far. Moreover, it reaches a $sim$3.5% accuracy loss under unprecedented 0.73% connectivity, which reveals remarkable structure refining capability in SNNs. Our work suggests that there exists extremely high redundancy in deep SNNs. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Yanqi-Chen/Gradient-Rewiring.
Deep neural networks often suffer from poor performance or even training failure due to the ill-conditioned problem, the vanishing/exploding gradient problem, and the saddle point problem. In this paper, a novel method by acting the gradient activation function (GAF) on the gradient is proposed to handle these challenges. Intuitively, the GAF enlarges the tiny gradients and restricts the large gradient. Theoretically, this paper gives conditions that the GAF needs to meet, and on this basis, proves that the GAF alleviates the problems mentioned above. In addition, this paper proves that the convergence rate of SGD with the GAF is faster than that without the GAF under some assumptions. Furthermore, experiments on CIFAR, ImageNet, and PASCAL visual object classes confirm the GAFs effectiveness. The experimental results also demonstrate that the proposed method is able to be adopted in various deep neural networks to improve their performance. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/LongJin-lab/Activated-Gradients-for-Deep-Neural-Networks.
We consider the problem of training input-output recurrent neural networks (RNN) for sequence labeling tasks. We propose a novel spectral approach for learning the network parameters. It is based on decomposition of the cross-moment tensor between the output and a non-linear transformation of the input, based on score functions. We guarantee consistent learning with polynomial sample and computational complexity under transparent conditions such as non-degeneracy of model parameters, polynomial activations for the neurons, and a Markovian evolution of the input sequence. We also extend our results to Bidirectional RNN which uses both previous and future information to output the label at each time point, and is employed in many NLP tasks such as POS tagging.
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) well support spatiotemporal learning and energy-efficient event-driven hardware neuromorphic processors. As an important class of SNNs, recurrent spiking neural networks (RSNNs) possess great computational power. However, the practical application of RSNNs is severely limited by challenges in training. Biologically-inspired unsupervised learning has limited capability in boosting the performance of RSNNs. On the other hand, existing backpropagation (BP) methods suffer from high complexity of unrolling in time, vanishing and exploding gradients, and approximate differentiation of discontinuous spiking activities when applied to RSNNs. To enable supervised training of RSNNs under a well-defined loss function, we present a novel Spike-Train level RSNNs Backpropagation (ST-RSBP) algorithm for training deep RSNNs. The proposed ST-RSBP directly computes the gradient of a rated-coded loss function defined at the output layer of the network w.r.t tunable parameters. The scalability of ST-RSBP is achieved by the proposed spike-train level computation during which temporal effects of the SNN is captured in both the forward and backward pass of BP. Our ST-RSBP algorithm can be broadly applied to RSNNs with a single recurrent layer or deep RSNNs with multiple feed-forward and recurrent layers. Based upon challenging speech and image datasets including TI46, N-TIDIGITS, Fashion-MNIST and MNIST, ST-RSBP is able to train RSNNs with an accuracy surpassing that of the current state-of-art SNN BP algorithms and conventional non-spiking deep learning models.
We review attempts that have been made towards understanding the computational properties and mechanisms of input-driven dynamical systems like RNNs, and reservoir computing networks in particular. We provide details on methods that have been developed to give quantitative answers to the questions above. Following this, we show how self-organization may be used to improve reservoirs for better performance, in some cases guided by the measures presented before. We also present a possible way to quantify task performance using an information-theoretic approach, and finally discuss promising future directions aimed at a better understanding of how these systems perform their computations and how to best guide self-organized processes for their optimization.