No Arabic abstract
Dropout is a regularisation technique in neural network training where unit activations are randomly set to zero with a given probability emph{independently}. In this work, we propose a generalisation of dropout and other multiplicative noise injection schemes for shallow and deep neural networks, where the random noise applied to different units is not independent but follows a joint distribution that is either fixed or estimated during training. We provide theoretical insights on why such adaptive structured noise injection (ASNI) may be relevant, and empirically confirm that it helps boost the accuracy of simple feedforward and convolutional neural networks, disentangles the hidden layer representations, and leads to sparser representations. Our proposed method is a straightforward modification of the classical dropout and does not require additional computational overhead.
We show that the output of a (residual) convolutional neural network (CNN) with an appropriate prior over the weights and biases is a Gaussian process (GP) in the limit of infinitely many convolutional filters, extending similar results for dense networks. For a CNN, the equivalent kernel can be computed exactly and, unlike deep kernels, has very few parameters: only the hyperparameters of the original CNN. Further, we show that this kernel has two properties that allow it to be computed efficiently; the cost of evaluating the kernel for a pair of images is similar to a single forward pass through the original CNN with only one filter per layer. The kernel equivalent to a 32-layer ResNet obtains 0.84% classification error on MNIST, a new record for GPs with a comparable number of parameters.
We consider shallow (single hidden layer) neural networks and characterize their performance when trained with stochastic gradient descent as the number of hidden units $N$ and gradient descent steps grow to infinity. In particular, we investigate the effect of different scaling schemes, which lead to different normalizations of the neural network, on the networks statistical output, closing the gap between the $1/sqrt{N}$ and the mean-field $1/N$ normalization. We develop an asymptotic expansion for the neural networks statistical output pointwise with respect to the scaling parameter as the number of hidden units grows to infinity. Based on this expansion, we demonstrate mathematically that to leading order in $N$, there is no bias-variance trade off, in that both bias and variance (both explicitly characterized) decrease as the number of hidden units increases and time grows. In addition, we show that to leading order in $N$, the variance of the neural networks statistical output decays as the implied normalization by the scaling parameter approaches the mean field normalization. Numerical studies on the MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets show that test and train accuracy monotonically improve as the neural networks normalization gets closer to the mean field normalization.
We consider the teacher-student setting of learning shallow neural networks with quadratic activations and planted weight matrix $W^*inmathbb{R}^{mtimes d}$, where $m$ is the width of the hidden layer and $dle m$ is the data dimension. We study the optimization landscape associated with the empirical and the population squared risk of the problem. Under the assumption the planted weights are full-rank we obtain the following results. First, we establish that the landscape of the empirical risk admits an energy barrier separating rank-deficient $W$ from $W^*$: if $W$ is rank deficient, then its risk is bounded away from zero by an amount we quantify. We then couple this result by showing that, assuming number $N$ of samples grows at least like a polynomial function of $d$, all full-rank approximate stationary points of the empirical risk are nearly global optimum. These two results allow us to prove that gradient descent, when initialized below the energy barrier, approximately minimizes the empirical risk and recovers the planted weights in polynomial-time. Next, we show that initializing below this barrier is in fact easily achieved when the weights are randomly generated under relatively weak assumptions. We show that provided the network is sufficiently overparametrized, initializing with an appropriate multiple of the identity suffices to obtain a risk below the energy barrier. At a technical level, the last result is a consequence of the semicircle law for the Wishart ensemble and could be of independent interest. Finally, we study the minimizers of the empirical risk and identify a simple necessary and sufficient geometric condition on the training data under which any minimizer has necessarily zero generalization error. We show that as soon as $Nge N^*=d(d+1)/2$, randomly generated data enjoys this geometric condition almost surely, while that ceases to be true if $N<N^*$.
We consider the variation space corresponding to a dictionary of functions in $L^2(Omega)$ and present the basic theory of approximation in these spaces. Specifically, we compare the definition based on integral representations with the definition in terms of convex hulls. We show that in many cases, including the dictionaries corresponding to shallow ReLU$^k$ networks and a dictionary of decaying Fourier modes, that the two definitions coincide. We also give a partial characterization of the variation space for shallow ReLU$^k$ networks and show that the variation space with respect to the dictionary of decaying Fourier modes corresponds to the Barron spectral space.
Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) have struggled for relevance in applications due to the challenges and cost associated with Bayesian inference. In this paper we propose a sparse variational approximation for DGPs for which the approximate posterior mean has the same mathematical structure as a Deep Neural Network (DNN). We make the forward pass through a DGP equivalent to a ReLU DNN by finding an interdomain transformation that represents the GP posterior mean as a sum of ReLU basis functions. This unification enables the initialisation and training of the DGP as a neural network, leveraging the well established practice in the deep learning community, and so greatly aiding the inference task. The experiments demonstrate improved accuracy and faster training compared to current DGP methods, while retaining favourable predictive uncertainties.