No Arabic abstract
Expressiveness and generalization of deep models was recently addressed via the connection between neural networks (NNs) and kernel learning, where first-order dynamics of NN during a gradient-descent (GD) optimization were related to gradient similarity kernel, also known as Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK). In the majority of works this kernel is considered to be time-invariant, with its properties being defined entirely by NN architecture and independent of the learning task at hand. In contrast, in this paper we empirically explore these properties along the optimization and show that in practical applications the NTK changes in a very dramatic and meaningful way, with its top eigenfunctions aligning toward the target function learned by NN. Moreover, these top eigenfunctions serve as basis functions for NN output - a function represented by NN is spanned almost completely by them for the entire optimization process. Further, since the learning along top eigenfunctions is typically fast, their alignment with the target function improves the overall optimization performance. In addition, we study how the neural spectrum is affected by learning rate decay, typically done by practitioners, showing various trends in the kernel behavior. We argue that the presented phenomena may lead to a more complete theoretical understanding behind NN learning.
We perform a careful, thorough, and large scale empirical study of the correspondence between wide neural networks and kernel methods. By doing so, we resolve a variety of open questions related to the study of infinitely wide neural networks. Our experimental results include: kernel methods outperform fully-connected finite-width networks, but underperform convolutional finite width networks; neural network Gaussian process (NNGP) kernels frequently outperform neural tangent (NT) kernels; centered and ensembled finite networks have reduced posterior variance and behave more similarly to infinite networks; weight decay and the use of a large learning rate break the correspondence between finite and infinite networks; the NTK parameterization outperforms the standard parameterization for finite width networks; diagonal regularization of kernels acts similarly to early stopping; floating point precision limits kernel performance beyond a critical dataset size; regularized ZCA whitening improves accuracy; finite network performance depends non-monotonically on width in ways not captured by double descent phenomena; equivariance of CNNs is only beneficial for narrow networks far from the kernel regime. Our experiments additionally motivate an improved layer-wise scaling for weight decay which improves generalization in finite-width networks. Finally, we develop improved best practices for using NNGP and NT kernels for prediction, including a novel ensembling technique. Using these best practices we achieve state-of-the-art results on CIFAR-10 classification for kernels corresponding to each architecture class we consider.
Inspired by the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting, we investigate the learning dynamics of neural networks as they train on single classification tasks. Our goal is to understand whether a related phenomenon occurs when data does not undergo a clear distributional shift. We define a `forgetting event to have occurred when an individual training example transitions from being classified correctly to incorrectly over the course of learning. Across several benchmark data sets, we find that: (i) certain examples are forgotten with high frequency, and some not at all; (ii) a data sets (un)forgettable examples generalize across neural architectures; and (iii) based on forgetting dynamics, a significant fraction of examples can be omitted from the training data set while still maintaining state-of-the-art generalization performance.
There were many algorithms to substitute the back-propagation (BP) in the deep neural network (DNN) training. However, they could not become popular because their training accuracy and the computational efficiency were worse than BP. One of them was direct feedback alignment (DFA), but it showed low training performance especially for the convolutional neural network (CNN). In this paper, we overcome the limitation of the DFA algorithm by combining with the conventional BP during the CNN training. To improve the training stability, we also suggest the feedback weight initialization method by analyzing the patterns of the fixed random matrices in the DFA. Finally, we propose the new training algorithm, binary direct feedback alignment (BDFA) to minimize the computational cost while maintaining the training accuracy compared with the DFA. In our experiments, we use the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 dataset to simulate the CNN learning from the scratch and apply the BDFA to the online learning based object tracking application to examine the training in the small dataset environment. Our proposed algorithms show better performance than conventional BP in both two different training tasks especially when the dataset is small.
The input space of a neural network with ReLU-like activations is partitioned into multiple linear regions, each corresponding to a specific activation pattern of the included ReLU-like activations. We demonstrate that this partition exhibits the following encoding properties across a variety of deep learning models: (1) {it determinism}: almost every linear region contains at most one training example. We can therefore represent almost every training example by a unique activation pattern, which is parameterized by a {it neural code}; and (2) {it categorization}: according to the neural code, simple algorithms, such as $K$-Means, $K$-NN, and logistic regression, can achieve fairly good performance on both training and test data. These encoding properties surprisingly suggest that {it normal neural networks well-trained for classification behave as hash encoders without any extra efforts.} In addition, the encoding properties exhibit variability in different scenarios. {Further experiments demonstrate that {it model size}, {it training time}, {it training sample size}, {it regularization}, and {it label noise} contribute in shaping the encoding properties, while the impacts of the first three are dominant.} We then define an {it activation hash phase chart} to represent the space expanded by {model size}, training time, training sample size, and the encoding properties, which is divided into three canonical regions: {it under-expressive regime}, {it critically-expressive regime}, and {it sufficiently-expressive regime}. The source code package is available at url{https://github.com/LeavesLei/activation-code}.
Recent algorithms with state-of-the-art few-shot classification results start their procedure by computing data features output by a large pretrained model. In this paper we systematically investigate which models provide the best representations for a few-shot image classification task when pretrained on the Imagenet dataset. We test their representations when used as the starting point for different few-shot classification algorithms. We observe that models trained on a supervised classification task have higher performance than models trained in an unsupervised manner even when transferred to out-of-distribution datasets. Models trained with adversarial robustness transfer better, while having slightly lower accuracy than supervised models.