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Despite their ubiquity in core AI fields like natural language processing, the mechanics of deep attention-based neural networks like the Transformer model are not fully understood. In this article, we present a new perspective towards understanding how Transformers work. In particular, we show that the dot-product attention that is the core of the Transformers operation can be characterized as a kernel learning method on a pair of Banach spaces. In particular, the Transformers kernel is characterized as having an infinite feature dimension. Along the way we consider an extension of the standard kernel learning problem to a binary setting, where data come from two input domains and a response is defined for every cross-domain pair. We prove a new representer theorem for these binary kernel machines with non-Mercer (indefinite, asymmetric) kernels (implying that the functions learned are elements of reproducing kernel Banach spaces rather than Hilbert spaces), and also prove a new universal approximation theorem showing that the Transformer calculation can learn any binary non-Mercer reproducing kernel Banach space pair. We experiment with new kernels in Transformers, and obtain results that suggest the infinite dimensionality of the standard Transformer kernel is partially responsible for its performance. This papers results provide a new theoretical understanding of a very important but poorly understood model in modern machine~learning.
In this paper, we develop a quadrature framework for large-scale kernel machines via a numerical integration representation. Considering that the integration domain and measure of typical kernels, e.g., Gaussian kernels, arc-cosine kernels, are fully symmetric, we leverage deterministic fully symmetric interpolatory rules to efficiently compute quadrature nodes and associated weights for kernel approximation. The developed interpolatory rules are able to reduce the number of needed nodes while retaining a high approximation accuracy. Further, we randomize the above deterministic rules by the classical Monte-Carlo sampling and control variates techniques with two merits: 1) The proposed stochastic rules make the dimension of the feature mapping flexibly varying, such that we can control the discrepancy between the original and approximate kernels by tuning the dimnension. 2) Our stochastic rules have nice statistical properties of unbiasedness and variance reduction with fast convergence rate. In addition, we elucidate the relationship between our deterministic/stochastic interpolatory rules and current quadrature rules for kernel approximation, including the sparse grids quadrature and stochastic spherical-radial rules, thereby unifying these methods under our framework. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets show that our methods compare favorably with other representative kernel approximation based methods.
A common lens to theoretically study neural net architectures is to analyze the functions they can approximate. However, the constructions from approximation theory often have unrealistic aspects, for example, reliance on infinite precision to memorize target function values, which make these results potentially less meaningful. To address these issues, this work proposes a formal definition of statistically meaningful approximation which requires the approximating network to exhibit good statistical learnability. We present case studies on statistically meaningful approximation for two classes of functions: boolean circuits and Turing machines. We show that overparameterized feedforward neural nets can statistically meaningfully approximate boolean circuits with sample complexity depending only polynomially on the circuit size, not the size of the approximating network. In addition, we show that transformers can statistically meaningfully approximate Turing machines with computation time bounded by $T$, requiring sample complexity polynomial in the alphabet size, state space size, and $log (T)$. Our analysis introduces new tools for generalization bounds that provide much tighter sample complexity guarantees than the typical VC-dimension or norm-based bounds, which may be of independent interest.
We propose a deep learning approach for discovering kernels tailored to identifying clusters over sample data. Our neural network produces sample embeddings that are motivated by--and are at least as expressive as--spectral clustering. Our training objective, based on the Hilbert Schmidt Information Criterion, can be optimized via gradient adaptations on the Stiefel manifold, leading to significant acceleration over spectral methods relying on eigendecompositions. Finally, our trained embedding can be directly applied to out-of-sample data. We show experimentally that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art deep clustering methods, as well as traditional approaches such as $k$-means and spectral clustering over a broad array of real-life and synthetic datasets.
We introduce a new class of graph neural networks (GNNs), by combining several concepts that were so far studied independently - graph kernels, attention-based networks with structural priors and more recently, efficient Transformers architectures applying small memory footprint implicit attention methods via low rank decomposition techniques. The goal of the paper is twofold. Proposed by us Graph Kernel Attention Transformers (or GKATs) are much more expressive than SOTA GNNs as capable of modeling longer-range dependencies within a single layer. Consequently, they can use more shallow architecture design. Furthermore, GKAT attention layers scale linearly rather than quadratically in the number of nodes of the input graphs, even when those graphs are dense, requiring less compute than their regular graph attention counterparts. They achieve it by applying new classes of graph kernels admitting random feature map decomposition via random walks on graphs. As a byproduct of the introduced techniques, we obtain a new class of learnable graph sketches, called graphots, compactly encoding topological graph properties as well as nodes features. We conducted exhaustive empirical comparison of our method with nine different GNN classes on tasks ranging from motif detection through social network classification to bioinformatics challenges, showing consistent gains coming from GKATs.
Deep ensembles have recently gained popularity in the deep learning community for their conceptual simplicity and efficiency. However, maintaining functional diversity between ensemble members that are independently trained with gradient descent is challenging. This can lead to pathologies when adding more ensemble members, such as a saturation of the ensemble performance, which converges to the performance of a single model. Moreover, this does not only affect the quality of its predictions, but even more so the uncertainty estimates of the ensemble, and thus its performance on out-of-distribution data. We hypothesize that this limitation can be overcome by discouraging different ensemble members from collapsing to the same function. To this end, we introduce a kernelized repulsive term in the update rule of the deep ensembles. We show that this simple modification not only enforces and maintains diversity among the members but, even more importantly, transforms the maximum a posteriori inference into proper Bayesian inference. Namely, we show that the training dynamics of our proposed repulsive ensembles follow a Wasserstein gradient flow of the KL divergence with the true posterior. We study repulsive terms in weight and function space and empirically compare their performance to standard ensembles and Bayesian baselines on synthetic and real-world prediction tasks.