No Arabic abstract
Overparametrization has been remarkably successful for deep learning studies. This study investigates an overlooked but important aspect of overparametrized neural networks, that is, the null components in the parameters of neural networks, or the ghosts. Since deep learning is not explicitly regularized, typical deep learning solutions contain null components. In this paper, we present a structure theorem of the null space for a general class of neural networks. Specifically, we show that any null element can be uniquely written by the linear combination of ridgelet transforms. In general, it is quite difficult to fully characterize the null space of an arbitrarily given operator. Therefore, the structure theorem is a great advantage for understanding a complicated landscape of neural network parameters. As applications, we discuss the roles of ghosts on the generalization performance of deep learning.
The method recently introduced in arXiv:2011.10115 realizes a deep neural network with just a single nonlinear element and delayed feedback. It is applicable for the description of physically implemented neural networks. In this work, we present an infinite-dimensional generalization, which allows for a more rigorous mathematical analysis and a higher flexibility in choosing the weight functions. Precisely speaking, the weights are described by Lebesgue integrable functions instead of step functions. We also provide a functional back-propagation algorithm, which enables gradient descent training of the weights. In addition, with a slight modification, our concept realizes recurrent neural networks.
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.
Despite existing work on ensuring generalization of neural networks in terms of scale sensitive complexity measures, such as norms, margin and sharpness, these complexity measures do not offer an explanation of why neural networks generalize better with over-parametrization. In this work we suggest a novel complexity measure based on unit-wise capacities resulting in a tighter generalization bound for two layer ReLU networks. Our capacity bound correlates with the behavior of test error with increasing network sizes, and could potentially explain the improvement in generalization with over-parametrization. We further present a matching lower bound for the Rademacher complexity that improves over previous capacity lower bounds for neural networks.
In this paper, we carry out null space analysis for Class-Specific Discriminant Analysis (CSDA) and formulate a number of solutions based on the analysis. We analyze both theoretically and experimentally the significance of each algorithmic step. The innate subspace dimensionality resulting from the proposed solutions is typically quite high and we discuss how the need for further dimensionality reduction changes the situation. Experimental evaluation of the proposed solutions shows that the straightforward extension of null space analysis approaches to the class-specific setting can outperform the standard CSDA method. Furthermore, by exploiting a recently proposed out-of-class scatter definition encoding the multi-modality of the negative class naturally appearing in class-specific problems, null space projections can lead to a performance comparable to or outperforming the most recent CSDA methods.
As its width tends to infinity, a deep neural networks behavior under gradient descent can become simplified and predictable (e.g. given by the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK)), if it is parametrized appropriately (e.g. the NTK parametrization). However, we show that the standard and NTK parametrizations of a neural network do not admit infinite-width limits that can learn features, which is crucial for pretraining and transfer learning such as with BERT. We propose simple modifications to the standard parametrization to allow for feature learning in the limit. Using the *Tensor Programs* technique, we derive explicit formulas for such limits. On Word2Vec and few-shot learning on Omniglot via MAML, two canonical tasks that rely crucially on feature learning, we compute these limits exactly. We find that they outperform both NTK baselines and finite-width networks, with the latter approaching the infinite-width feature learning performance as width increases. More generally, we classify a natural space of neural network parametrizations that generalizes standard, NTK, and Mean Field parametrizations. We show 1) any parametrization in this space either admits feature learning or has an infinite-width training dynamics given by kernel gradient descent, but not both; 2) any such infinite-width limit can be computed using the Tensor Programs technique. Code for our experiments can be found at github.com/edwardjhu/TP4.