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We study the SIMP method with a density field generated by a fully-connected neural network, taking the coordinates as inputs. In the large width limit, we show that the use of DNNs leads to a filtering effect similar to traditional filtering techniques for SIMP, with a filter described by the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK). This filter is however not invariant under translation, leading to visual artifacts and non-optimal shapes. We propose two embeddings of the input coordinates, which lead to (approximate) spatial invariance of the NTK and of the filter. We empirically confirm our theoretical observations and study how the filter size is affected by the architecture of the network. Our solution can easily be applied to any other coordinates-based generation method.
We present a novel neural network Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) statistic by identifying a connection between neural tangent kernel (NTK) and MMD statistic. This connection enables us to develop a computationally efficient and memory-efficient approach to compute the MMD statistic and perform neural network based two-sample tests towards addressing the long-standing challenge of memory and computational complexity of the MMD statistic, which is essential for online implementation to assimilate new samples. Theoretically, such a connection allows us to understand the properties of the new test statistic, such as Type-I error and testing power for performing the two-sample test, by leveraging analysis tools for kernel MMD. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the theory and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed NTK-MMD statistic.
We analyze the convergence of the averaged stochastic gradient descent for overparameterized two-layer neural networks for regression problems. It was recently found that a neural tangent kernel (NTK) plays an important role in showing the global convergence of gradient-based methods under the NTK regime, where the learning dynamics for overparameterized neural networks can be almost characterized by that for the associated reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). However, there is still room for a convergence rate analysis in the NTK regime. In this study, we show that the averaged stochastic gradient descent can achieve the minimax optimal convergence rate, with the global convergence guarantee, by exploiting the complexities of the target function and the RKHS associated with the NTK. Moreover, we show that the target function specified by the NTK of a ReLU network can be learned at the optimal convergence rate through a smooth approximation of a ReLU network under certain conditions.
Modern deep learning models employ considerably more parameters than required to fit the training data. Whereas conventional statistical wisdom suggests such models should drastically overfit, in practice these models generalize remarkably well. An emerging paradigm for describing this unexpected behavior is in terms of a emph{double descent} curve, in which increasing a models capacity causes its test error to first decrease, then increase to a maximum near the interpolation threshold, and then decrease again in the overparameterized regime. Recent efforts to explain this phenomenon theoretically have focused on simple settings, such as linear regression or kernel regression with unstructured random features, which we argue are too coarse to reveal important nuances of actual neural networks. We provide a precise high-dimensional asymptotic analysis of generalization under kernel regression with the Neural Tangent Kernel, which characterizes the behavior of wide neural networks optimized with gradient descent. Our results reveal that the test error has non-monotonic behavior deep in the overparameterized regime and can even exhibit additional peaks and descents when the number of parameters scales quadratically with the dataset size.
We prove that a randomly initialized neural network of *any architecture* has its Tangent Kernel (NTK) converge to a deterministic limit, as the network widths tend to infinity. We demonstrate how to calculate this limit. In prior literature, the heuristic study of neural network gradients often assumes every weight matrix used in forward propagation is independent from its transpose used in backpropagation (Schoenholz et al. 2017). This is known as the *gradient independence assumption (GIA)*. We identify a commonly satisfied condition, which we call *Simple GIA Check*, such that the NTK limit calculation based on GIA is correct. Conversely, when Simple GIA Check fails, we show GIA can result in wrong answers. Our material here presents the NTK results of Yang (2019a) in a friendly manner and showcases the *tensor programs* technique for understanding wide neural networks. We provide reference implementations of infinite-width NTKs of recurrent neural network, transformer, and batch normalization at https://github.com/thegregyang/NTK4A.
A recent line of work has analyzed the theoretical properties of deep neural networks via the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK). In particular, the smallest eigenvalue of the NTK has been related to the memorization capacity, the global convergence of gradient descent algorithms and the generalization of deep nets. However, existing results either provide bounds in the two-layer setting or assume that the spectrum of the NTK matrices is bounded away from 0 for multi-layer networks. In this paper, we provide tight bounds on the smallest eigenvalue of NTK matrices for deep ReLU nets, both in the limiting case of infinite widths and for finite widths. In the finite-width setting, the network architectures we consider are fairly general: we require the existence of a wide layer with roughly order of $N$ neurons, $N$ being the number of data samples; and the scaling of the remaining layer widths is arbitrary (up to logarithmic factors). To obtain our results, we analyze various quantities of independent interest: we give lower bounds on the smallest singular value of hidden feature matrices, and upper bounds on the Lipschitz constant of input-output feature maps.