No Arabic abstract
We study the family of functions that are represented by a linear convolutional neural network (LCN). These functions form a semi-algebraic subset of the set of linear maps from input space to output space. In contrast, the families of functions represented by fully-connected linear networks form algebraic sets. We observe that the functions represented by LCNs can be identified with polynomials that admit certain factorizations, and we use this perspective to describe the impact of the networks architecture on the geometry of the resulting function space. We further study the optimization of an objective function over an LCN, analyzing critical points in function space and in parameter space, and describing dynamical invariants for gradient descent. Overall, our theory predicts that the optimized parameters of an LCN will often correspond to repeated filters across layers, or filters that can be decomposed as repeated filters. We also conduct numerical and symbolic experiments that illustrate our results and present an in-depth analysis of the landscape for small architectures.
We establish, for the first time, connections between feedforward neural networks with ReLU activation and tropical geometry --- we show that the family of such neural networks is equivalent to the family of tropical rational maps. Among other things, we deduce that feedforward ReLU neural networks with one hidden layer can be characterized by zonotopes, which serve as building blocks for deeper networks; we relate decision boundaries of such neural networks to tropical hypersurfaces, a major object of study in tropical geometry; and we prove that linear regions of such neural networks correspond to vertices of polytopes associated with tropical rational functions. An insight from our tropical formulation is that a deeper network is exponentially more expressive than a shallow network.
The critical locus of the loss function of a neural network is determined by the geometry of the functional space and by the parameterization of this space by the networks weights. We introduce a natural distinction between pure critical points, which only depend on the functional space, and spurious critical points, which arise from the parameterization. We apply this perspective to revisit and extend the literature on the loss function of linear neural networks. For this type of network, the functional space is either the set of all linear maps from input to output space, or a determinantal variety, i.e., a set of linear maps with bounded rank. We use geometric properties of determinantal varieties to derive new results on the landscape of linear networks with different loss functions and different parameterizations. Our analysis clearly illustrates that the absence of bad local minima in the loss landscape of linear networks is due to two distinct phenomena that apply in different settings: it is true for arbitrary smooth convex losses in the case of architectures that can express all linear maps (filling architectures) but it holds only for the quadratic loss when the functional space is a determinantal variety (non-filling architectures). Without any assumption on the architecture, smooth convex losses may lead to landscapes with many bad minima.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have attracted more and more attentions in recent years. A typical GCN layer consists of a linear feature propagation step and a nonlinear transformation step. Recent works show that a linear GCN can achieve comparable performance to the original non-linear GCN while being much more computationally efficient. In this paper, we dissect the feature propagation steps of linear GCNs from a perspective of continuous graph diffusion, and analyze why linear GCNs fail to benefit from more propagation steps. Following that, we propose Decoupled Graph Convolution (DGC) that decouples the terminal time and the feature propagation steps, making it more flexible and capable of exploiting a very large number of feature propagation steps. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed DGC improves linear GCNs by a large margin and makes them competitive with many modern variants of non-linear GCNs.
We present diffusion-convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), a new model for graph-structured data. Through the introduction of a diffusion-convolution operation, we show how diffusion-based representations can be learned from graph-structured data and used as an effective basis for node classification. DCNNs have several attractive qualities, including a latent representation for graphical data that is invariant under isomorphism, as well as polynomial-time prediction and learning that can be represented as tensor operations and efficiently implemented on the GPU. Through several experiments with real structured datasets, we demonstrate that DCNNs are able to outperform probabilistic relational models and kernel-on-graph methods at relational node classification tasks.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have received considerable research attention recently. Most GCNs learn the node representations in Euclidean geometry, but that could have a high distortion in the case of embedding graphs with scale-free or hierarchical structure. Recently, some GCNs are proposed to deal with this problem in non-Euclidean geometry, e.g., hyperbolic geometry. Although hyperbolic GCNs achieve promising performance, existing hyperbolic graph operations actually cannot rigorously follow the hyperbolic geometry, which may limit the ability of hyperbolic geometry and thus hurt the performance of hyperbolic GCNs. In this paper, we propose a novel hyperbolic GCN named Lorentzian graph convolutional network (LGCN), which rigorously guarantees the learned node features follow the hyperbolic geometry. Specifically, we rebuild the graph operations of hyperbolic GCNs with Lorentzian version, e.g., the feature transformation and non-linear activation. Also, an elegant neighborhood aggregation method is designed based on the centroid of Lorentzian distance. Moreover, we prove some proposed graph operations are equivalent in different types of hyperbolic geometry, which fundamentally indicates their correctness. Experiments on six datasets show that LGCN performs better than the state-of-the-art methods. LGCN has lower distortion to learn the representation of tree-likeness graphs compared with existing hyperbolic GCNs. We also find that the performance of some hyperbolic GCNs can be improved by simply replacing the graph operations with those we defined in this paper.