No Arabic abstract
Effective control and prediction of dynamical systems often require appropriate handling of continuous-time and discrete, event-triggered processes. Stochastic hybrid systems (SHSs), common across engineering domains, provide a formalism for dynamical systems subject to discrete, possibly stochastic, state jumps and multi-modal continuous-time flows. Despite the versatility and importance of SHSs across applications, a general procedure for the explicit learning of both discrete events and multi-mode continuous dynamics remains an open problem. This work introduces Neural Hybrid Automata (NHAs), a recipe for learning SHS dynamics without a priori knowledge on the number of modes and inter-modal transition dynamics. NHAs provide a systematic inference method based on normalizing flows, neural differential equations and self-supervision. We showcase NHAs on several tasks, including mode recovery and flow learning in systems with stochastic transitions, and end-to-end learning of hierarchical robot controllers.
We show that Neural ODEs, an emerging class of time-continuous neural networks, can be verified by solving a set of global-optimization problems. For this purpose, we introduce Stochastic Lagrangian Reachability (SLR), an abstraction-based technique for constructing a tight Reachtube (an over-approximation of the set of reachable states over a given time-horizon), and provide stochastic guarantees in the form of confidence intervals for the Reachtube bounds. SLR inherently avoids the infamous wrapping effect (accumulation of over-approximation errors) by performing local optimization steps to expand safe regions instead of repeatedly forward-propagating them as is done by deterministic reachability methods. To enable fast local optimizations, we introduce a novel forward-mode adjoint sensitivity method to compute gradients without the need for backpropagation. Finally, we establish asymptotic and non-asymptotic convergence rates for SLR.
Graph distance metric learning serves as the foundation for many graph learning problems, e.g., graph clustering, graph classification and graph matching. Existing research works on graph distance metric (or graph kernels) learning fail to maintain the basic properties of such metrics, e.g., non-negative, identity of indiscernibles, symmetry and triangle inequality, respectively. In this paper, we will introduce a new graph neural network based distance metric learning approaches, namely GB-DISTANCE (GRAPH-BERT based Neural Distance). Solely based on the attention mechanism, GB-DISTANCE can learn graph instance representations effectively based on a pre-trained GRAPH-BERT model. Different from the existing supervised/unsupervised metrics, GB-DISTANCE can be learned effectively in a semi-supervised manner. In addition, GB-DISTANCE can also maintain the distance metric basic properties mentioned above. Extensive experiments have been done on several benchmark graph datasets, and the results demonstrate that GB-DISTANCE can out-perform the existing baseline methods, especially the recent graph neural network model based graph metrics, with a significant gap in computing the graph distance.
Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-based inference on battery-powered devices can be made more energy-efficient by restricting the synaptic weights to be binary, hence eliminating the need to perform multiplications. An alternative, emerging, approach relies on the use of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), biologically inspired, dynamic, event-driven models that enhance energy efficiency via the use of binary, sparse, activations. In this paper, an SNN model is introduced that combines the benefits of temporally sparse binary activations and of binary weights. Two learning rules are derived, the first based on the combination of straight-through and surrogate gradient techniques, and the second based on a Bayesian paradigm. Experiments validate the performance loss with respect to full-precision implementations, and demonstrate the advantage of the Bayesian paradigm in terms of accuracy and calibration.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have surpassed human-level accuracy in a variety of cognitive tasks but at the cost of significant memory/time requirements in DNN training. This limits their deployment in energy and memory limited applications that require real-time learning. Matrix-vector multiplications (MVM) and vector-vector outer product (VVOP) are the two most expensive operations associated with the training of DNNs. Strategies to improve the efficiency of MVM computation in hardware have been demonstrated with minimal impact on training accuracy. However, the VVOP computation remains a relatively less explored bottleneck even with the aforementioned strategies. Stochastic computing (SC) has been proposed to improve the efficiency of VVOP computation but on relatively shallow networks with bounded activation functions and floating-point (FP) scaling of activation gradients. In this paper, we propose ESSOP, an efficient and scalable stochastic outer product architecture based on the SC paradigm. We introduce efficient techniques to generalize SC for weight update computation in DNNs with the unbounded activation functions (e.g., ReLU), required by many state-of-the-art networks. Our architecture reduces the computational cost by re-using random numbers and replacing certain FP multiplication operations by bit shift scaling. We show that the ResNet-32 network with 33 convolution layers and a fully-connected layer can be trained with ESSOP on the CIFAR-10 dataset to achieve baseline comparable accuracy. Hardware design of ESSOP at 14nm technology node shows that, compared to a highly pipelined FP16 multiplier design, ESSOP is 82.2% and 93.7% better in energy and area efficiency respectively for outer product computation.
A significant effort has been made to train neural networks that replicate algorithmic reasoning, but they often fail to learn the abstract concepts underlying these algorithms. This is evidenced by their inability to generalize to data distributions that are outside of their restricted training sets, namely larger inputs and unseen data. We study these generalization issues at the level of numerical subroutines that comprise common algorithms like sorting, shortest paths, and minimum spanning trees. First, we observe that transformer-based sequence-to-sequence models can learn subroutines like sorting a list of numbers, but their performance rapidly degrades as the length of lists grows beyond those found in the training set. We demonstrate that this is due to attention weights that lose fidelity with longer sequences, particularly when the input numbers are numerically similar. To address the issue, we propose a learned conditional masking mechanism, which enables the model to strongly generalize far outside of its training range with near-perfect accuracy on a variety of algorithms. Second, to generalize to unseen data, we show that encoding numbers with a binary representation leads to embeddings with rich structure once trained on downstream tasks like addition or multiplication. This allows the embedding to handle missing data by faithfully interpolating numbers not seen during training.