No Arabic abstract
Recent results suggest that reinitializing a subset of the parameters of a neural network during training can improve generalization, particularly for small training sets. We study the impact of different reinitialization methods in several convolutional architectures across 12 benchmark image classification datasets, analyzing their potential gains and highlighting limitations. We also introduce a new layerwise reinitialization algorithm that outperforms previous methods and suggest explanations of the observed improved generalization. First, we show that layerwise reinitialization increases the margin on the training examples without increasing the norm of the weights, hence leading to an improvement in margin-based generalization bounds for neural networks. Second, we demonstrate that it settles in flatter local minima of the loss surface. Third, it encourages learning general rules and discourages memorization by placing emphasis on the lower layers of the neural network. Our takeaway message is that the accuracy of convolutional neural networks can be improved for small datasets using bottom-up layerwise reinitialization, where the number of reinitialized layers may vary depending on the available compute budget.
Inspired by convolutional neural networks on 1D and 2D data, graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) have been developed for various learning tasks on graph data, and have shown superior performance on real-world datasets. Despite their success, there is a dearth of theoretical explorations of GCNN models such as their generalization properties. In this paper, we take a first step towards developing a deeper theoretical understanding of GCNN models by analyzing the stability of single-layer GCNN models and deriving their generalization guarantees in a semi-supervised graph learning setting. In particular, we show that the algorithmic stability of a GCNN model depends upon the largest absolute eigenvalue of its graph convolution filter. Moreover, to ensure the uniform stability needed to provide strong generalization guarantees, the largest absolute eigenvalue must be independent of the graph size. Our results shed new insights on the design of new & improved graph convolution filters with guaranteed algorithmic stability. We evaluate the generalization gap and stability on various real-world graph datasets and show that the empirical results indeed support our theoretical findings. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study stability bounds on graph learning in a semi-supervised setting and derive generalization bounds for GCNN models.
We investigate the impact of aliasing on generalization in Deep Convolutional Networks and show that data augmentation schemes alone are unable to prevent it due to structural limitations in widely used architectures. Drawing insights from frequency analysis theory, we take a closer look at ResNet and EfficientNet architectures and review the trade-off between aliasing and information loss in each of their major components. We show how to mitigate aliasing by inserting non-trainable low-pass filters at key locations, particularly where networks lack the capacity to learn them. These simple architectural changes lead to substantial improvements in generalization on i.i.d. and even more on out-of-distribution conditions, such as image classification under natural corruptions on ImageNet-C [11] and few-shot learning on Meta-Dataset [26]. State-of-the art results are achieved on both datasets without introducing additional trainable parameters and using the default hyper-parameters of open source codebases.
This paper analyzes the effects of approximate multiplication when performing inferences on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The approximate multiplication can reduce the cost of the underlying circuits so that CNN inferences can be performed more efficiently in hardware accelerators. The study identifies the critical factors in the convolution, fully-connected, and batch normalization layers that allow more accurate CNN predictions despite the errors from approximate multiplication. The same factors also provide an arithmetic explanation of why bfloat16 multiplication performs well on CNNs. The experiments are performed with recognized network architectures to show that the approximate multipliers can produce predictions that are nearly as accurate as the FP32 references, without additional training. For example, the ResNet and Inception-v4 models with Mitch-$w$6 multiplication produces Top-5 errors that are within 0.2% compared to the FP32 references. A brief cost comparison of Mitch-$w$6 against bfloat16 is presented, where a MAC operation saves up to 80% of energy compared to the bfloat16 arithmetic. The most far-reaching contribution of this paper is the analytical justification that multiplications can be approximated while additions need to be exact in CNN MAC operations.
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been widely applied to sequential data analysis. Due to their complicated modeling structures, however, the theory behind is still largely missing. To connect theory and practice, we study the generalization properties of vanilla RNNs as well as their variants, including Minimal Gated Unit (MGU), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Convolutional (Conv) RNNs. Specifically, our theory is established under the PAC-Learning framework. The generalization bound is presented in terms of the spectral norms of the weight matrices and the total number of parameters. We also establish refined generalization bounds with additional norm assumptions, and draw a comparison among these bounds. We remark: (1) Our generalization bound for vanilla RNNs is significantly tighter than the best of existing results; (2) We are not aware of any other generalization bounds for MGU, LSTM, and Conv RNNs in the exiting literature; (3) We demonstrate the advantages of these variants in generalization.
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.