21,451 research outputs found
Exact solutions to the nonlinear dynamics of learning in deep linear neural networks
Despite the widespread practical success of deep learning methods, our
theoretical understanding of the dynamics of learning in deep neural networks
remains quite sparse. We attempt to bridge the gap between the theory and
practice of deep learning by systematically analyzing learning dynamics for the
restricted case of deep linear neural networks. Despite the linearity of their
input-output map, such networks have nonlinear gradient descent dynamics on
weights that change with the addition of each new hidden layer. We show that
deep linear networks exhibit nonlinear learning phenomena similar to those seen
in simulations of nonlinear networks, including long plateaus followed by rapid
transitions to lower error solutions, and faster convergence from greedy
unsupervised pretraining initial conditions than from random initial
conditions. We provide an analytical description of these phenomena by finding
new exact solutions to the nonlinear dynamics of deep learning. Our theoretical
analysis also reveals the surprising finding that as the depth of a network
approaches infinity, learning speed can nevertheless remain finite: for a
special class of initial conditions on the weights, very deep networks incur
only a finite, depth independent, delay in learning speed relative to shallow
networks. We show that, under certain conditions on the training data,
unsupervised pretraining can find this special class of initial conditions,
while scaled random Gaussian initializations cannot. We further exhibit a new
class of random orthogonal initial conditions on weights that, like
unsupervised pre-training, enjoys depth independent learning times. We further
show that these initial conditions also lead to faithful propagation of
gradients even in deep nonlinear networks, as long as they operate in a special
regime known as the edge of chaos.Comment: Submission to ICLR2014. Revised based on reviewer feedbac
A mathematical theory of semantic development in deep neural networks
An extensive body of empirical research has revealed remarkable regularities
in the acquisition, organization, deployment, and neural representation of
human semantic knowledge, thereby raising a fundamental conceptual question:
what are the theoretical principles governing the ability of neural networks to
acquire, organize, and deploy abstract knowledge by integrating across many
individual experiences? We address this question by mathematically analyzing
the nonlinear dynamics of learning in deep linear networks. We find exact
solutions to this learning dynamics that yield a conceptual explanation for the
prevalence of many disparate phenomena in semantic cognition, including the
hierarchical differentiation of concepts through rapid developmental
transitions, the ubiquity of semantic illusions between such transitions, the
emergence of item typicality and category coherence as factors controlling the
speed of semantic processing, changing patterns of inductive projection over
development, and the conservation of semantic similarity in neural
representations across species. Thus, surprisingly, our simple neural model
qualitatively recapitulates many diverse regularities underlying semantic
development, while providing analytic insight into how the statistical
structure of an environment can interact with nonlinear deep learning dynamics
to give rise to these regularities
The Neural Race Reduction: Dynamics of Abstraction in Gated Networks
Our theoretical understanding of deep learning has not kept pace with its empirical success. While network architecture is known to be critical, we do not yet understand its effect on learned representations and network behavior, or how this architecture should reflect task this http URL this work, we begin to address this gap by introducing the Gated Deep Linear Network framework that schematizes how pathways of information flow impact learning dynamics within an architecture. Crucially, because of the gating, these networks can compute nonlinear functions of their input. We derive an exact reduction and, for certain cases, exact solutions to the dynamics of learning. Our analysis demonstrates that the learning dynamics in structured networks can be conceptualized as a neural race with an implicit bias towards shared representations, which then govern the model's ability to systematically generalize, multi-task, and transfer. We validate our key insights on naturalistic datasets and with relaxed assumptions. Taken together, our work gives rise to general hypotheses relating neural architecture to learning and provides a mathematical approach towards understanding the design of more complex architectures and the role of modularity and compositionality in solving real-world problems. The code and results are available at this https URL
A machine learning framework for data driven acceleration of computations of differential equations
We propose a machine learning framework to accelerate numerical computations
of time-dependent ODEs and PDEs. Our method is based on recasting
(generalizations of) existing numerical methods as artificial neural networks,
with a set of trainable parameters. These parameters are determined in an
offline training process by (approximately) minimizing suitable (possibly
non-convex) loss functions by (stochastic) gradient descent methods. The
proposed algorithm is designed to be always consistent with the underlying
differential equation. Numerical experiments involving both linear and
non-linear ODE and PDE model problems demonstrate a significant gain in
computational efficiency over standard numerical methods
Robust learning with implicit residual networks
In this effort, we propose a new deep architecture utilizing residual blocks
inspired by implicit discretization schemes. As opposed to the standard
feed-forward networks, the outputs of the proposed implicit residual blocks are
defined as the fixed points of the appropriately chosen nonlinear
transformations. We show that this choice leads to the improved stability of
both forward and backward propagations, has a favorable impact on the
generalization power and allows to control the robustness of the network with
only a few hyperparameters. In addition, the proposed reformulation of ResNet
does not introduce new parameters and can potentially lead to a reduction in
the number of required layers due to improved forward stability. Finally, we
derive the memory-efficient training algorithm, propose a stochastic
regularization technique and provide numerical results in support of our
findings
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