Compression-aware Training of Deep Networks

In recent years, great progress has been made in a variety of application domains thanks to the development of increasingly deeper neural networks. Unfortunately, the huge number of units of these networks makes them expensive both computationally and memory-wise. To overcome this, exploiting the fact that deep networks are over-parametrized, several compression strategies have been proposed. These methods, however, typically start from a network that has been trained in a standard manner, without considering such a future compression. In this paper, we propose to explicitly account for compression in the training process. To this end, we introduce a regularizer that encourages the parameter matrix of each layer to have low rank during training. We show that accounting for compression during training allows us to learn much more compact, yet at least as effective, models than state-of-the-art compression techniques.Comment: Accepted at NIPS 201

Neurons vs Weights Pruning in Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial neural networks (ANN) are well known for their good classification abilities. Recent advances in deep learning imposed second ANN renaissance. But neural networks possesses some problems like choosing hyper parameters such as neuron layers count and sizes which can greatly influence classification rate. Thus pruning techniques were developed that can reduce network sizes, increase its generalization abilities and overcome overfitting. Pruning approaches, in contrast to growing neural networks approach, assume that sufficiently large ANN is already trained and can be simplified with acceptable classification accuracy loss.Current paper compares nodes vs weights pruning algorithms and gives experimental results for pruned networks accuracy rates versus their non-pruned counterparts. We conclude that nodes pruning is more preferable solution, with some sidenotes

Machine learning, medical diagnosis, and biomedical engineering research - commentary

A large number of papers are appearing in the biomedical engineering literature that describe the use of machine learning techniques to develop classifiers for detection or diagnosis of disease. However, the usefulness of this approach in developing clinically validated diagnostic techniques so far has been limited and the methods are prone to overfitting and other problems which may not be immediately apparent to the investigators. This commentary is intended to help sensitize investigators as well as readers and reviewers of papers to some potential pitfalls in the development of classifiers, and suggests steps that researchers can take to help avoid these problems. Building classifiers should be viewed not simply as an add-on statistical analysis, but as part and parcel of the experimental process. Validation of classifiers for diagnostic applications should be considered as part of a much larger process of establishing the clinical validity of the diagnostic technique

Hints

The systematic use of hints in the learning-from-examples paradigm is the subject of this review. Hints are the properties of the target function that are known to us independently of the training examples. The use of hints is tantamount to combining rules and data in learning, and is compatible with different learning models, optimization techniques, and regularization techniques. The hints are represented to the learning process by virtual examples, and the training examples of the target function are treated on equal footing with the rest of the hints. A balance is achieved between the information provided by the different hints through the choice of objective functions and learning schedules. The Adaptive Minimization algorithm achieves this balance by relating the performance on each hint to the overall performance. The application of hints in forecasting the very noisy foreign-exchange markets is illustrated. On the theoretical side, the information value of hints is contrasted to the complexity value and related to the VC dimension