Daily Papers

We propose a class of greedy algorithms for weighted sparse recovery by considering new loss function-based generalizations of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP). Given a (regularized) loss function, the proposed algorithms alternate the iterative construction of the signal support via greedy index selection and a signal update based on solving a local data-fitting problem restricted to the current support. We show that greedy selection rules associated with popular weighted sparsity-promoting loss functions admit explicitly computable and simple formulas. Specifically, we consider ell^0 - and ell^1 -based versions of the weighted LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator), the Square-Root LASSO (SR-LASSO) and the Least Absolute Deviations LASSO (LAD-LASSO). Through numerical experiments on Gaussian compressive sensing and high-dimensional function approximation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and empirically show that they inherit desirable characteristics from the corresponding loss functions, such as SR-LASSO's noise-blind optimal parameter tuning and LAD-LASSO's fault tolerance. In doing so, our study sheds new light on the connection between greedy sparse recovery and convex relaxation.

Assigning importance weights to adversarial data has achieved great success in training adversarially robust networks under limited model capacity. However, existing instance-reweighted adversarial training (AT) methods heavily depend on heuristics and/or geometric interpretations to determine those importance weights, making these algorithms lack rigorous theoretical justification/guarantee. Moreover, recent research has shown that adversarial training suffers from a severe non-uniform robust performance across the training distribution, e.g., data points belonging to some classes can be much more vulnerable to adversarial attacks than others. To address both issues, in this paper, we propose a novel doubly-robust instance reweighted AT framework, which allows to obtain the importance weights via exploring distributionally robust optimization (DRO) techniques, and at the same time boosts the robustness on the most vulnerable examples. In particular, our importance weights are obtained by optimizing the KL-divergence regularized loss function, which allows us to devise new algorithms with a theoretical convergence guarantee. Experiments on standard classification datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms related state-of-the-art baseline methods in terms of average robust performance, and at the same time improves the robustness against attacks on the weakest data points. Codes will be available soon.

Federated learning (FL) is a decentralized and privacy-preserving machine learning technique in which a group of clients collaborate with a server to learn a global model without sharing clients' data. One challenge associated with FL is statistical diversity among clients, which restricts the global model from delivering good performance on each client's task. To address this, we propose an algorithm for personalized FL (pFedMe) using Moreau envelopes as clients' regularized loss functions, which help decouple personalized model optimization from the global model learning in a bi-level problem stylized for personalized FL. Theoretically, we show that pFedMe's convergence rate is state-of-the-art: achieving quadratic speedup for strongly convex and sublinear speedup of order 2/3 for smooth nonconvex objectives. Experimentally, we verify that pFedMe excels at empirical performance compared with the vanilla FedAvg and Per-FedAvg, a meta-learning based personalized FL algorithm.

Cross-entropy is a widely used loss function in applications. It coincides with the logistic loss applied to the outputs of a neural network, when the softmax is used. But, what guarantees can we rely on when using cross-entropy as a surrogate loss? We present a theoretical analysis of a broad family of loss functions, comp-sum losses, that includes cross-entropy (or logistic loss), generalized cross-entropy, the mean absolute error and other cross-entropy-like loss functions. We give the first H-consistency bounds for these loss functions. These are non-asymptotic guarantees that upper bound the zero-one loss estimation error in terms of the estimation error of a surrogate loss, for the specific hypothesis set H used. We further show that our bounds are tight. These bounds depend on quantities called minimizability gaps. To make them more explicit, we give a specific analysis of these gaps for comp-sum losses. We also introduce a new family of loss functions, smooth adversarial comp-sum losses, that are derived from their comp-sum counterparts by adding in a related smooth term. We show that these loss functions are beneficial in the adversarial setting by proving that they admit H-consistency bounds. This leads to new adversarial robustness algorithms that consist of minimizing a regularized smooth adversarial comp-sum loss. While our main purpose is a theoretical analysis, we also present an extensive empirical analysis comparing comp-sum losses. We further report the results of a series of experiments demonstrating that our adversarial robustness algorithms outperform the current state-of-the-art, while also achieving a superior non-adversarial accuracy.

Due to the rise of privacy concerns, in many practical applications the training data is aggregated before being shared with the learner, in order to protect privacy of users' sensitive responses. In an aggregate learning framework, the dataset is grouped into bags of samples, where each bag is available only with an aggregate response, providing a summary of individuals' responses in that bag. In this paper, we study two natural loss functions for learning from aggregate responses: bag-level loss and the instance-level loss. In the former, the model is learnt by minimizing a loss between aggregate responses and aggregate model predictions, while in the latter the model aims to fit individual predictions to the aggregate responses. In this work, we show that the instance-level loss can be perceived as a regularized form of the bag-level loss. This observation lets us compare the two approaches with respect to bias and variance of the resulting estimators, and introduce a novel interpolating estimator which combines the two approaches. For linear regression tasks, we provide a precise characterization of the risk of the interpolating estimator in an asymptotic regime where the size of the training set grows in proportion to the features dimension. Our analysis allows us to theoretically understand the effect of different factors, such as bag size on the model prediction risk. In addition, we propose a mechanism for differentially private learning from aggregate responses and derive the optimal bag size in terms of prediction risk-privacy trade-off. We also carry out thorough experiments to corroborate our theory and show the efficacy of the interpolating estimator.

Recent text detection frameworks require several handcrafted components such as anchor generation, non-maximum suppression (NMS), or multiple processing stages (e.g. label generation) to detect arbitrarily shaped text images. In contrast, we propose an end-to-end trainable architecture based on Detection using Transformers (DETR), that outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in arbitrary-shaped text detection. At its core, our proposed method leverages a bounding box loss function that accurately measures the arbitrary detected text regions' changes in scale and aspect ratio. This is possible due to a hybrid shape representation made from Bezier curves, that are further split into piece-wise polygons. The proposed loss function is then a combination of a generalized-split-intersection-over-union loss defined over the piece-wise polygons and regularized by a Smooth-ln regression over the Bezier curve's control points. We evaluate our proposed model using Total-Text and CTW-1500 datasets for curved text, and MSRA-TD500 and ICDAR15 datasets for multi-oriented text, and show that the proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods in arbitrary-shape text detection tasks.

We show that deep neural networks (DNNs) can efficiently learn any composition of functions with bounded F_{1}-norm, which allows DNNs to break the curse of dimensionality in ways that shallow networks cannot. More specifically, we derive a generalization bound that combines a covering number argument for compositionality, and the F_{1}-norm (or the related Barron norm) for large width adaptivity. We show that the global minimizer of the regularized loss of DNNs can fit for example the composition of two functions f^{*}=hcirc g from a small number of observations, assuming g is smooth/regular and reduces the dimensionality (e.g. g could be the modulo map of the symmetries of f^{*}), so that h can be learned in spite of its low regularity. The measures of regularity we consider is the Sobolev norm with different levels of differentiability, which is well adapted to the F_{1} norm. We compute scaling laws empirically and observe phase transitions depending on whether g or h is harder to learn, as predicted by our theory.

We present NeRFVS, a novel neural radiance fields (NeRF) based method to enable free navigation in a room. NeRF achieves impressive performance in rendering images for novel views similar to the input views while suffering for novel views that are significantly different from the training views. To address this issue, we utilize the holistic priors, including pseudo depth maps and view coverage information, from neural reconstruction to guide the learning of implicit neural representations of 3D indoor scenes. Concretely, an off-the-shelf neural reconstruction method is leveraged to generate a geometry scaffold. Then, two loss functions based on the holistic priors are proposed to improve the learning of NeRF: 1) A robust depth loss that can tolerate the error of the pseudo depth map to guide the geometry learning of NeRF; 2) A variance loss to regularize the variance of implicit neural representations to reduce the geometry and color ambiguity in the learning procedure. These two loss functions are modulated during NeRF optimization according to the view coverage information to reduce the negative influence brought by the view coverage imbalance. Extensive results demonstrate that our NeRFVS outperforms state-of-the-art view synthesis methods quantitatively and qualitatively on indoor scenes, achieving high-fidelity free navigation results.

This paper explores the effects of various forms of regularization in the context of language model alignment via self-play. While both reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO) require to collect costly human-annotated pairwise preferences, the self-play fine-tuning (SPIN) approach replaces the rejected answers by data generated from the previous iterate. However, the SPIN method presents a performance instability issue in the learning phase, which can be mitigated by playing against a mixture of the two previous iterates. In the same vein, we propose in this work to address this issue from two perspectives: first, by incorporating an additional Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization to stay at the proximity of the reference policy; second, by using the idea of fictitious play which smoothens the opponent policy across all previous iterations. In particular, we show that the KL-based regularizer boils down to replacing the previous policy by its geometric mixture with the base policy inside of the SPIN loss function. We finally discuss empirical results on MT-Bench as well as on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard.

Regularization is a set of techniques that are used to improve the generalization ability of deep neural networks. In this paper, we introduce weight compander (WC), a novel effective method to improve generalization by reparameterizing each weight in deep neural networks using a nonlinear function. It is a general, intuitive, cheap and easy to implement method, which can be combined with various other regularization techniques. Large weights in deep neural networks are a sign of a more complex network that is overfitted to the training data. Moreover, regularized networks tend to have a greater range of weights around zero with fewer weights centered at zero. We introduce a weight reparameterization function which is applied to each weight and implicitly reduces overfitting by restricting the magnitude of the weights while forcing them away from zero at the same time. This leads to a more democratic decision-making in the network. Firstly, individual weights cannot have too much influence in the prediction process due to the restriction of their magnitude. Secondly, more weights are used in the prediction process, since they are forced away from zero during the training. This promotes the extraction of more features from the input data and increases the level of weight redundancy, which makes the network less sensitive to statistical differences between training and test data. We extend our method to learn the hyperparameters of the introduced weight reparameterization function. This avoids hyperparameter search and gives the network the opportunity to align the weight reparameterization with the training progress. We show experimentally that using weight compander in addition to standard regularization methods improves the performance of neural networks.

Deep neural networks exploiting millions of parameters are nowadays the norm in deep learning applications. This is a potential issue because of the great amount of computational resources needed for training, and of the possible loss of generalization performance of overparametrized networks. We propose in this paper a method for learning sparse neural topologies via a regularization technique which identifies non relevant weights and selectively shrinks their norm, while performing a classic update for relevant ones. This technique, which is an improvement of classical weight decay, is based on the definition of a regularization term which can be added to any loss functional regardless of its form, resulting in a unified general framework exploitable in many different contexts. The actual elimination of parameters identified as irrelevant is handled by an iterative pruning algorithm. We tested the proposed technique on different image classification and Natural language generation tasks, obtaining results on par or better then competitors in terms of sparsity and metrics, while achieving strong models compression.

Effective regularization techniques are highly desired in deep learning for alleviating overfitting and improving generalization. This work proposes a new regularization scheme, based on the understanding that the flat local minima of the empirical risk cause the model to generalize better. This scheme is referred to as adversarial model perturbation (AMP), where instead of directly minimizing the empirical risk, an alternative "AMP loss" is minimized via SGD. Specifically, the AMP loss is obtained from the empirical risk by applying the "worst" norm-bounded perturbation on each point in the parameter space. Comparing with most existing regularization schemes, AMP has strong theoretical justifications, in that minimizing the AMP loss can be shown theoretically to favour flat local minima of the empirical risk. Extensive experiments on various modern deep architectures establish AMP as a new state of the art among regularization schemes. Our code is available at https://github.com/hiyouga/AMP-Regularizer.

Adversarial training, which is to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks, has received much attention because it is easy to generate human-imperceptible perturbations of data to deceive a given deep neural network. In this paper, we propose a new adversarial training algorithm that is theoretically well motivated and empirically superior to other existing algorithms. A novel feature of the proposed algorithm is to apply more regularization to data vulnerable to adversarial attacks than other existing regularization algorithms do. Theoretically, we show that our algorithm can be understood as an algorithm of minimizing the regularized empirical risk motivated from a newly derived upper bound of the robust risk. Numerical experiments illustrate that our proposed algorithm improves the generalization (accuracy on examples) and robustness (accuracy on adversarial attacks) simultaneously to achieve the state-of-the-art performance.

Loss of plasticity is a phenomenon where neural networks become more difficult to train during the course of learning. Continual learning algorithms seek to mitigate this effect by sustaining good predictive performance while maintaining network trainability. We develop new techniques for improving continual learning by first reconsidering how initialization can ensure trainability during early phases of learning. From this perspective, we derive new regularization strategies for continual learning that ensure beneficial initialization properties are better maintained throughout training. In particular, we investigate two new regularization techniques for continual learning: (i) Wasserstein regularization toward the initial weight distribution, which is less restrictive than regularizing toward initial weights; and (ii) regularizing weight matrix singular values, which directly ensures gradient diversity is maintained throughout training. We present an experimental analysis that shows these alternative regularizers can improve continual learning performance across a range of supervised learning tasks and model architectures. The alternative regularizers prove to be less sensitive to hyperparameters while demonstrating better training in individual tasks, sustaining trainability as new tasks arrive, and achieving better generalization performance.

Convolutional neural network training can suffer from diverse issues like exploding or vanishing gradients, scaling-based weight space symmetry and covariant-shift. In order to address these issues, researchers develop weight regularization methods and activation normalization methods. In this work we propose a weight soft-regularization method based on the Oblique manifold. The proposed method uses a loss function which pushes each weight vector to have a norm close to one, i.e. the weight matrix is smoothly steered toward the so-called Oblique manifold. We evaluate our method on the very popular CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet 2012 datasets using two state-of-the-art architectures, namely the ResNet and wide-ResNet. Our method introduces negligible computational overhead and the results show that it is competitive to the state-of-the-art and in some cases superior to it. Additionally, the results are less sensitive to hyperparameter settings such as batch size and regularization factor.

We address the problem of network calibration adjusting miscalibrated confidences of deep neural networks. Many approaches to network calibration adopt a regularization-based method that exploits a regularization term to smooth the miscalibrated confidences. Although these approaches have shown the effectiveness on calibrating the networks, there is still a lack of understanding on the underlying principles of regularization in terms of network calibration. We present in this paper an in-depth analysis of existing regularization-based methods, providing a better understanding on how they affect to network calibration. Specifically, we have observed that 1) the regularization-based methods can be interpreted as variants of label smoothing, and 2) they do not always behave desirably. Based on the analysis, we introduce a novel loss function, dubbed ACLS, that unifies the merits of existing regularization methods, while avoiding the limitations. We show extensive experimental results for image classification and semantic segmentation on standard benchmarks, including CIFAR10, Tiny-ImageNet, ImageNet, and PASCAL VOC, demonstrating the effectiveness of our loss function.

Catastrophic overfitting (CO) in single-step adversarial training (AT) results in abrupt drops in the adversarial test accuracy (even down to 0%). For models trained with multi-step AT, it has been observed that the loss function behaves locally linearly with respect to the input, this is however lost in single-step AT. To address CO in single-step AT, several methods have been proposed to enforce local linearity of the loss via regularization. However, these regularization terms considerably slow down training due to Double Backpropagation. Instead, in this work, we introduce a regularization term, called ELLE, to mitigate CO effectively and efficiently in classical AT evaluations, as well as some more difficult regimes, e.g., large adversarial perturbations and long training schedules. Our regularization term can be theoretically linked to curvature of the loss function and is computationally cheaper than previous methods by avoiding Double Backpropagation. Our thorough experimental validation demonstrates that our work does not suffer from CO, even in challenging settings where previous works suffer from it. We also notice that adapting our regularization parameter during training (ELLE-A) greatly improves the performance, specially in large epsilon setups. Our implementation is available in https://github.com/LIONS-EPFL/ELLE .

This paper offers a new perspective to ease the challenge of domain generalization, which involves maintaining robust results even in unseen environments. Our design focuses on the decision-making process in the final classifier layer. Specifically, we propose treating the element-wise contributions to the final results as the rationale for making a decision and representing the rationale for each sample as a matrix. For a well-generalized model, we suggest the rationale matrices for samples belonging to the same category should be similar, indicating the model relies on domain-invariant clues to make decisions, thereby ensuring robust results. To implement this idea, we introduce a rationale invariance loss as a simple regularization technique, requiring only a few lines of code. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive results across various datasets, despite its simplicity. Code is available at https://github.com/liangchen527/RIDG.

Convolutional neural networks are capable of learning powerful representational spaces, which are necessary for tackling complex learning tasks. However, due to the model capacity required to capture such representations, they are often susceptible to overfitting and therefore require proper regularization in order to generalize well. In this paper, we show that the simple regularization technique of randomly masking out square regions of input during training, which we call cutout, can be used to improve the robustness and overall performance of convolutional neural networks. Not only is this method extremely easy to implement, but we also demonstrate that it can be used in conjunction with existing forms of data augmentation and other regularizers to further improve model performance. We evaluate this method by applying it to current state-of-the-art architectures on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN datasets, yielding new state-of-the-art results of 2.56%, 15.20%, and 1.30% test error respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/uoguelph-mlrg/Cutout

We propose a new regularization method based on virtual adversarial loss: a new measure of local smoothness of the conditional label distribution given input. Virtual adversarial loss is defined as the robustness of the conditional label distribution around each input data point against local perturbation. Unlike adversarial training, our method defines the adversarial direction without label information and is hence applicable to semi-supervised learning. Because the directions in which we smooth the model are only "virtually" adversarial, we call our method virtual adversarial training (VAT). The computational cost of VAT is relatively low. For neural networks, the approximated gradient of virtual adversarial loss can be computed with no more than two pairs of forward- and back-propagations. In our experiments, we applied VAT to supervised and semi-supervised learning tasks on multiple benchmark datasets. With a simple enhancement of the algorithm based on the entropy minimization principle, our VAT achieves state-of-the-art performance for semi-supervised learning tasks on SVHN and CIFAR-10.

Sparse neural networks are a key factor in developing resource-efficient machine learning applications. We propose the novel and powerful sparse learning method Adaptive Regularized Training (ART) to compress dense into sparse networks. Instead of the commonly used binary mask during training to reduce the number of model weights, we inherently shrink weights close to zero in an iterative manner with increasing weight regularization. Our method compresses the pre-trained model knowledge into the weights of highest magnitude. Therefore, we introduce a novel regularization loss named HyperSparse that exploits the highest weights while conserving the ability of weight exploration. Extensive experiments on CIFAR and TinyImageNet show that our method leads to notable performance gains compared to other sparsification methods, especially in extremely high sparsity regimes up to 99.8 percent model sparsity. Additional investigations provide new insights into the patterns that are encoded in weights with high magnitudes.

Although deep neural networks achieve tremendous success on various classification tasks, the generalization ability drops sheer when training datasets exhibit long-tailed distributions. One of the reasons is that the learned representations (i.e. features) from the imbalanced datasets are less effective than those from balanced datasets. Specifically, the learned representation under class-balanced distribution will present the Neural Collapse (NC) phenomena. NC indicates the features from the same category are close to each other and from different categories are maximally distant, showing an optimal linear separable state of classification. However, the pattern differs on imbalanced datasets and is partially responsible for the reduced performance of the model. In this work, we propose two explicit feature regularization terms to learn high-quality representation for class-imbalanced data. With the proposed regularization, NC phenomena will appear under the class-imbalanced distribution, and the generalization ability can be significantly improved. Our method is easily implemented, highly effective, and can be plugged into most existing methods. The extensive experimental results on widely-used benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method

Over-parameterized deep networks trained using gradient-based optimizers are a popular choice for solving classification and ranking problems. Without appropriately tuned ell_2 regularization or weight decay, such networks have the tendency to make output scores (logits) and network weights large, causing training loss to become too small and the network to lose its adaptivity (ability to move around) in the parameter space. Although regularization is typically understood from an overfitting perspective, we highlight its role in making the network more adaptive and enabling it to escape more easily from weights that generalize poorly. To provide such a capability, we propose a method called Logit Attenuating Weight Normalization (LAWN), that can be stacked onto any gradient-based optimizer. LAWN controls the logits by constraining the weight norms of layers in the final homogeneous sub-network. Empirically, we show that the resulting LAWN variant of the optimizer makes a deep network more adaptive to finding minimas with superior generalization performance on large-scale image classification and recommender systems. While LAWN is particularly impressive in improving Adam, it greatly improves all optimizers when used with large batch sizes

Image clustering is one of the most important computer vision applications, which has been extensively studied in literature. However, current clustering methods mostly suffer from lack of efficiency and scalability when dealing with large-scale and high-dimensional data. In this paper, we propose a new clustering model, called DEeP Embedded RegularIzed ClusTering (DEPICT), which efficiently maps data into a discriminative embedding subspace and precisely predicts cluster assignments. DEPICT generally consists of a multinomial logistic regression function stacked on top of a multi-layer convolutional autoencoder. We define a clustering objective function using relative entropy (KL divergence) minimization, regularized by a prior for the frequency of cluster assignments. An alternating strategy is then derived to optimize the objective by updating parameters and estimating cluster assignments. Furthermore, we employ the reconstruction loss functions in our autoencoder, as a data-dependent regularization term, to prevent the deep embedding function from overfitting. In order to benefit from end-to-end optimization and eliminate the necessity for layer-wise pretraining, we introduce a joint learning framework to minimize the unified clustering and reconstruction loss functions together and train all network layers simultaneously. Experimental results indicate the superiority and faster running time of DEPICT in real-world clustering tasks, where no labeled data is available for hyper-parameter tuning.

A novel gradient boosting framework is proposed where shallow neural networks are employed as ``weak learners''. General loss functions are considered under this unified framework with specific examples presented for classification, regression, and learning to rank. A fully corrective step is incorporated to remedy the pitfall of greedy function approximation of classic gradient boosting decision tree. The proposed model rendered outperforming results against state-of-the-art boosting methods in all three tasks on multiple datasets. An ablation study is performed to shed light on the effect of each model components and model hyperparameters.

Masked image modeling (MIM) has attracted much research attention due to its promising potential for learning scalable visual representations. In typical approaches, models usually focus on predicting specific contents of masked patches, and their performances are highly related to pre-defined mask strategies. Intuitively, this procedure can be considered as training a student (the model) on solving given problems (predict masked patches). However, we argue that the model should not only focus on solving given problems, but also stand in the shoes of a teacher to produce a more challenging problem by itself. To this end, we propose Hard Patches Mining (HPM), a brand-new framework for MIM pre-training. We observe that the reconstruction loss can naturally be the metric of the difficulty of the pre-training task. Therefore, we introduce an auxiliary loss predictor, predicting patch-wise losses first and deciding where to mask next. It adopts a relative relationship learning strategy to prevent overfitting to exact reconstruction loss values. Experiments under various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of HPM in constructing masked images. Furthermore, we empirically find that solely introducing the loss prediction objective leads to powerful representations, verifying the efficacy of the ability to be aware of where is hard to reconstruct.

L_2 regularization and weight decay regularization are equivalent for standard stochastic gradient descent (when rescaled by the learning rate), but as we demonstrate this is not the case for adaptive gradient algorithms, such as Adam. While common implementations of these algorithms employ L_2 regularization (often calling it "weight decay" in what may be misleading due to the inequivalence we expose), we propose a simple modification to recover the original formulation of weight decay regularization by decoupling the weight decay from the optimization steps taken w.r.t. the loss function. We provide empirical evidence that our proposed modification (i) decouples the optimal choice of weight decay factor from the setting of the learning rate for both standard SGD and Adam and (ii) substantially improves Adam's generalization performance, allowing it to compete with SGD with momentum on image classification datasets (on which it was previously typically outperformed by the latter). Our proposed decoupled weight decay has already been adopted by many researchers, and the community has implemented it in TensorFlow and PyTorch; the complete source code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/loshchil/AdamW-and-SGDW

We propose a game-based formulation for learning dimensionality-reducing representations of feature vectors, when only a prior knowledge on future prediction tasks is available. In this game, the first player chooses a representation, and then the second player adversarially chooses a prediction task from a given class, representing the prior knowledge. The first player aims is to minimize, and the second player to maximize, the regret: The minimal prediction loss using the representation, compared to the same loss using the original features. For the canonical setting in which the representation, the response to predict and the predictors are all linear functions, and under the mean squared error loss function, we derive the theoretically optimal representation in pure strategies, which shows the effectiveness of the prior knowledge, and the optimal regret in mixed strategies, which shows the usefulness of randomizing the representation. For general representations and loss functions, we propose an efficient algorithm to optimize a randomized representation. The algorithm only requires the gradients of the loss function, and is based on incrementally adding a representation rule to a mixture of such rules.

We propose a novel framework to perform classification via deep learning in the presence of noisy annotations. When trained on noisy labels, deep neural networks have been observed to first fit the training data with clean labels during an "early learning" phase, before eventually memorizing the examples with false labels. We prove that early learning and memorization are fundamental phenomena in high-dimensional classification tasks, even in simple linear models, and give a theoretical explanation in this setting. Motivated by these findings, we develop a new technique for noisy classification tasks, which exploits the progress of the early learning phase. In contrast with existing approaches, which use the model output during early learning to detect the examples with clean labels, and either ignore or attempt to correct the false labels, we take a different route and instead capitalize on early learning via regularization. There are two key elements to our approach. First, we leverage semi-supervised learning techniques to produce target probabilities based on the model outputs. Second, we design a regularization term that steers the model towards these targets, implicitly preventing memorization of the false labels. The resulting framework is shown to provide robustness to noisy annotations on several standard benchmarks and real-world datasets, where it achieves results comparable to the state of the art.

Hyperparameter optimization can be formulated as a bilevel optimization problem, where the optimal parameters on the training set depend on the hyperparameters. We aim to adapt regularization hyperparameters for neural networks by fitting compact approximations to the best-response function, which maps hyperparameters to optimal weights and biases. We show how to construct scalable best-response approximations for neural networks by modeling the best-response as a single network whose hidden units are gated conditionally on the regularizer. We justify this approximation by showing the exact best-response for a shallow linear network with L2-regularized Jacobian can be represented by a similar gating mechanism. We fit this model using a gradient-based hyperparameter optimization algorithm which alternates between approximating the best-response around the current hyperparameters and optimizing the hyperparameters using the approximate best-response function. Unlike other gradient-based approaches, we do not require differentiating the training loss with respect to the hyperparameters, allowing us to tune discrete hyperparameters, data augmentation hyperparameters, and dropout probabilities. Because the hyperparameters are adapted online, our approach discovers hyperparameter schedules that can outperform fixed hyperparameter values. Empirically, our approach outperforms competing hyperparameter optimization methods on large-scale deep learning problems. We call our networks, which update their own hyperparameters online during training, Self-Tuning Networks (STNs).

We analyze continual learning on a sequence of separable linear classification tasks with binary labels. We show theoretically that learning with weak regularization reduces to solving a sequential max-margin problem, corresponding to a special case of the Projection Onto Convex Sets (POCS) framework. We then develop upper bounds on the forgetting and other quantities of interest under various settings with recurring tasks, including cyclic and random orderings of tasks. We discuss several practical implications to popular training practices like regularization scheduling and weighting. We point out several theoretical differences between our continual classification setting and a recently studied continual regression setting.

Gradient regularization (GR) is a method that penalizes the gradient norm of the training loss during training. While some studies have reported that GR can improve generalization performance, little attention has been paid to it from the algorithmic perspective, that is, the algorithms of GR that efficiently improve the performance. In this study, we first reveal that a specific finite-difference computation, composed of both gradient ascent and descent steps, reduces the computational cost of GR. Next, we show that the finite-difference computation also works better in the sense of generalization performance. We theoretically analyze a solvable model, a diagonal linear network, and clarify that GR has a desirable implicit bias to so-called rich regime and finite-difference computation strengthens this bias. Furthermore, finite-difference GR is closely related to some other algorithms based on iterative ascent and descent steps for exploring flat minima. In particular, we reveal that the flooding method can perform finite-difference GR in an implicit way. Thus, this work broadens our understanding of GR for both practice and theory.

Despite being the standard loss function to train multi-class neural networks, the log-softmax has two potential limitations. First, it involves computations that scale linearly with the number of output classes, which can restrict the size of problems we are able to tackle with current hardware. Second, it remains unclear how close it matches the task loss such as the top-k error rate or other non-differentiable evaluation metrics which we aim to optimize ultimately. In this paper, we introduce an alternative classification loss function, the Z-loss, which is designed to address these two issues. Unlike the log-softmax, it has the desirable property of belonging to the spherical loss family (Vincent et al., 2015), a class of loss functions for which training can be performed very efficiently with a complexity independent of the number of output classes. We show experimentally that it significantly outperforms the other spherical loss functions previously investigated. Furthermore, we show on a word language modeling task that it also outperforms the log-softmax with respect to certain ranking scores, such as top-k scores, suggesting that the Z-loss has the flexibility to better match the task loss. These qualities thus makes the Z-loss an appealing candidate to train very efficiently large output networks such as word-language models or other extreme classification problems. On the One Billion Word (Chelba et al., 2014) dataset, we are able to train a model with the Z-loss 40 times faster than the log-softmax and more than 4 times faster than the hierarchical softmax.

Supervised learning can be viewed as distilling relevant information from input data into feature representations. This process becomes difficult when supervision is noisy as the distilled information might not be relevant. In fact, recent research shows that networks can easily overfit all labels including those that are corrupted, and hence can hardly generalize to clean datasets. In this paper, we focus on the problem of learning with noisy labels and introduce compression inductive bias to network architectures to alleviate this over-fitting problem. More precisely, we revisit one classical regularization named Dropout and its variant Nested Dropout. Dropout can serve as a compression constraint for its feature dropping mechanism, while Nested Dropout further learns ordered feature representations w.r.t. feature importance. Moreover, the trained models with compression regularization are further combined with Co-teaching for performance boost. Theoretically, we conduct bias-variance decomposition of the objective function under compression regularization. We analyze it for both single model and Co-teaching. This decomposition provides three insights: (i) it shows that over-fitting is indeed an issue for learning with noisy labels; (ii) through an information bottleneck formulation, it explains why the proposed feature compression helps in combating label noise; (iii) it gives explanations on the performance boost brought by incorporating compression regularization into Co-teaching. Experiments show that our simple approach can have comparable or even better performance than the state-of-the-art methods on benchmarks with real-world label noise including Clothing1M and ANIMAL-10N. Our implementation is available at https://yingyichen-cyy.github.io/CompressFeatNoisyLabels/.

We introduce a novel class of sample-based explanations we term high-dimensional representers, that can be used to explain the predictions of a regularized high-dimensional model in terms of importance weights for each of the training samples. Our workhorse is a novel representer theorem for general regularized high-dimensional models, which decomposes the model prediction in terms of contributions from each of the training samples: with positive (negative) values corresponding to positive (negative) impact training samples to the model's prediction. We derive consequences for the canonical instances of ell_1 regularized sparse models, and nuclear norm regularized low-rank models. As a case study, we further investigate the application of low-rank models in the context of collaborative filtering, where we instantiate high-dimensional representers for specific popular classes of models. Finally, we study the empirical performance of our proposed methods on three real-world binary classification datasets and two recommender system datasets. We also showcase the utility of high-dimensional representers in explaining model recommendations.

Masked visual modeling has attracted much attention due to its promising potential in learning generalizable representations. Typical approaches urge models to predict specific contents of masked tokens, which can be intuitively considered as teaching a student (the model) to solve given problems (predicting masked contents). Under such settings, the performance is highly correlated with mask strategies (the difficulty of provided problems). We argue that it is equally important for the model to stand in the shoes of a teacher to produce challenging problems by itself. Intuitively, patches with high values of reconstruction loss can be regarded as hard samples, and masking those hard patches naturally becomes a demanding reconstruction task. To empower the model as a teacher, we propose Hard Patches Mining (HPM), predicting patch-wise losses and subsequently determining where to mask. Technically, we introduce an auxiliary loss predictor, which is trained with a relative objective to prevent overfitting to exact loss values. Also, to gradually guide the training procedure, we propose an easy-to-hard mask strategy. Empirically, HPM brings significant improvements under both image and video benchmarks. Interestingly, solely incorporating the extra loss prediction objective leads to better representations, verifying the efficacy of determining where is hard to reconstruct. The code is available at https://github.com/Haochen-Wang409/HPM.

Neural network training relies on our ability to find "good" minimizers of highly non-convex loss functions. It is well-known that certain network architecture designs (e.g., skip connections) produce loss functions that train easier, and well-chosen training parameters (batch size, learning rate, optimizer) produce minimizers that generalize better. However, the reasons for these differences, and their effects on the underlying loss landscape, are not well understood. In this paper, we explore the structure of neural loss functions, and the effect of loss landscapes on generalization, using a range of visualization methods. First, we introduce a simple "filter normalization" method that helps us visualize loss function curvature and make meaningful side-by-side comparisons between loss functions. Then, using a variety of visualizations, we explore how network architecture affects the loss landscape, and how training parameters affect the shape of minimizers.

Loss functions serve as the foundation of supervised learning and are often chosen prior to model development. To avoid potentially ad hoc choices of losses, statistical decision theory describes a desirable property for losses known as properness, which asserts that Bayes' rule is optimal. Recent works have sought to learn losses and models jointly. Existing methods do this by fitting an inverse canonical link function which monotonically maps R to [0,1] to estimate probabilities for binary problems. In this paper, we extend monotonicity to maps between R^{C-1} and the projected probability simplex Delta^{C-1} by using monotonicity of gradients of convex functions. We present {\sc LegendreTron} as a novel and practical method that jointly learns proper canonical losses and probabilities for multiclass problems. Tested on a benchmark of domains with up to 1,000 classes, our experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms the natural multiclass baseline under a t-test at 99% significance on all datasets with greater than 10 classes.

Generalization bounds which assess the difference between the true risk and the empirical risk, have been studied extensively. However, to obtain bounds, current techniques use strict assumptions such as a uniformly bounded or a Lipschitz loss function. To avoid these assumptions, in this paper, we follow an alternative approach: we relax uniform bounds assumptions by using on-average bounded loss and on-average bounded gradient norm assumptions. Following this relaxation, we propose a new generalization bound that exploits the contractivity of the log-Sobolev inequalities. These inequalities add an additional loss-gradient norm term to the generalization bound, which is intuitively a surrogate of the model complexity. We apply the proposed bound on Bayesian deep nets and empirically analyze the effect of this new loss-gradient norm term on different neural architectures.

Representing a manifold of very high-dimensional data with generative models has been shown to be computationally efficient in practice. However, this requires that the data manifold admits a global parameterization. In order to represent manifolds of arbitrary topology, we propose to learn a mixture model of variational autoencoders. Here, every encoder-decoder pair represents one chart of a manifold. We propose a loss function for maximum likelihood estimation of the model weights and choose an architecture that provides us the analytical expression of the charts and of their inverses. Once the manifold is learned, we use it for solving inverse problems by minimizing a data fidelity term restricted to the learned manifold. To solve the arising minimization problem we propose a Riemannian gradient descent algorithm on the learned manifold. We demonstrate the performance of our method for low-dimensional toy examples as well as for deblurring and electrical impedance tomography on certain image manifolds.

When training large flexible models, practitioners often rely on grid search to select hyperparameters that control over-fitting. This grid search has several disadvantages: the search is computationally expensive, requires carving out a validation set that reduces the available data for training, and requires users to specify candidate values. In this paper, we propose an alternative: directly learning regularization hyperparameters on the full training set via the evidence lower bound ("ELBo") objective from variational methods. For deep neural networks with millions of parameters, we recommend a modified ELBo that upweights the influence of the data likelihood relative to the prior. Our proposed technique overcomes all three disadvantages of grid search. In a case study on transfer learning of image classifiers, we show how our method reduces the 88+ hour grid search of past work to under 3 hours while delivering comparable accuracy. We further demonstrate how our approach enables efficient yet accurate approximations of Gaussian processes with learnable length-scale kernels.

Adversarial robustness is a research area that has recently received a lot of attention in the quest for trustworthy artificial intelligence. However, recent works on adversarial robustness have focused on supervised learning where it is assumed that labeled data is plentiful. In this paper, we investigate semi-supervised adversarial training where labeled data is scarce. We derive two upper bounds for the robust risk and propose a regularization term for unlabeled data motivated by these two upper bounds. Then, we develop a semi-supervised adversarial training algorithm that combines the proposed regularization term with knowledge distillation using a semi-supervised teacher (i.e., a teacher model trained using a semi-supervised learning algorithm). Our experiments show that our proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant margins compared to existing algorithms. In particular, compared to supervised learning algorithms, performance of our proposed algorithm is not much worse even when the amount of labeled data is very small. For example, our algorithm with only 8\% labeled data is comparable to supervised adversarial training algorithms that use all labeled data, both in terms of standard and robust accuracies on CIFAR-10.

In class incremental learning, neural networks typically suffer from catastrophic forgetting. We show that an MLP featuring a sparse activation function and an adaptive learning rate optimizer can compete with established regularization techniques in the Split-MNIST task. We highlight the effectiveness of the Adaptive SwisH (ASH) activation function in this context and introduce a novel variant, Hard Adaptive SwisH (Hard ASH) to further enhance the learning retention.

Despite apparent human-level performances of deep neural networks (DNN), they behave fundamentally differently from humans. They easily change predictions when small corruptions such as blur and noise are applied on the input (lack of robustness), and they often produce confident predictions on out-of-distribution samples (improper uncertainty measure). While a number of researches have aimed to address those issues, proposed solutions are typically expensive and complicated (e.g. Bayesian inference and adversarial training). Meanwhile, many simple and cheap regularization methods have been developed to enhance the generalization of classifiers. Such regularization methods have largely been overlooked as baselines for addressing the robustness and uncertainty issues, as they are not specifically designed for that. In this paper, we provide extensive empirical evaluations on the robustness and uncertainty estimates of image classifiers (CIFAR-100 and ImageNet) trained with state-of-the-art regularization methods. Furthermore, experimental results show that certain regularization methods can serve as strong baseline methods for robustness and uncertainty estimation of DNNs.

The presence of distribution shifts poses a significant challenge for deploying modern machine learning models in real-world applications. This work focuses on the target shift problem in a regression setting (Zhang et al., 2013; Nguyen et al., 2016). More specifically, the target variable y (also known as the response variable), which is continuous, has different marginal distributions in the training source and testing domain, while the conditional distribution of features x given y remains the same. While most literature focuses on classification tasks with finite target space, the regression problem has an infinite dimensional target space, which makes many of the existing methods inapplicable. In this work, we show that the continuous target shift problem can be addressed by estimating the importance weight function from an ill-posed integral equation. We propose a nonparametric regularized approach named ReTaSA to solve the ill-posed integral equation and provide theoretical justification for the estimated importance weight function. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated with extensive numerical studies on synthetic and real-world datasets.

The generalization capability of deep neural networks has been substantially improved by applying a wide spectrum of regularization methods, e.g., restricting function space, injecting randomness during training, augmenting data, etc. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective regularization method named progressive self-knowledge distillation (PS-KD), which progressively distills a model's own knowledge to soften hard targets (i.e., one-hot vectors) during training. Hence, it can be interpreted within a framework of knowledge distillation as a student becomes a teacher itself. Specifically, targets are adjusted adaptively by combining the ground-truth and past predictions from the model itself. We show that PS-KD provides an effect of hard example mining by rescaling gradients according to difficulty in classifying examples. The proposed method is applicable to any supervised learning tasks with hard targets and can be easily combined with existing regularization methods to further enhance the generalization performance. Furthermore, it is confirmed that PS-KD achieves not only better accuracy, but also provides high quality of confidence estimates in terms of calibration as well as ordinal ranking. Extensive experimental results on three different tasks, image classification, object detection, and machine translation, demonstrate that our method consistently improves the performance of the state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/lgcnsai/PS-KD-Pytorch.

Label Smoothing (LS) is widely adopted to curb overconfidence in neural network predictions and enhance generalization. However, previous research shows that LS can force feature representations into excessively tight clusters, eroding intra-class distinctions. More recent findings suggest that LS also induces overconfidence in misclassifications, yet the precise mechanism remained unclear. In this work, we decompose the loss term introduced by LS, revealing two key components: (i) a regularization term that functions only when the prediction is correct, and (ii) an error-enhancement term that emerges under misclassifications. This latter term compels the model to reinforce incorrect predictions with exaggerated certainty, further collapsing the feature space. To address these issues, we propose Max Suppression (MaxSup), which uniformly applies the intended regularization to both correct and incorrect predictions by penalizing the top-1 logit instead of the ground-truth logit. Through feature analyses, we show that MaxSup restores intra-class variation and sharpens inter-class boundaries. Extensive experiments on image classification and downstream tasks confirm that MaxSup is a more robust alternative to LS. Code is available at: https://github.com/ZhouYuxuanYX/Maximum-Suppression-Regularization.

While neural networks are used for classification tasks across domains, a long-standing open problem in machine learning is determining whether neural networks trained using standard procedures are optimal for classification, i.e., whether such models minimize the probability of misclassification for arbitrary data distributions. In this work, we identify and construct an explicit set of neural network classifiers that achieve optimality. Since effective neural networks in practice are typically both wide and deep, we analyze infinitely wide networks that are also infinitely deep. In particular, using the recent connection between infinitely wide neural networks and Neural Tangent Kernels, we provide explicit activation functions that can be used to construct networks that achieve optimality. Interestingly, these activation functions are simple and easy to implement, yet differ from commonly used activations such as ReLU or sigmoid. More generally, we create a taxonomy of infinitely wide and deep networks and show that these models implement one of three well-known classifiers depending on the activation function used: (1) 1-nearest neighbor (model predictions are given by the label of the nearest training example); (2) majority vote (model predictions are given by the label of the class with greatest representation in the training set); or (3) singular kernel classifiers (a set of classifiers containing those that achieve optimality). Our results highlight the benefit of using deep networks for classification tasks, in contrast to regression tasks, where excessive depth is harmful.

When training or evaluating deep learning models, two essential parts are picking the proper loss function and deciding on performance metrics. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the most common loss functions and metrics used across many different types of deep learning tasks, from general tasks such as regression and classification to more specific tasks in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. We introduce the formula for each loss and metric, discuss their strengths and limitations, and describe how these methods can be applied to various problems within deep learning. This work can serve as a reference for researchers and practitioners in the field, helping them make informed decisions when selecting the most appropriate loss function and performance metrics for their deep learning projects.

Owing to the growing concerns about privacy and regulatory compliance, it is desirable to regulate the output of generative models. To that end, the objective of this work is to prevent the generation of outputs containing undesired features from a pre-trained Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) where the underlying training data set is inaccessible. Our approach is inspired by the observation that the parameter space of GANs exhibits meaningful directions that can be leveraged to suppress specific undesired features. However, such directions usually result in the degradation of the quality of generated samples. Our proposed two-stage method, known as 'Adapt-then-Unlearn,' excels at unlearning such undesirable features while also maintaining the quality of generated samples. In the initial stage, we adapt a pre-trained GAN on a set of negative samples (containing undesired features) provided by the user. Subsequently, we train the original pre-trained GAN using positive samples, along with a repulsion regularizer. This regularizer encourages the learned model parameters to move away from the parameters of the adapted model (first stage) while not degrading the generation quality. We provide theoretical insights into the proposed method. To the best of our knowledge, our approach stands as the first method addressing unlearning within the realm of high-fidelity GANs (such as StyleGAN). We validate the effectiveness of our method through comprehensive experiments, encompassing both class-level unlearning on the MNIST and AFHQ dataset and feature-level unlearning tasks on the CelebA-HQ dataset. Our code and implementation is available at: https://github.com/atriguha/Adapt_Unlearn.

Convolutional neural networks show remarkable results in classification but struggle with learning new things on the fly. We present a novel rehearsal-free approach, where a deep neural network is continually learning new unseen object categories without saving any data of prior sequences. Our approach is called RECALL, as the network recalls categories by calculating logits for old categories before training new ones. These are then used during training to avoid changing the old categories. For each new sequence, a new head is added to accommodate the new categories. To mitigate forgetting, we present a regularization strategy where we replace the classification with a regression. Moreover, for the known categories, we propose a Mahalanobis loss that includes the variances to account for the changing densities between known and unknown categories. Finally, we present a novel dataset for continual learning, especially suited for object recognition on a mobile robot (HOWS-CL-25), including 150,795 synthetic images of 25 household object categories. Our approach RECALL outperforms the current state of the art on CORe50 and iCIFAR-100 and reaches the best performance on HOWS-CL-25.

Cross-entropy loss and focal loss are the most common choices when training deep neural networks for classification problems. Generally speaking, however, a good loss function can take on much more flexible forms, and should be tailored for different tasks and datasets. Motivated by how functions can be approximated via Taylor expansion, we propose a simple framework, named PolyLoss, to view and design loss functions as a linear combination of polynomial functions. Our PolyLoss allows the importance of different polynomial bases to be easily adjusted depending on the targeting tasks and datasets, while naturally subsuming the aforementioned cross-entropy loss and focal loss as special cases. Extensive experimental results show that the optimal choice within the PolyLoss is indeed dependent on the task and dataset. Simply by introducing one extra hyperparameter and adding one line of code, our Poly-1 formulation outperforms the cross-entropy loss and focal loss on 2D image classification, instance segmentation, object detection, and 3D object detection tasks, sometimes by a large margin.

We study the problem of classification with a reject option for a fixed predictor, applicable in natural language processing. We introduce a new problem formulation for this scenario, and an algorithm minimizing a new surrogate loss function. We provide a complete theoretical analysis of the surrogate loss function with a strong H-consistency guarantee. For evaluation, we choose the decontextualization task, and provide a manually-labelled dataset of 2mathord,000 examples. Our algorithm significantly outperforms the baselines considered, with a sim!!25% improvement in coverage when halving the error rate, which is only sim!! 3 % away from the theoretical limit.

Deep neural networks have been shown to suffer from a surprising weakness: their classification outputs can be changed by small, non-random perturbations of their inputs. This adversarial example phenomenon has been explained as originating from deep networks being "too linear" (Goodfellow et al., 2014). We show here that the linear explanation of adversarial examples presents a number of limitations: the formal argument is not convincing, linear classifiers do not always suffer from the phenomenon, and when they do their adversarial examples are different from the ones affecting deep networks. We propose a new perspective on the phenomenon. We argue that adversarial examples exist when the classification boundary lies close to the submanifold of sampled data, and present a mathematical analysis of this new perspective in the linear case. We define the notion of adversarial strength and show that it can be reduced to the deviation angle between the classifier considered and the nearest centroid classifier. Then, we show that the adversarial strength can be made arbitrarily high independently of the classification performance due to a mechanism that we call boundary tilting. This result leads us to defining a new taxonomy of adversarial examples. Finally, we show that the adversarial strength observed in practice is directly dependent on the level of regularisation used and the strongest adversarial examples, symptomatic of overfitting, can be avoided by using a proper level of regularisation.

We introduce an algorithm where the individual bits representing the weights of a neural network are learned. This method allows training weights with integer values on arbitrary bit-depths and naturally uncovers sparse networks, without additional constraints or regularization techniques. We show better results than the standard training technique with fully connected networks and similar performance as compared to standard training for convolutional and residual networks. By training bits in a selective manner we found that the biggest contribution to achieving high accuracy is given by the first three most significant bits, while the rest provide an intrinsic regularization. As a consequence more than 90\% of a network can be used to store arbitrary codes without affecting its accuracy. These codes may be random noise, binary files or even the weights of previously trained networks.

We study the problem of learning a single neuron with respect to the L_2^2-loss in the presence of adversarial label noise. We give an efficient algorithm that, for a broad family of activations including ReLUs, approximates the optimal L_2^2-error within a constant factor. Our algorithm applies under much milder distributional assumptions compared to prior work. The key ingredient enabling our results is a novel connection to local error bounds from optimization theory.

A large-scale deep model pre-trained on massive labeled or unlabeled data transfers well to downstream tasks. Linear evaluation freezes parameters in the pre-trained model and trains a linear classifier separately, which is efficient and attractive for transfer. However, little work has investigated the classifier in linear evaluation except for the default logistic regression. Inspired by the statistical efficiency of naive Bayes, the paper revisits the classical topic on discriminative vs. generative classifiers. Theoretically, the paper considers the surrogate loss instead of the zero-one loss in analyses and generalizes the classical results from binary cases to multiclass ones. We show that, under mild assumptions, multiclass naive Bayes requires O(log n) samples to approach its asymptotic error while the corresponding multiclass logistic regression requires O(n) samples, where n is the feature dimension. To establish it, we present a multiclass H-consistency bound framework and an explicit bound for logistic loss, which are of independent interests. Simulation results on a mixture of Gaussian validate our theoretical findings. Experiments on various pre-trained deep vision models show that naive Bayes consistently converges faster as the number of data increases. Besides, naive Bayes shows promise in few-shot cases and we observe the "two regimes" phenomenon in pre-trained supervised models. Our code is available at https://github.com/ML-GSAI/Revisiting-Dis-vs-Gen-Classifiers.

Batch Normalization is a commonly used trick to improve the training of deep neural networks. These neural networks use L2 regularization, also called weight decay, ostensibly to prevent overfitting. However, we show that L2 regularization has no regularizing effect when combined with normalization. Instead, regularization has an influence on the scale of weights, and thereby on the effective learning rate. We investigate this dependence, both in theory, and experimentally. We show that popular optimization methods such as ADAM only partially eliminate the influence of normalization on the learning rate. This leads to a discussion on other ways to mitigate this issue.

This paper investigates the distinctions between gradient methods applied to non-differentiable functions (NGDMs) and classical gradient descents (GDs) designed for differentiable functions. First, we demonstrate significant differences in the convergence properties of NGDMs compared to GDs, challenging the applicability of the extensive neural network convergence literature based on L-smoothness to non-smooth neural networks. Next, we demonstrate the paradoxical nature of NGDM solutions for L_{1}-regularized problems, showing that increasing the regularization penalty leads to an increase in the L_{1} norm of optimal solutions in NGDMs. Consequently, we show that widely adopted L_{1} penalization-based techniques for network pruning do not yield expected results. Finally, we explore the Edge of Stability phenomenon, indicating its inapplicability even to Lipschitz continuous convex differentiable functions, leaving its relevance to non-convex non-differentiable neural networks inconclusive. Our analysis exposes misguided interpretations of NGDMs in widely referenced papers and texts due to an overreliance on strong smoothness assumptions, emphasizing the necessity for a nuanced understanding of foundational assumptions in the analysis of these systems.

In this paper, we study the problem of learning image classification models in the presence of label noise. We revisit a simple compression regularization named Nested Dropout. We find that Nested Dropout, though originally proposed to perform fast information retrieval and adaptive data compression, can properly regularize a neural network to combat label noise. Moreover, owing to its simplicity, it can be easily combined with Co-teaching to further boost the performance. Our final model remains simple yet effective: it achieves comparable or even better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches on two real-world datasets with label noise which are Clothing1M and ANIMAL-10N. On Clothing1M, our approach obtains 74.9% accuracy which is slightly better than that of DivideMix. On ANIMAL-10N, we achieve 84.1% accuracy while the best public result by PLC is 83.4%. We hope that our simple approach can be served as a strong baseline for learning with label noise. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/yingyichen-cyy/Nested-Co-teaching.

Introduced by Hinton et al. in 2012, dropout has stood the test of time as a regularizer for preventing overfitting in neural networks. In this study, we demonstrate that dropout can also mitigate underfitting when used at the start of training. During the early phase, we find dropout reduces the directional variance of gradients across mini-batches and helps align the mini-batch gradients with the entire dataset's gradient. This helps counteract the stochasticity of SGD and limit the influence of individual batches on model training. Our findings lead us to a solution for improving performance in underfitting models - early dropout: dropout is applied only during the initial phases of training, and turned off afterwards. Models equipped with early dropout achieve lower final training loss compared to their counterparts without dropout. Additionally, we explore a symmetric technique for regularizing overfitting models - late dropout, where dropout is not used in the early iterations and is only activated later in training. Experiments on ImageNet and various vision tasks demonstrate that our methods consistently improve generalization accuracy. Our results encourage more research on understanding regularization in deep learning and our methods can be useful tools for future neural network training, especially in the era of large data. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/dropout.

Label smoothing regularization (LSR) has a great success in training deep neural networks by stochastic algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants. However, the theoretical understanding of its power from the view of optimization is still rare. This study opens the door to a deep understanding of LSR by initiating the analysis. In this paper, we analyze the convergence behaviors of stochastic gradient descent with label smoothing regularization for solving non-convex problems and show that an appropriate LSR can help to speed up the convergence by reducing the variance. More interestingly, we proposed a simple yet effective strategy, namely Two-Stage LAbel smoothing algorithm (TSLA), that uses LSR in the early training epochs and drops it off in the later training epochs. We observe from the improved convergence result of TSLA that it benefits from LSR in the first stage and essentially converges faster in the second stage. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work for understanding the power of LSR via establishing convergence complexity of stochastic methods with LSR in non-convex optimization. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with baselines on training ResNet models over benchmark data sets.

We develop a novel theoretical framework for understating OT schemes respecting a class structure. For this purpose, we propose a convex OT program with a sum-of-norms regularization term, which provably recovers the underlying class structure under geometric assumptions. Furthermore, we derive an accelerated proximal algorithm with a closed-form projection and proximal operator scheme, thereby affording a more scalable algorithm for computing optimal transport plans. We provide a novel argument for the uniqueness of the optimum even in the absence of strong convexity. Our experiments show that the new regularizer not only results in a better preservation of the class structure in the data but also yields additional robustness to the data geometry, compared to previous regularizers.

The ability to learn different tasks sequentially is essential to the development of artificial intelligence. In general, neural networks lack this capability, the major obstacle being catastrophic forgetting. It occurs when the incrementally available information from non-stationary data distributions is continually acquired, disrupting what the model has already learned. Our approach remembers old tasks by projecting the representations of new tasks close to that of old tasks while keeping the decision boundaries unchanged. We employ the center loss as a regularization penalty that enforces new tasks' features to have the same class centers as old tasks and makes the features highly discriminative. This, in turn, leads to the least forgetting of already learned information. This method is easy to implement, requires minimal computational and memory overhead, and allows the neural network to maintain high performance across many sequentially encountered tasks. We also demonstrate that using the center loss in conjunction with the memory replay outperforms other replay-based strategies. Along with standard MNIST variants for continual learning, we apply our method to continual domain adaptation scenarios with the Digits and PACS datasets. We demonstrate that our approach is scalable, effective, and gives competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art continual learning methods.

We consider the problem of accurate quantization for language models, where both the weights and activations are uniformly quantized to 4 bits per parameter, the lowest bitwidth format natively supported by GPU hardware. In this context, the key challenge is activation quantization: it is known that language models contain outlier channels whose values on average are orders of magnitude higher than than other channels, which prevents accurate low-bitwidth quantization with known techniques. We systematically study this phenomena and find that these outlier channels emerge early in training, and that they occur more frequently in layers with residual streams. We then propose a simple strategy which regularizes a layer's inputs via quantization-aware training (QAT) and its outputs via activation kurtosis regularization. We show that regularizing both the inputs and outputs is crucial for preventing a model's "migrating" the difficulty in input quantization to the weights, which makes post-training quantization (PTQ) of weights more difficult. When combined with weight PTQ, we show that our approach can obtain a W4A4 model that performs competitively to the standard-precision W16A16 baseline.

In today's heavily overparameterized models, the value of the training loss provides few guarantees on model generalization ability. Indeed, optimizing only the training loss value, as is commonly done, can easily lead to suboptimal model quality. Motivated by prior work connecting the geometry of the loss landscape and generalization, we introduce a novel, effective procedure for instead simultaneously minimizing loss value and loss sharpness. In particular, our procedure, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), seeks parameters that lie in neighborhoods having uniformly low loss; this formulation results in a min-max optimization problem on which gradient descent can be performed efficiently. We present empirical results showing that SAM improves model generalization across a variety of benchmark datasets (e.g., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, finetuning tasks) and models, yielding novel state-of-the-art performance for several. Additionally, we find that SAM natively provides robustness to label noise on par with that provided by state-of-the-art procedures that specifically target learning with noisy labels. We open source our code at https://github.com/google-research/sam.

We present SURE-Score: an approach for learning score-based generative models using training samples corrupted by additive Gaussian noise. When a large training set of clean samples is available, solving inverse problems via score-based (diffusion) generative models trained on the underlying fully-sampled data distribution has recently been shown to outperform end-to-end supervised deep learning. In practice, such a large collection of training data may be prohibitively expensive to acquire in the first place. In this work, we present an approach for approximately learning a score-based generative model of the clean distribution, from noisy training data. We formulate and justify a novel loss function that leverages Stein's unbiased risk estimate to jointly denoise the data and learn the score function via denoising score matching, while using only the noisy samples. We demonstrate the generality of SURE-Score by learning priors and applying posterior sampling to ill-posed inverse problems in two practical applications from different domains: compressive wireless multiple-input multiple-output channel estimation and accelerated 2D multi-coil magnetic resonance imaging reconstruction, where we demonstrate competitive reconstruction performance when learning at signal-to-noise ratio values of 0 and 10 dB, respectively.

We consider the distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem with spectral risk-based uncertainty set and f-divergence penalty. This formulation includes common risk-sensitive learning objectives such as regularized condition value-at-risk (CVaR) and average top-k loss. We present Prospect, a stochastic gradient-based algorithm that only requires tuning a single learning rate hyperparameter, and prove that it enjoys linear convergence for smooth regularized losses. This contrasts with previous algorithms that either require tuning multiple hyperparameters or potentially fail to converge due to biased gradient estimates or inadequate regularization. Empirically, we show that Prospect can converge 2-3times faster than baselines such as stochastic gradient and stochastic saddle-point methods on distribution shift and fairness benchmarks spanning tabular, vision, and language domains.

Mixture of experts (MoE) has a well-principled finite mixture model construction for prediction, allowing the gating network (mixture weights) to learn from the predictors (explanatory variables) together with the experts' network (mixture component densities). We investigate the estimation properties of MoEs in a high-dimensional setting, where the number of predictors is much larger than the sample size, for which the literature lacks computational and especially theoretical results. We consider the class of finite MoE models with softmax gating functions and Gaussian regression experts, and focus on the theoretical properties of their l_1-regularized estimation via the Lasso. We provide a lower bound on the regularization parameter of the Lasso penalty that ensures an l_1-oracle inequality is satisfied by the Lasso estimator according to the Kullback--Leibler loss. We further state an l_1-ball oracle inequality for the l_1-penalized maximum likelihood estimator from the model selection.

Deep learning has been wildly successful in practice and most state-of-the-art machine learning methods are based on neural networks. Lacking, however, is a rigorous mathematical theory that adequately explains the amazing performance of deep neural networks. In this article, we present a relatively new mathematical framework that provides the beginning of a deeper understanding of deep learning. This framework precisely characterizes the functional properties of neural networks that are trained to fit to data. The key mathematical tools which support this framework include transform-domain sparse regularization, the Radon transform of computed tomography, and approximation theory, which are all techniques deeply rooted in signal processing. This framework explains the effect of weight decay regularization in neural network training, the use of skip connections and low-rank weight matrices in network architectures, the role of sparsity in neural networks, and explains why neural networks can perform well in high-dimensional problems.

In representation learning, uniformity refers to the uniform feature distribution in the latent space (i.e., unit hypersphere). Previous work has shown that improving uniformity contributes to the learning of under-represented classes. However, most of the previous work focused on classification; the representation space of imbalanced regression remains unexplored. Classification-based methods are not suitable for regression tasks because they cluster features into distinct groups without considering the continuous and ordered nature essential for regression. In a geometric aspect, we uniquely focus on ensuring uniformity in the latent space for imbalanced regression through two key losses: enveloping and homogeneity. The enveloping loss encourages the induced trace to uniformly occupy the surface of a hypersphere, while the homogeneity loss ensures smoothness, with representations evenly spaced at consistent intervals. Our method integrates these geometric principles into the data representations via a Surrogate-driven Representation Learning (SRL) framework. Experiments with real-world regression and operator learning tasks highlight the importance of uniformity in imbalanced regression and validate the efficacy of our geometry-based loss functions.

LOBSTER (LOss-Based SensiTivity rEgulaRization) is a method for training neural networks having a sparse topology. Let the sensitivity of a network parameter be the variation of the loss function with respect to the variation of the parameter. Parameters with low sensitivity, i.e. having little impact on the loss when perturbed, are shrunk and then pruned to sparsify the network. Our method allows to train a network from scratch, i.e. without preliminary learning or rewinding. Experiments on multiple architectures and datasets show competitive compression ratios with minimal computational overhead.

Many recent datasets contain a variety of different data modalities, for instance, image, question, and answer data in visual question answering (VQA). When training deep net classifiers on those multi-modal datasets, the modalities get exploited at different scales, i.e., some modalities can more easily contribute to the classification results than others. This is suboptimal because the classifier is inherently biased towards a subset of the modalities. To alleviate this shortcoming, we propose a novel regularization term based on the functional entropy. Intuitively, this term encourages to balance the contribution of each modality to the classification result. However, regularization with the functional entropy is challenging. To address this, we develop a method based on the log-Sobolev inequality, which bounds the functional entropy with the functional-Fisher-information. Intuitively, this maximizes the amount of information that the modalities contribute. On the two challenging multi-modal datasets VQA-CPv2 and SocialIQ, we obtain state-of-the-art results while more uniformly exploiting the modalities. In addition, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method on Colored MNIST.

We introduce for continual learning Autodiff Quadratic Consolidation (AQC), which approximates the previous loss function with a quadratic function, and Neural Consolidation (NC), which approximates the previous loss function with a neural network. Although they are not scalable to large neural networks, they can be used with a fixed pre-trained feature extractor. We empirically study these methods in class-incremental learning, for which regularization-based methods produce unsatisfactory results, unless combined with replay. We find that for small datasets, quadratic approximation of the previous loss function leads to poor results, even with full Hessian computation, and NC could significantly improve the predictive performance, while for large datasets, when used with a fixed pre-trained feature extractor, AQC provides superior predictive performance. We also find that using tanh-output features can improve the predictive performance of AQC. In particular, in class-incremental Split MNIST, when a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with tanh-output features is pre-trained on EMNIST Letters and used as a fixed pre-trained feature extractor, AQC can achieve predictive performance comparable to joint training.

Recognition in low quality face datasets is challenging because facial attributes are obscured and degraded. Advances in margin-based loss functions have resulted in enhanced discriminability of faces in the embedding space. Further, previous studies have studied the effect of adaptive losses to assign more importance to misclassified (hard) examples. In this work, we introduce another aspect of adaptiveness in the loss function, namely the image quality. We argue that the strategy to emphasize misclassified samples should be adjusted according to their image quality. Specifically, the relative importance of easy or hard samples should be based on the sample's image quality. We propose a new loss function that emphasizes samples of different difficulties based on their image quality. Our method achieves this in the form of an adaptive margin function by approximating the image quality with feature norms. Extensive experiments show that our method, AdaFace, improves the face recognition performance over the state-of-the-art (SoTA) on four datasets (IJB-B, IJB-C, IJB-S and TinyFace). Code and models are released in https://github.com/mk-minchul/AdaFace.

We introduce Random Feature Representation Boosting (RFRBoost), a novel method for constructing deep residual random feature neural networks (RFNNs) using boosting theory. RFRBoost uses random features at each layer to learn the functional gradient of the network representation, enhancing performance while preserving the convex optimization benefits of RFNNs. In the case of MSE loss, we obtain closed-form solutions to greedy layer-wise boosting with random features. For general loss functions, we show that fitting random feature residual blocks reduces to solving a quadratically constrained least squares problem. We demonstrate, through numerical experiments on 91 tabular datasets for regression and classification, that RFRBoost significantly outperforms traditional RFNNs and end-to-end trained MLP ResNets, while offering substantial computational advantages and theoretical guarantees stemming from boosting theory.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models have shown an impressive generation quality, although their long sampling chain leads to high computational costs. In this paper, we observe that a long sampling chain also leads to an error accumulation phenomenon, which is similar to the exposure bias problem in autoregressive text generation. Specifically, we note that there is a discrepancy between training and testing, since the former is conditioned on the ground truth samples, while the latter is conditioned on the previously generated results. To alleviate this problem, we propose a very simple but effective training regularization, consisting in perturbing the ground truth samples to simulate the inference time prediction errors. We empirically show that, without affecting the recall and precision, the proposed input perturbation leads to a significant improvement in the sample quality while reducing both the training and the inference times. For instance, on CelebA 64times64, we achieve a new state-of-the-art FID score of 1.27, while saving 37.5% of the training time. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/forever208/DDPM-IP

Current model quantization methods have shown their promising capability in reducing storage space and computation complexity. However, due to the diversity of quantization forms supported by different hardware, one limitation of existing solutions is that usually require repeated optimization for different scenarios. How to construct a model with flexible quantization forms has been less studied. In this paper, we explore a one-shot network quantization regime, named Elastic Quantization Neural Networks (EQ-Net), which aims to train a robust weight-sharing quantization supernet. First of all, we propose an elastic quantization space (including elastic bit-width, granularity, and symmetry) to adapt to various mainstream quantitative forms. Secondly, we propose the Weight Distribution Regularization Loss (WDR-Loss) and Group Progressive Guidance Loss (GPG-Loss) to bridge the inconsistency of the distribution for weights and output logits in the elastic quantization space gap. Lastly, we incorporate genetic algorithms and the proposed Conditional Quantization-Aware Accuracy Predictor (CQAP) as an estimator to quickly search mixed-precision quantized neural networks in supernet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EQ-Net is close to or even better than its static counterparts as well as state-of-the-art robust bit-width methods. Code can be available at https://github.com/xuke225/EQ-Net.git{https://github.com/xuke225/EQ-Net}.

Time Series Forecasting has been an active area of research due to its many applications ranging from network usage prediction, resource allocation, anomaly detection, and predictive maintenance. Numerous publications published in the last five years have proposed diverse sets of objective loss functions to address cases such as biased data, long-term forecasting, multicollinear features, etc. In this paper, we have summarized 14 well-known regression loss functions commonly used for time series forecasting and listed out the circumstances where their application can aid in faster and better model convergence. We have also demonstrated how certain categories of loss functions perform well across all data sets and can be considered as a baseline objective function in circumstances where the distribution of the data is unknown. Our code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/aryan-jadon/Regression-Loss-Functions-in-Time-Series-Forecasting-Tensorflow.

We tackle the problem of novel class discovery, which aims to learn novel classes without supervision based on labeled data from known classes. A key challenge lies in transferring the knowledge in the known-class data to the learning of novel classes. Previous methods mainly focus on building a shared representation space for knowledge transfer and often ignore modeling class relations. To address this, we introduce a class relation representation for the novel classes based on the predicted class distribution of a model trained on known classes. Empirically, we find that such class relation becomes less informative during typical discovery training. To prevent such information loss, we propose a novel knowledge distillation framework, which utilizes our class-relation representation to regularize the learning of novel classes. In addition, to enable a flexible knowledge distillation scheme for each data point in novel classes, we develop a learnable weighting function for the regularization, which adaptively promotes knowledge transfer based on the semantic similarity between the novel and known classes. To validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, including CIFAR100, Stanford Cars, CUB, and FGVC-Aircraft datasets. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on almost all benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/kleinzcy/Cr-KD-NCD{here}.

Although deep learning has produced dazzling successes for applications of image, speech, and video processing in the past few years, most trainings are with suboptimal hyper-parameters, requiring unnecessarily long training times. Setting the hyper-parameters remains a black art that requires years of experience to acquire. This report proposes several efficient ways to set the hyper-parameters that significantly reduce training time and improves performance. Specifically, this report shows how to examine the training validation/test loss function for subtle clues of underfitting and overfitting and suggests guidelines for moving toward the optimal balance point. Then it discusses how to increase/decrease the learning rate/momentum to speed up training. Our experiments show that it is crucial to balance every manner of regularization for each dataset and architecture. Weight decay is used as a sample regularizer to show how its optimal value is tightly coupled with the learning rates and momentums. Files to help replicate the results reported here are available.

This paper focuses on over-parameterized deep neural networks (DNNs) with ReLU activation functions and proves that when the data distribution is well-separated, DNNs can achieve Bayes-optimal test error for classification while obtaining (nearly) zero-training error under the lazy training regime. For this purpose, we unify three interrelated concepts of overparameterization, benign overfitting, and the Lipschitz constant of DNNs. Our results indicate that interpolating with smoother functions leads to better generalization. Furthermore, we investigate the special case where interpolating smooth ground-truth functions is performed by DNNs under the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) regime for generalization. Our result demonstrates that the generalization error converges to a constant order that only depends on label noise and initialization noise, which theoretically verifies benign overfitting. Our analysis provides a tight lower bound on the normalized margin under non-smooth activation functions, as well as the minimum eigenvalue of NTK under high-dimensional settings, which has its own interest in learning theory.

It is widely believed that a neural network can fit a training set containing at least as many samples as it has parameters, underpinning notions of overparameterized and underparameterized models. In practice, however, we only find solutions accessible via our training procedure, including the optimizer and regularizers, limiting flexibility. Moreover, the exact parameterization of the function class, built into an architecture, shapes its loss surface and impacts the minima we find. In this work, we examine the ability of neural networks to fit data in practice. Our findings indicate that: (1) standard optimizers find minima where the model can only fit training sets with significantly fewer samples than it has parameters; (2) convolutional networks are more parameter-efficient than MLPs and ViTs, even on randomly labeled data; (3) while stochastic training is thought to have a regularizing effect, SGD actually finds minima that fit more training data than full-batch gradient descent; (4) the difference in capacity to fit correctly labeled and incorrectly labeled samples can be predictive of generalization; (5) ReLU activation functions result in finding minima that fit more data despite being designed to avoid vanishing and exploding gradients in deep architectures.

We consider a deep matrix factorization model of covariance matrices trained with the Bures-Wasserstein distance. While recent works have made important advances in the study of the optimization problem for overparametrized low-rank matrix approximation, much emphasis has been placed on discriminative settings and the square loss. In contrast, our model considers another interesting type of loss and connects with the generative setting. We characterize the critical points and minimizers of the Bures-Wasserstein distance over the space of rank-bounded matrices. For low-rank matrices the Hessian of this loss can theoretically blow up, which creates challenges to analyze convergence of optimizaton methods. We establish convergence results for gradient flow using a smooth perturbative version of the loss and convergence results for finite step size gradient descent under certain assumptions on the initial weights.

We investigate conditional adversarial networks as a general-purpose solution to image-to-image translation problems. These networks not only learn the mapping from input image to output image, but also learn a loss function to train this mapping. This makes it possible to apply the same generic approach to problems that traditionally would require very different loss formulations. We demonstrate that this approach is effective at synthesizing photos from label maps, reconstructing objects from edge maps, and colorizing images, among other tasks. Indeed, since the release of the pix2pix software associated with this paper, a large number of internet users (many of them artists) have posted their own experiments with our system, further demonstrating its wide applicability and ease of adoption without the need for parameter tweaking. As a community, we no longer hand-engineer our mapping functions, and this work suggests we can achieve reasonable results without hand-engineering our loss functions either.

We identify and formalize a fundamental gradient descent phenomenon resulting in a learning proclivity in over-parameterized neural networks. Gradient Starvation arises when cross-entropy loss is minimized by capturing only a subset of features relevant for the task, despite the presence of other predictive features that fail to be discovered. This work provides a theoretical explanation for the emergence of such feature imbalance in neural networks. Using tools from Dynamical Systems theory, we identify simple properties of learning dynamics during gradient descent that lead to this imbalance, and prove that such a situation can be expected given certain statistical structure in training data. Based on our proposed formalism, we develop guarantees for a novel regularization method aimed at decoupling feature learning dynamics, improving accuracy and robustness in cases hindered by gradient starvation. We illustrate our findings with simple and real-world out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization experiments.

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) with a computationally feasible surrogate loss is a widely accepted approach for classification. Notably, the convexity and calibration (CC) properties of a loss function ensure consistency of ERM in maximizing accuracy, thereby offering a wide range of options for surrogate losses. In this article, we propose a novel ensemble method, namely EnsLoss, which extends the ensemble learning concept to combine loss functions within the ERM framework. A key feature of our method is the consideration on preserving the "legitimacy" of the combined losses, i.e., ensuring the CC properties. Specifically, we first transform the CC conditions of losses into loss-derivatives, thereby bypassing the need for explicit loss functions and directly generating calibrated loss-derivatives. Therefore, inspired by Dropout, EnsLoss enables loss ensembles through one training process with doubly stochastic gradient descent (i.e., random batch samples and random calibrated loss-derivatives). We theoretically establish the statistical consistency of our approach and provide insights into its benefits. The numerical effectiveness of EnsLoss compared to fixed loss methods is demonstrated through experiments on a broad range of 14 OpenML tabular datasets and 46 image datasets with various deep learning architectures. Python repository and source code are available on GitHub at https://github.com/statmlben/ensloss.

This manuscript considers the problem of learning a random Gaussian network function using a fully connected network with frozen intermediate layers and trainable readout layer. This problem can be seen as a natural generalization of the widely studied random features model to deeper architectures. First, we prove Gaussian universality of the test error in a ridge regression setting where the learner and target networks share the same intermediate layers, and provide a sharp asymptotic formula for it. Establishing this result requires proving a deterministic equivalent for traces of the deep random features sample covariance matrices which can be of independent interest. Second, we conjecture the asymptotic Gaussian universality of the test error in the more general setting of arbitrary convex losses and generic learner/target architectures. We provide extensive numerical evidence for this conjecture, which requires the derivation of closed-form expressions for the layer-wise post-activation population covariances. In light of our results, we investigate the interplay between architecture design and implicit regularization.

Smoothness and low dimensional structures play central roles in improving generalization and stability in learning and statistics. This work combines techniques from semi-infinite constrained learning and manifold regularization to learn representations that are globally smooth on a manifold. To do so, it shows that under typical conditions the problem of learning a Lipschitz continuous function on a manifold is equivalent to a dynamically weighted manifold regularization problem. This observation leads to a practical algorithm based on a weighted Laplacian penalty whose weights are adapted using stochastic gradient techniques. It is shown that under mild conditions, this method estimates the Lipschitz constant of the solution, learning a globally smooth solution as a byproduct. Experiments on real world data illustrate the advantages of the proposed method relative to existing alternatives.

Overparameterized neural networks can be highly accurate on average on an i.i.d. test set yet consistently fail on atypical groups of the data (e.g., by learning spurious correlations that hold on average but not in such groups). Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) allows us to learn models that instead minimize the worst-case training loss over a set of pre-defined groups. However, we find that naively applying group DRO to overparameterized neural networks fails: these models can perfectly fit the training data, and any model with vanishing average training loss also already has vanishing worst-case training loss. Instead, the poor worst-case performance arises from poor generalization on some groups. By coupling group DRO models with increased regularization---a stronger-than-typical L2 penalty or early stopping---we achieve substantially higher worst-group accuracies, with 10-40 percentage point improvements on a natural language inference task and two image tasks, while maintaining high average accuracies. Our results suggest that regularization is important for worst-group generalization in the overparameterized regime, even if it is not needed for average generalization. Finally, we introduce a stochastic optimization algorithm, with convergence guarantees, to efficiently train group DRO models.

Multivariate time series data for real-world applications typically contain a significant amount of missing values. The dominant approach for classification with such missing values is to impute them heuristically with specific values (zero, mean, values of adjacent time-steps) or learnable parameters. However, these simple strategies do not take the data generative process into account, and more importantly, do not effectively capture the uncertainty in prediction due to the multiple possibilities for the missing values. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic framework for classification with multivariate time series data with missing values. Our model consists of two parts; a deep generative model for missing value imputation and a classifier. Extending the existing deep generative models to better capture structures of time-series data, our deep generative model part is trained to impute the missing values in multiple plausible ways, effectively modeling the uncertainty of the imputation. The classifier part takes the time series data along with the imputed missing values and classifies signals, and is trained to capture the predictive uncertainty due to the multiple possibilities of imputations. Importantly, we show that na\"ively combining the generative model and the classifier could result in trivial solutions where the generative model does not produce meaningful imputations. To resolve this, we present a novel regularization technique that can promote the model to produce useful imputation values that help classification. Through extensive experiments on real-world time series data with missing values, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

In this paper we study the effects of quantization in DNN training. We hypothesize that weight quantization is a form of regularization and the amount of regularization is correlated with the quantization level (precision). We confirm our hypothesis by providing analytical study and empirical results. By modeling weight quantization as a form of additive noise to weights, we explore how this noise propagates through the network at training time. We then show that the magnitude of this noise is correlated with the level of quantization. To confirm our analytical study, we performed an extensive list of experiments summarized in this paper in which we show that the regularization effects of quantization can be seen in various vision tasks and models, over various datasets. Based on our study, we propose that 8-bit quantization provides a reliable form of regularization in different vision tasks and models.

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) stands as a cornerstone optimization algorithm with proven real-world empirical successes but relatively limited theoretical understanding. Recent research has illuminated a key factor contributing to its practical efficacy: the implicit regularization it instigates. Several studies have investigated the linear stability property of SGD in the vicinity of a stationary point as a predictive proxy for sharpness and generalization error in overparameterized neural networks (Wu et al., 2022; Jastrzebski et al., 2019; Cohen et al., 2021). In this paper, we delve deeper into the relationship between linear stability and sharpness. More specifically, we meticulously delineate the necessary and sufficient conditions for linear stability, contingent on hyperparameters of SGD and the sharpness at the optimum. Towards this end, we introduce a novel coherence measure of the loss Hessian that encapsulates pertinent geometric properties of the loss function that are relevant to the linear stability of SGD. It enables us to provide a simplified sufficient condition for identifying linear instability at an optimum. Notably, compared to previous works, our analysis relies on significantly milder assumptions and is applicable for a broader class of loss functions than known before, encompassing not only mean-squared error but also cross-entropy loss.

Accurate probabilistic predictions are essential for optimal decision making. While neural network miscalibration has been studied primarily in classification, we investigate this in the less-explored domain of regression. We conduct the largest empirical study to date to assess the probabilistic calibration of neural networks. We also analyze the performance of recalibration, conformal, and regularization methods to enhance probabilistic calibration. Additionally, we introduce novel differentiable recalibration and regularization methods, uncovering new insights into their effectiveness. Our findings reveal that regularization methods offer a favorable tradeoff between calibration and sharpness. Post-hoc methods exhibit superior probabilistic calibration, which we attribute to the finite-sample coverage guarantee of conformal prediction. Furthermore, we demonstrate that quantile recalibration can be considered as a specific case of conformal prediction. Our study is fully reproducible and implemented in a common code base for fair comparisons.

What do auto-encoders learn about the underlying data generating distribution? Recent work suggests that some auto-encoder variants do a good job of capturing the local manifold structure of data. This paper clarifies some of these previous observations by showing that minimizing a particular form of regularized reconstruction error yields a reconstruction function that locally characterizes the shape of the data generating density. We show that the auto-encoder captures the score (derivative of the log-density with respect to the input). It contradicts previous interpretations of reconstruction error as an energy function. Unlike previous results, the theorems provided here are completely generic and do not depend on the parametrization of the auto-encoder: they show what the auto-encoder would tend to if given enough capacity and examples. These results are for a contractive training criterion we show to be similar to the denoising auto-encoder training criterion with small corruption noise, but with contraction applied on the whole reconstruction function rather than just encoder. Similarly to score matching, one can consider the proposed training criterion as a convenient alternative to maximum likelihood because it does not involve a partition function. Finally, we show how an approximate Metropolis-Hastings MCMC can be setup to recover samples from the estimated distribution, and this is confirmed in sampling experiments.

We study the problem of transferring a sample in one domain to an analog sample in another domain. Given two related domains, S and T, we would like to learn a generative function G that maps an input sample from S to the domain T, such that the output of a given function f, which accepts inputs in either domains, would remain unchanged. Other than the function f, the training data is unsupervised and consist of a set of samples from each domain. The Domain Transfer Network (DTN) we present employs a compound loss function that includes a multiclass GAN loss, an f-constancy component, and a regularizing component that encourages G to map samples from T to themselves. We apply our method to visual domains including digits and face images and demonstrate its ability to generate convincing novel images of previously unseen entities, while preserving their identity.

Learning compact discrete representations of data is a key task on its own or for facilitating subsequent processing of data. In this paper we present a model that produces Discrete InfoMax Codes (DIMCO); we learn a probabilistic encoder that yields k-way d-dimensional codes associated with input data. Our model's learning objective is to maximize the mutual information between codes and labels with a regularization, which enforces entries of a codeword to be as independent as possible. We show that the infomax principle also justifies previous loss functions (e.g., cross-entropy) as its special cases. Our analysis also shows that using shorter codes, as DIMCO does, reduces overfitting in the context of few-shot classification. Through experiments in various domains, we observe this implicit meta-regularization effect of DIMCO. Furthermore, we show that the codes learned by DIMCO are efficient in terms of both memory and retrieval time compared to previous methods.

Adversarial training provides a means of regularizing supervised learning algorithms while virtual adversarial training is able to extend supervised learning algorithms to the semi-supervised setting. However, both methods require making small perturbations to numerous entries of the input vector, which is inappropriate for sparse high-dimensional inputs such as one-hot word representations. We extend adversarial and virtual adversarial training to the text domain by applying perturbations to the word embeddings in a recurrent neural network rather than to the original input itself. The proposed method achieves state of the art results on multiple benchmark semi-supervised and purely supervised tasks. We provide visualizations and analysis showing that the learned word embeddings have improved in quality and that while training, the model is less prone to overfitting. Code is available at https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/adversarial_text.

It is widely believed that the implicit regularization of SGD is fundamental to the impressive generalization behavior we observe in neural networks. In this work, we demonstrate that non-stochastic full-batch training can achieve comparably strong performance to SGD on CIFAR-10 using modern architectures. To this end, we show that the implicit regularization of SGD can be completely replaced with explicit regularization even when comparing against a strong and well-researched baseline. Our observations indicate that the perceived difficulty of full-batch training may be the result of its optimization properties and the disproportionate time and effort spent by the ML community tuning optimizers and hyperparameters for small-batch training.

PixelCNNs are a recently proposed class of powerful generative models with tractable likelihood. Here we discuss our implementation of PixelCNNs which we make available at https://github.com/openai/pixel-cnn. Our implementation contains a number of modifications to the original model that both simplify its structure and improve its performance. 1) We use a discretized logistic mixture likelihood on the pixels, rather than a 256-way softmax, which we find to speed up training. 2) We condition on whole pixels, rather than R/G/B sub-pixels, simplifying the model structure. 3) We use downsampling to efficiently capture structure at multiple resolutions. 4) We introduce additional short-cut connections to further speed up optimization. 5) We regularize the model using dropout. Finally, we present state-of-the-art log likelihood results on CIFAR-10 to demonstrate the usefulness of these modifications.

We introduce a novel and general loss function, called Symmetric Contrastive (Sy-CON) loss, for effective continual self-supervised learning (CSSL). We first argue that the conventional loss form of continual learning which consists of single task-specific loss (for plasticity) and a regularizer (for stability) may not be ideal for contrastive loss based CSSL that focus on representation learning. Our reasoning is that, in contrastive learning based methods, the task-specific loss would suffer from decreasing diversity of negative samples and the regularizer may hinder learning new distinctive representations. To that end, we propose Sy-CON that consists of two losses (one for plasticity and the other for stability) with symmetric dependence on current and past models' negative sample embeddings. We argue our model can naturally find good trade-off between the plasticity and stability without any explicit hyperparameter tuning. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments, demonstrating that MoCo-based implementation of Sy-CON loss achieves superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art CSSL methods.

The study on improving the robustness of deep neural networks against adversarial examples grows rapidly in recent years. Among them, adversarial training is the most promising one, which flattens the input loss landscape (loss change with respect to input) via training on adversarially perturbed examples. However, how the widely used weight loss landscape (loss change with respect to weight) performs in adversarial training is rarely explored. In this paper, we investigate the weight loss landscape from a new perspective, and identify a clear correlation between the flatness of weight loss landscape and robust generalization gap. Several well-recognized adversarial training improvements, such as early stopping, designing new objective functions, or leveraging unlabeled data, all implicitly flatten the weight loss landscape. Based on these observations, we propose a simple yet effective Adversarial Weight Perturbation (AWP) to explicitly regularize the flatness of weight loss landscape, forming a double-perturbation mechanism in the adversarial training framework that adversarially perturbs both inputs and weights. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AWP indeed brings flatter weight loss landscape and can be easily incorporated into various existing adversarial training methods to further boost their adversarial robustness.

We propose that the grokking phenomenon, where the train loss of a neural network decreases much earlier than its test loss, can arise due to a neural network transitioning from lazy training dynamics to a rich, feature learning regime. To illustrate this mechanism, we study the simple setting of vanilla gradient descent on a polynomial regression problem with a two layer neural network which exhibits grokking without regularization in a way that cannot be explained by existing theories. We identify sufficient statistics for the test loss of such a network, and tracking these over training reveals that grokking arises in this setting when the network first attempts to fit a kernel regression solution with its initial features, followed by late-time feature learning where a generalizing solution is identified after train loss is already low. We provide an asymptotic theoretical description of the grokking dynamics in this model using dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) for high dimensional data. We find that the key determinants of grokking are the rate of feature learning -- which can be controlled precisely by parameters that scale the network output -- and the alignment of the initial features with the target function y(x). We argue this delayed generalization arises when (1) the top eigenvectors of the initial neural tangent kernel and the task labels y(x) are misaligned, but (2) the dataset size is large enough so that it is possible for the network to generalize eventually, but not so large that train loss perfectly tracks test loss at all epochs, and (3) the network begins training in the lazy regime so does not learn features immediately. We conclude with evidence that this transition from lazy (linear model) to rich training (feature learning) can control grokking in more general settings, like on MNIST, one-layer Transformers, and student-teacher networks.

Robust generalization is a major challenge in deep learning, particularly when the number of trainable parameters is very large. In general, it is very difficult to know if the network has memorized a particular set of examples or understood the underlying rule (or both). Motivated by this challenge, we study an interpretable model where generalizing representations are understood analytically, and are easily distinguishable from the memorizing ones. Namely, we consider multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and Transformer architectures trained on modular arithmetic tasks, where (xi cdot 100%) of labels are corrupted (i.e. some results of the modular operations in the training set are incorrect). We show that (i) it is possible for the network to memorize the corrupted labels and achieve 100% generalization at the same time; (ii) the memorizing neurons can be identified and pruned, lowering the accuracy on corrupted data and improving the accuracy on uncorrupted data; (iii) regularization methods such as weight decay, dropout and BatchNorm force the network to ignore the corrupted data during optimization, and achieve 100% accuracy on the uncorrupted dataset; and (iv) the effect of these regularization methods is (``mechanistically'') interpretable: weight decay and dropout force all the neurons to learn generalizing representations, while BatchNorm de-amplifies the output of memorizing neurons and amplifies the output of the generalizing ones. Finally, we show that in the presence of regularization, the training dynamics involves two consecutive stages: first, the network undergoes grokking dynamics reaching high train and test accuracy; second, it unlearns the memorizing representations, where the train accuracy suddenly jumps from 100% to 100 (1-xi)%.

Representations learned via self-supervised learning (SSL) can be susceptible to dimensional collapse, where the learned representation subspace is of extremely low dimensionality and thus fails to represent the full data distribution and modalities. Dimensional collapse also known as the "underfilling" phenomenon is one of the major causes of degraded performance on downstream tasks. Previous work has investigated the dimensional collapse problem of SSL at a global level. In this paper, we demonstrate that representations can span over high dimensional space globally, but collapse locally. To address this, we propose a method called local dimensionality regularization (LDReg). Our formulation is based on the derivation of the Fisher-Rao metric to compare and optimize local distance distributions at an asymptotically small radius for each data point. By increasing the local intrinsic dimensionality, we demonstrate through a range of experiments that LDReg improves the representation quality of SSL. The results also show that LDReg can regularize dimensionality at both local and global levels.

Recently, contrastive learning has found impressive success in advancing the state of the art in solving various machine learning tasks. However, the existing generalization analysis is very limited or even not meaningful. In particular, the existing generalization error bounds depend linearly on the number k of negative examples while it was widely shown in practice that choosing a large k is necessary to guarantee good generalization of contrastive learning in downstream tasks. In this paper, we establish novel generalization bounds for contrastive learning which do not depend on k, up to logarithmic terms. Our analysis uses structural results on empirical covering numbers and Rademacher complexities to exploit the Lipschitz continuity of loss functions. For self-bounding Lipschitz loss functions, we further improve our results by developing optimistic bounds which imply fast rates in a low noise condition. We apply our results to learning with both linear representation and nonlinear representation by deep neural networks, for both of which we derive Rademacher complexity bounds to get improved generalization bounds.

We present a novel deep learning approach to approximate the solution of large, sparse, symmetric, positive-definite linear systems of equations. These systems arise from many problems in applied science, e.g., in numerical methods for partial differential equations. Algorithms for approximating the solution to these systems are often the bottleneck in problems that require their solution, particularly for modern applications that require many millions of unknowns. Indeed, numerical linear algebra techniques have been investigated for many decades to alleviate this computational burden. Recently, data-driven techniques have also shown promise for these problems. Motivated by the conjugate gradients algorithm that iteratively selects search directions for minimizing the matrix norm of the approximation error, we design an approach that utilizes a deep neural network to accelerate convergence via data-driven improvement of the search directions. Our method leverages a carefully chosen convolutional network to approximate the action of the inverse of the linear operator up to an arbitrary constant. We train the network using unsupervised learning with a loss function equal to the L^2 difference between an input and the system matrix times the network evaluation, where the unspecified constant in the approximate inverse is accounted for. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on spatially discretized Poisson equations with millions of degrees of freedom arising in computational fluid dynamics applications. Unlike state-of-the-art learning approaches, our algorithm is capable of reducing the linear system residual to a given tolerance in a small number of iterations, independent of the problem size. Moreover, our method generalizes effectively to various systems beyond those encountered during training.

We design learning rate schedules that minimize regret for SGD-based online learning in the presence of a changing data distribution. We fully characterize the optimal learning rate schedule for online linear regression via a novel analysis with stochastic differential equations. For general convex loss functions, we propose new learning rate schedules that are robust to distribution shift, and we give upper and lower bounds for the regret that only differ by constants. For non-convex loss functions, we define a notion of regret based on the gradient norm of the estimated models and propose a learning schedule that minimizes an upper bound on the total expected regret. Intuitively, one expects changing loss landscapes to require more exploration, and we confirm that optimal learning rate schedules typically increase in the presence of distribution shift. Finally, we provide experiments for high-dimensional regression models and neural networks to illustrate these learning rate schedules and their cumulative regret.

Deep neural network is difficult to train and this predicament becomes worse as the depth increases. The essence of this problem exists in the magnitude of backpropagated errors that will result in gradient vanishing or exploding phenomenon. We show that a variant of regularizer which utilizes orthonormality among different filter banks can alleviate this problem. Moreover, we design a backward error modulation mechanism based on the quasi-isometry assumption between two consecutive parametric layers. Equipped with these two ingredients, we propose several novel optimization solutions that can be utilized for training a specific-structured (repetitively triple modules of Conv-BNReLU) extremely deep convolutional neural network (CNN) WITHOUT any shortcuts/ identity mappings from scratch. Experiments show that our proposed solutions can achieve distinct improvements for a 44-layer and a 110-layer plain networks on both the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Moreover, we can successfully train plain CNNs to match the performance of the residual counterparts. Besides, we propose new principles for designing network structure from the insights evoked by orthonormality. Combined with residual structure, we achieve comparative performance on the ImageNet dataset.

Democratization of machine learning requires architectures that automatically adapt to new problems. Neural Differential Equations (NDEs) have emerged as a popular modeling framework by removing the need for ML practitioners to choose the number of layers in a recurrent model. While we can control the computational cost by choosing the number of layers in standard architectures, in NDEs the number of neural network evaluations for a forward pass can depend on the number of steps of the adaptive ODE solver. But, can we force the NDE to learn the version with the least steps while not increasing the training cost? Current strategies to overcome slow prediction require high order automatic differentiation, leading to significantly higher training time. We describe a novel regularization method that uses the internal cost heuristics of adaptive differential equation solvers combined with discrete adjoint sensitivities to guide the training process towards learning NDEs that are easier to solve. This approach opens up the blackbox numerical analysis behind the differential equation solver's algorithm and directly uses its local error estimates and stiffness heuristics as cheap and accurate cost estimates. We incorporate our method without any change in the underlying NDE framework and show that our method extends beyond Ordinary Differential Equations to accommodate Neural Stochastic Differential Equations. We demonstrate how our approach can halve the prediction time and, unlike other methods which can increase the training time by an order of magnitude, we demonstrate similar reduction in training times. Together this showcases how the knowledge embedded within state-of-the-art equation solvers can be used to enhance machine learning.

Kernel methods are widely used in machine learning, especially for classification problems. However, the theoretical analysis of kernel classification is still limited. This paper investigates the statistical performances of kernel classifiers. With some mild assumptions on the conditional probability eta(x)=P(Y=1mid X=x), we derive an upper bound on the classification excess risk of a kernel classifier using recent advances in the theory of kernel regression. We also obtain a minimax lower bound for Sobolev spaces, which shows the optimality of the proposed classifier. Our theoretical results can be extended to the generalization error of overparameterized neural network classifiers. To make our theoretical results more applicable in realistic settings, we also propose a simple method to estimate the interpolation smoothness of 2eta(x)-1 and apply the method to real datasets.

Regularized optimal transport (OT) is now increasingly used as a loss or as a matching layer in neural networks. Entropy-regularized OT can be computed using the Sinkhorn algorithm but it leads to fully-dense transportation plans, meaning that all sources are (fractionally) matched with all targets. To address this issue, several works have investigated quadratic regularization instead. This regularization preserves sparsity and leads to unconstrained and smooth (semi) dual objectives, that can be solved with off-the-shelf gradient methods. Unfortunately, quadratic regularization does not give direct control over the cardinality (number of nonzeros) of the transportation plan. We propose in this paper a new approach for OT with explicit cardinality constraints on the transportation plan. Our work is motivated by an application to sparse mixture of experts, where OT can be used to match input tokens such as image patches with expert models such as neural networks. Cardinality constraints ensure that at most k tokens are matched with an expert, which is crucial for computational performance reasons. Despite the nonconvexity of cardinality constraints, we show that the corresponding (semi) dual problems are tractable and can be solved with first-order gradient methods. Our method can be thought as a middle ground between unregularized OT (recovered in the limit case k=1) and quadratically-regularized OT (recovered when k is large enough). The smoothness of the objectives increases as k increases, giving rise to a trade-off between convergence speed and sparsity of the optimal plan.

This paper proposes a new loss function for adversarial training. Since adversarial training has difficulties, e.g., necessity of high model capacity, focusing on important data points by weighting cross-entropy loss has attracted much attention. However, they are vulnerable to sophisticated attacks, e.g., Auto-Attack. This paper experimentally reveals that the cause of their vulnerability is their small margins between logits for the true label and the other labels. Since neural networks classify the data points based on the logits, logit margins should be large enough to avoid flipping the largest logit by the attacks. Importance-aware methods do not increase logit margins of important samples but decrease those of less-important samples compared with cross-entropy loss. To increase logit margins of important samples, we propose switching one-vs-the-rest loss (SOVR), which switches from cross-entropy to one-vs-the-rest loss for important samples that have small logit margins. We prove that one-vs-the-rest loss increases logit margins two times larger than the weighted cross-entropy loss for a simple problem. We experimentally confirm that SOVR increases logit margins of important samples unlike existing methods and achieves better robustness against Auto-Attack than importance-aware methods.

Autoencoders are a popular model in many branches of machine learning and lossy data compression. However, their fundamental limits, the performance of gradient methods and the features learnt during optimization remain poorly understood, even in the two-layer setting. In fact, earlier work has considered either linear autoencoders or specific training regimes (leading to vanishing or diverging compression rates). Our paper addresses this gap by focusing on non-linear two-layer autoencoders trained in the challenging proportional regime in which the input dimension scales linearly with the size of the representation. Our results characterize the minimizers of the population risk, and show that such minimizers are achieved by gradient methods; their structure is also unveiled, thus leading to a concise description of the features obtained via training. For the special case of a sign activation function, our analysis establishes the fundamental limits for the lossy compression of Gaussian sources via (shallow) autoencoders. Finally, while the results are proved for Gaussian data, numerical simulations on standard datasets display the universality of the theoretical predictions.

Off-policy learning (OPL) aims at finding improved policies from logged bandit data, often by minimizing the inverse propensity scoring (IPS) estimator of the risk. In this work, we investigate a smooth regularization for IPS, for which we derive a two-sided PAC-Bayes generalization bound. The bound is tractable, scalable, interpretable and provides learning certificates. In particular, it is also valid for standard IPS without making the assumption that the importance weights are bounded. We demonstrate the relevance of our approach and its favorable performance through a set of learning tasks. Since our bound holds for standard IPS, we are able to provide insight into when regularizing IPS is useful. Namely, we identify cases where regularization might not be needed. This goes against the belief that, in practice, clipped IPS often enjoys favorable performance than standard IPS in OPL.

Despite their massive size, successful deep artificial neural networks can exhibit a remarkably small difference between training and test performance. Conventional wisdom attributes small generalization error either to properties of the model family, or to the regularization techniques used during training. Through extensive systematic experiments, we show how these traditional approaches fail to explain why large neural networks generalize well in practice. Specifically, our experiments establish that state-of-the-art convolutional networks for image classification trained with stochastic gradient methods easily fit a random labeling of the training data. This phenomenon is qualitatively unaffected by explicit regularization, and occurs even if we replace the true images by completely unstructured random noise. We corroborate these experimental findings with a theoretical construction showing that simple depth two neural networks already have perfect finite sample expressivity as soon as the number of parameters exceeds the number of data points as it usually does in practice. We interpret our experimental findings by comparison with traditional models.

Understanding how overparameterized neural networks generalize despite perfect interpolation of noisy training data is a fundamental question. Mallinar et. al. 2022 noted that neural networks seem to often exhibit ``tempered overfitting'', wherein the population risk does not converge to the Bayes optimal error, but neither does it approach infinity, yielding non-trivial generalization. However, this has not been studied rigorously. We provide the first rigorous analysis of the overfitting behavior of regression with minimum norm (ell_2 of weights), focusing on univariate two-layer ReLU networks. We show overfitting is tempered (with high probability) when measured with respect to the L_1 loss, but also show that the situation is more complex than suggested by Mallinar et. al., and overfitting is catastrophic with respect to the L_2 loss, or when taking an expectation over the training set.

Domain adaptation framework of GANs has achieved great progress in recent years as a main successful approach of training contemporary GANs in the case of very limited training data. In this work, we significantly improve this framework by proposing an extremely compact parameter space for fine-tuning the generator. We introduce a novel domain-modulation technique that allows to optimize only 6 thousand-dimensional vector instead of 30 million weights of StyleGAN2 to adapt to a target domain. We apply this parameterization to the state-of-art domain adaptation methods and show that it has almost the same expressiveness as the full parameter space. Additionally, we propose a new regularization loss that considerably enhances the diversity of the fine-tuned generator. Inspired by the reduction in the size of the optimizing parameter space we consider the problem of multi-domain adaptation of GANs, i.e. setting when the same model can adapt to several domains depending on the input query. We propose the HyperDomainNet that is a hypernetwork that predicts our parameterization given the target domain. We empirically confirm that it can successfully learn a number of domains at once and may even generalize to unseen domains. Source code can be found at https://github.com/MACderRu/HyperDomainNet

Generative models such as denoising diffusion models are quickly advancing their ability to approximate highly complex data distributions. They are also increasingly leveraged in scientific machine learning, where samples from the implied data distribution are expected to adhere to specific governing equations. We present a framework that unifies generative modeling and partial differential equation fulfillment by introducing a first-principle-based loss term that enforces generated samples to fulfill the underlying physical constraints. Our approach reduces the residual error by up to two orders of magnitude compared to previous work in a fluid flow case study and outperforms task-specific frameworks in relevant metrics for structural topology optimization. We also present numerical evidence that our extended training objective acts as a natural regularization mechanism against overfitting. Our framework is simple to implement and versatile in its applicability for imposing equality and inequality constraints as well as auxiliary optimization objectives.

Representation learning methods have revolutionized machine learning on networks by converting discrete network structures into continuous domains. However, dynamic networks that evolve over time pose new challenges. To address this, dynamic representation learning methods have gained attention, offering benefits like reduced learning time and improved accuracy by utilizing temporal information. T-batching is a valuable technique for training dynamic network models that reduces training time while preserving vital conditions for accurate modeling. However, we have identified a limitation in the training loss function used with t-batching. Through mathematical analysis, we propose two alternative loss functions that overcome these issues, resulting in enhanced training performance. We extensively evaluate the proposed loss functions on synthetic and real-world dynamic networks. The results consistently demonstrate superior performance compared to the original loss function. Notably, in a real-world network characterized by diverse user interaction histories, the proposed loss functions achieved more than 26.9% enhancement in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and more than 11.8% improvement in Recall@10. These findings underscore the efficacy of the proposed loss functions in dynamic network modeling.

Knowledge distillation is classically a procedure where a neural network is trained on the output of another network along with the original targets in order to transfer knowledge between the architectures. The special case of self-distillation, where the network architectures are identical, has been observed to improve generalization accuracy. In this paper, we consider an iterative variant of self-distillation in a kernel regression setting, in which successive steps incorporate both model outputs and the ground-truth targets. This allows us to provide the first theoretical results on the importance of using the weighted ground-truth targets in self-distillation. Our focus is on fitting nonlinear functions to training data with a weighted mean square error objective function suitable for distillation, subject to ell_2 regularization of the model parameters. We show that any such function obtained with self-distillation can be calculated directly as a function of the initial fit, and that infinite distillation steps yields the same optimization problem as the original with amplified regularization. Furthermore, we provide a closed form solution for the optimal choice of weighting parameter at each step, and show how to efficiently estimate this weighting parameter for deep learning and significantly reduce the computational requirements compared to a grid search.

Proximal operators are ubiquitous in inverse problems, commonly appearing as part of algorithmic strategies to regularize problems that are otherwise ill-posed. Modern deep learning models have been brought to bear for these tasks too, as in the framework of plug-and-play or deep unrolling, where they loosely resemble proximal operators. Yet, something essential is lost in employing these purely data-driven approaches: there is no guarantee that a general deep network represents the proximal operator of any function, nor is there any characterization of the function for which the network might provide some approximate proximal. This not only makes guaranteeing convergence of iterative schemes challenging but, more fundamentally, complicates the analysis of what has been learned by these networks about their training data. Herein we provide a framework to develop learned proximal networks (LPN), prove that they provide exact proximal operators for a data-driven nonconvex regularizer, and show how a new training strategy, dubbed proximal matching, provably promotes the recovery of the log-prior of the true data distribution. Such LPN provide general, unsupervised, expressive proximal operators that can be used for general inverse problems with convergence guarantees. We illustrate our results in a series of cases of increasing complexity, demonstrating that these models not only result in state-of-the-art performance, but provide a window into the resulting priors learned from data.

The conventional wisdom behind learning deep classification models is to focus on bad-classified examples and ignore well-classified examples that are far from the decision boundary. For instance, when training with cross-entropy loss, examples with higher likelihoods (i.e., well-classified examples) contribute smaller gradients in back-propagation. However, we theoretically show that this common practice hinders representation learning, energy optimization, and margin growth. To counteract this deficiency, we propose to reward well-classified examples with additive bonuses to revive their contribution to the learning process. This counterexample theoretically addresses these three issues. We empirically support this claim by directly verifying the theoretical results or significant performance improvement with our counterexample on diverse tasks, including image classification, graph classification, and machine translation. Furthermore, this paper shows that we can deal with complex scenarios, such as imbalanced classification, OOD detection, and applications under adversarial attacks because our idea can solve these three issues. Code is available at: https://github.com/lancopku/well-classified-examples-are-underestimated.

We investigate methods for combining multiple self-supervised tasks--i.e., supervised tasks where data can be collected without manual labeling--in order to train a single visual representation. First, we provide an apples-to-apples comparison of four different self-supervised tasks using the very deep ResNet-101 architecture. We then combine tasks to jointly train a network. We also explore lasso regularization to encourage the network to factorize the information in its representation, and methods for "harmonizing" network inputs in order to learn a more unified representation. We evaluate all methods on ImageNet classification, PASCAL VOC detection, and NYU depth prediction. Our results show that deeper networks work better, and that combining tasks--even via a naive multi-head architecture--always improves performance. Our best joint network nearly matches the PASCAL performance of a model pre-trained on ImageNet classification, and matches the ImageNet network on NYU depth prediction.

Nearly all practical neural models for classification are trained using cross-entropy loss. Yet this ubiquitous choice is supported by little theoretical or empirical evidence. Recent work (Hui & Belkin, 2020) suggests that training using the (rescaled) square loss is often superior in terms of the classification accuracy. In this paper we propose the "squentropy" loss, which is the sum of two terms: the cross-entropy loss and the average square loss over the incorrect classes. We provide an extensive set of experiments on multi-class classification problems showing that the squentropy loss outperforms both the pure cross entropy and rescaled square losses in terms of the classification accuracy. We also demonstrate that it provides significantly better model calibration than either of these alternative losses and, furthermore, has less variance with respect to the random initialization. Additionally, in contrast to the square loss, squentropy loss can typically be trained using exactly the same optimization parameters, including the learning rate, as the standard cross-entropy loss, making it a true "plug-and-play" replacement. Finally, unlike the rescaled square loss, multiclass squentropy contains no parameters that need to be adjusted.

Existing losses used in deep metric learning (DML) for image retrieval often lead to highly non-uniform intra-class and inter-class representation structures across test classes and data distributions. When combined with the common practice of using a fixed threshold to declare a match, this gives rise to significant performance variations in terms of false accept rate (FAR) and false reject rate (FRR) across test classes and data distributions. We define this issue in DML as threshold inconsistency. In real-world applications, such inconsistency often complicates the threshold selection process when deploying commercial image retrieval systems. To measure this inconsistency, we propose a novel variance-based metric called Operating-Point-Inconsistency-Score (OPIS) that quantifies the variance in the operating characteristics across classes. Using the OPIS metric, we find that achieving high accuracy levels in a DML model does not automatically guarantee threshold consistency. In fact, our investigation reveals a Pareto frontier in the high-accuracy regime, where existing methods to improve accuracy often lead to degradation in threshold consistency. To address this trade-off, we introduce the Threshold-Consistent Margin (TCM) loss, a simple yet effective regularization technique that promotes uniformity in representation structures across classes by selectively penalizing hard sample pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate TCM's effectiveness in enhancing threshold consistency while preserving accuracy, simplifying the threshold selection process in practical DML settings.

Self-distillation (SD) is the process of first training a teacher model and then using its predictions to train a student model with the same architecture. Specifically, the student's objective function is big(xi*ell(teacher's predictions, student's predictions) + (1-xi)*ell(given labels, student's predictions)big), where ell is some loss function and xi is some parameter in [0,1]. Empirically, SD has been observed to provide performance gains in several settings. In this paper, we theoretically characterize the effect of SD in two supervised learning problems with noisy labels. We first analyze SD for regularized linear regression and show that in the high label noise regime, the optimal value of xi that minimizes the expected error in estimating the ground truth parameter is surprisingly greater than 1. Empirically, we show that xi > 1 works better than xi leq 1 even with the cross-entropy loss for several classification datasets when 50\% or 30\% of the labels are corrupted. Further, we quantify when optimal SD is better than optimal regularization. Next, we analyze SD in the case of logistic regression for binary classification with random label corruption and quantify the range of label corruption in which the student outperforms the teacher in terms of accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first result of its kind for the cross-entropy loss.

We propose a novel framework for incorporating unlabeled data into semi-supervised classification problems, where scenarios involving the minimization of either i) adversarially robust or ii) non-robust loss functions have been considered. Notably, we allow the unlabeled samples to deviate slightly (in total variation sense) from the in-domain distribution. The core idea behind our framework is to combine Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) with self-supervised training. As a result, we also leverage efficient polynomial-time algorithms for the training stage. From a theoretical standpoint, we apply our framework on the classification problem of a mixture of two Gaussians in R^d, where in addition to the m independent and labeled samples from the true distribution, a set of n (usually with ngg m) out of domain and unlabeled samples are given as well. Using only the labeled data, it is known that the generalization error can be bounded by proptoleft(d/mright)^{1/2}. However, using our method on both isotropic and non-isotropic Gaussian mixture models, one can derive a new set of analytically explicit and non-asymptotic bounds which show substantial improvement on the generalization error compared to ERM. Our results underscore two significant insights: 1) out-of-domain samples, even when unlabeled, can be harnessed to narrow the generalization gap, provided that the true data distribution adheres to a form of the ``cluster assumption", and 2) the semi-supervised learning paradigm can be regarded as a special case of our framework when there are no distributional shifts. We validate our claims through experiments conducted on a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets.

It is impossible today to pretend that the practice of machine learning is compatible with the idea that training and testing data follow the same distribution. Several authors have recently used ensemble techniques to show how scenarios involving multiple data distributions are best served by representations that are both richer than those obtained by regularizing for the best in-distribution performance, and richer than those obtained under the influence of the implicit sparsity bias of common stochastic gradient procedures. This contribution investigates the use of very high dropout rates instead of ensembles to obtain such rich representations. Although training a deep network from scratch using such dropout rates is virtually impossible, fine-tuning a large pre-trained model under such conditions is not only possible but also achieves out-of-distribution performances that exceed those of both ensembles and weight averaging methods such as model soups. This result has practical significance because the importance of the fine-tuning scenario has considerably grown in recent years. This result also provides interesting insights on the nature of rich representations and on the intrinsically linear nature of fine-tuning a large network using a comparatively small dataset.

In neural Information Retrieval, ongoing research is directed towards improving the first retriever in ranking pipelines. Learning dense embeddings to conduct retrieval using efficient approximate nearest neighbors methods has proven to work well. Meanwhile, there has been a growing interest in learning sparse representations for documents and queries, that could inherit from the desirable properties of bag-of-words models such as the exact matching of terms and the efficiency of inverted indexes. In this work, we present a new first-stage ranker based on explicit sparsity regularization and a log-saturation effect on term weights, leading to highly sparse representations and competitive results with respect to state-of-the-art dense and sparse methods. Our approach is simple, trained end-to-end in a single stage. We also explore the trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency, by controlling the contribution of the sparsity regularization.

We present AERO, a audio super-resolution model that processes speech and music signals in the spectral domain. AERO is based on an encoder-decoder architecture with U-Net like skip connections. We optimize the model using both time and frequency domain loss functions. Specifically, we consider a set of reconstruction losses together with perceptual ones in the form of adversarial and feature discriminator loss functions. To better handle phase information the proposed method operates over the complex-valued spectrogram using two separate channels. Unlike prior work which mainly considers low and high frequency concatenation for audio super-resolution, the proposed method directly predicts the full frequency range. We demonstrate high performance across a wide range of sample rates considering both speech and music. AERO outperforms the evaluated baselines considering Log-Spectral Distance, ViSQOL, and the subjective MUSHRA test. Audio samples and code are available at https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/aero

Deep learning classifiers face significant challenges when dealing with heterogeneous multi-modal and multi-organ biomedical datasets. The low-level feature distinguishability limited to imaging-modality hinders the classifiers' ability to learn high-level semantic relationships, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, image augmentation strategies are employed as regularization techniques. While additive noise input during network training is a well-established augmentation as regularization method, modern pipelines often favor more robust techniques such as dropout and weight decay. This preference stems from the observation that combining these established techniques with noise input can adversely affect model performance. In this study, we propose a novel pretraining pipeline that learns to generate conditional noise mask specifically tailored to improve performance on multi-modal and multi-organ datasets. As a reinforcement learning algorithm, our approach employs a dual-component system comprising a very light-weight policy network that learns to sample conditional noise using a differentiable beta distribution as well as a classifier network. The policy network is trained using the reinforce algorithm to generate image-specific noise masks that regularize the classifier during pretraining. A key aspect is that the policy network's role is limited to obtaining an intermediate (or heated) model before fine-tuning. During inference, the policy network is omitted, allowing direct comparison between the baseline and noise-regularized models. We conducted experiments and related analyses on RadImageNet datasets. Results demonstrate that fine-tuning the intermediate models consistently outperforms conventional training algorithms on both classification and generalization to unseen concept tasks.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is a critical ability for deep learning models in many real-world scenarios including healthcare and autonomous vehicles. Recently, different techniques have been proposed to improve OOD generalization. Among these methods, gradient-based regularizers have shown promising performance compared with other competitors. Despite this success, our understanding of the role of Hessian and gradient alignment in domain generalization is still limited. To address this shortcoming, we analyze the role of the classifier's head Hessian matrix and gradient in domain generalization using recent OOD theory of transferability. Theoretically, we show that spectral norm between the classifier's head Hessian matrices across domains is an upper bound of the transfer measure, a notion of distance between target and source domains. Furthermore, we analyze all the attributes that get aligned when we encourage similarity between Hessians and gradients. Our analysis explains the success of many regularizers like CORAL, IRM, V-REx, Fish, IGA, and Fishr as they regularize part of the classifier's head Hessian and/or gradient. Finally, we propose two simple yet effective methods to match the classifier's head Hessians and gradients in an efficient way, based on the Hessian Gradient Product (HGP) and Hutchinson's method (Hutchinson), and without directly calculating Hessians. We validate the OOD generalization ability of proposed methods in different scenarios, including transferability, severe correlation shift, label shift and diversity shift. Our results show that Hessian alignment methods achieve promising performance on various OOD benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Federated-Learning/tree/main/HessianAlignment.

Recent domain generalization (DG) approaches typically use the hypothesis learned on source domains for inference on the unseen target domain. However, such a hypothesis can be arbitrarily far from the optimal one for the target domain, induced by a gap termed ``adaptivity gap''. Without exploiting the domain information from the unseen test samples, adaptivity gap estimation and minimization are intractable, which hinders us to robustify a model to any unknown distribution. In this paper, we first establish a generalization bound that explicitly considers the adaptivity gap. Our bound motivates two strategies to reduce the gap: the first one is ensembling multiple classifiers to enrich the hypothesis space, then we propose effective gap estimation methods for guiding the selection of a better hypothesis for the target. The other method is minimizing the gap directly by adapting model parameters using online target samples. We thus propose Domain-specific Risk Minimization (DRM). During training, DRM models the distributions of different source domains separately; for inference, DRM performs online model steering using the source hypothesis for each arriving target sample. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DRM for domain generalization with the following advantages: 1) it significantly outperforms competitive baselines on different distributional shift settings; 2) it achieves either comparable or superior accuracies on all source domains compared to vanilla empirical risk minimization; 3) it remains simple and efficient during training, and 4) it is complementary to invariant learning approaches.

In this paper we propose to study generalization of neural networks on small algorithmically generated datasets. In this setting, questions about data efficiency, memorization, generalization, and speed of learning can be studied in great detail. In some situations we show that neural networks learn through a process of "grokking" a pattern in the data, improving generalization performance from random chance level to perfect generalization, and that this improvement in generalization can happen well past the point of overfitting. We also study generalization as a function of dataset size and find that smaller datasets require increasing amounts of optimization for generalization. We argue that these datasets provide a fertile ground for studying a poorly understood aspect of deep learning: generalization of overparametrized neural networks beyond memorization of the finite training dataset.

Much research in machine learning involves finding appropriate inductive biases (e.g. convolutional neural networks, momentum-based optimizers, transformers) to promote generalization on tasks. However, quantification of the amount of inductive bias associated with these architectures and hyperparameters has been limited. We propose a novel method for efficiently computing the inductive bias required for generalization on a task with a fixed training data budget; formally, this corresponds to the amount of information required to specify well-generalizing models within a specific hypothesis space of models. Our approach involves modeling the loss distribution of random hypotheses drawn from a hypothesis space to estimate the required inductive bias for a task relative to these hypotheses. Unlike prior work, our method provides a direct estimate of inductive bias without using bounds and is applicable to diverse hypothesis spaces. Moreover, we derive approximation error bounds for our estimation approach in terms of the number of sampled hypotheses. Consistent with prior results, our empirical results demonstrate that higher dimensional tasks require greater inductive bias. We show that relative to other expressive model classes, neural networks as a model class encode large amounts of inductive bias. Furthermore, our measure quantifies the relative difference in inductive bias between different neural network architectures. Our proposed inductive bias metric provides an information-theoretic interpretation of the benefits of specific model architectures for certain tasks and provides a quantitative guide to developing tasks requiring greater inductive bias, thereby encouraging the development of more powerful inductive biases.

Parameter regularization or allocation methods are effective in overcoming catastrophic forgetting in lifelong learning. However, they solve all tasks in a sequence uniformly and ignore the differences in the learning difficulty of different tasks. So parameter regularization methods face significant forgetting when learning a new task very different from learned tasks, and parameter allocation methods face unnecessary parameter overhead when learning simple tasks. In this paper, we propose the Parameter Allocation & Regularization (PAR), which adaptively select an appropriate strategy for each task from parameter allocation and regularization based on its learning difficulty. A task is easy for a model that has learned tasks related to it and vice versa. We propose a divergence estimation method based on the Nearest-Prototype distance to measure the task relatedness using only features of the new task. Moreover, we propose a time-efficient relatedness-aware sampling-based architecture search strategy to reduce the parameter overhead for allocation. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that, compared with SOTAs, our method is scalable and significantly reduces the model's redundancy while improving the model's performance. Further qualitative analysis indicates that PAR obtains reasonable task-relatedness.

In deep learning, often the training process finds an interpolator (a solution with 0 training loss), but the test loss is still low. This phenomenon, known as benign overfitting, is a major mystery that received a lot of recent attention. One common mechanism for benign overfitting is implicit regularization, where the training process leads to additional properties for the interpolator, often characterized by minimizing certain norms. However, even for a simple sparse linear regression problem y = beta^{*top} x +xi with sparse beta^*, neither minimum ell_1 or ell_2 norm interpolator gives the optimal test loss. In this work, we give a different parametrization of the model which leads to a new implicit regularization effect that combines the benefit of ell_1 and ell_2 interpolators. We show that training our new model via gradient descent leads to an interpolator with near-optimal test loss. Our result is based on careful analysis of the training dynamics and provides another example of implicit regularization effect that goes beyond norm minimization.

Machine Unlearning (MU) is critical for enhancing privacy and security in deep learning models, particularly in large multimodal language models (MLLMs), by removing specific private or hazardous information. While MU has made significant progress in textual and visual modalities, multimodal unlearning (MMU) remains significantly underexplored, partially due to the absence of a suitable open-source benchmark. To address this, we introduce CLEAR, a new benchmark designed to evaluate MMU methods. CLEAR contains 200 fictitious individuals and 3,700 images linked with corresponding question-answer pairs, enabling a thorough evaluation across modalities. We assess 10 MU methods, adapting them for MMU, and highlight new challenges specific to multimodal forgetting. We also demonstrate that simple ell_1 regularization on LoRA weights significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting, preserving model performance on retained data. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/therem/CLEAR

Quantization has become a popular technique to compress neural networks and reduce compute cost, but most prior work focuses on studying quantization without changing the network size. Many real-world applications of neural networks have compute cost and memory budgets, which can be traded off with model quality by changing the number of parameters. In this work, we use ResNet as a case study to systematically investigate the effects of quantization on inference compute cost-quality tradeoff curves. Our results suggest that for each bfloat16 ResNet model, there are quantized models with lower cost and higher accuracy; in other words, the bfloat16 compute cost-quality tradeoff curve is Pareto-dominated by the 4-bit and 8-bit curves, with models primarily quantized to 4-bit yielding the best Pareto curve. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art results on ImageNet for 4-bit ResNet-50 with quantization-aware training, obtaining a top-1 eval accuracy of 77.09%. We demonstrate the regularizing effect of quantization by measuring the generalization gap. The quantization method we used is optimized for practicality: It requires little tuning and is designed with hardware capabilities in mind. Our work motivates further research into optimal numeric formats for quantization, as well as the development of machine learning accelerators supporting these formats. As part of this work, we contribute a quantization library written in JAX, which is open-sourced at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/aqt.

Robust loss functions are essential for training accurate deep neural networks (DNNs) in the presence of noisy (incorrect) labels. It has been shown that the commonly used Cross Entropy (CE) loss is not robust to noisy labels. Whilst new loss functions have been designed, they are only partially robust. In this paper, we theoretically show by applying a simple normalization that: any loss can be made robust to noisy labels. However, in practice, simply being robust is not sufficient for a loss function to train accurate DNNs. By investigating several robust loss functions, we find that they suffer from a problem of underfitting. To address this, we propose a framework to build robust loss functions called Active Passive Loss (APL). APL combines two robust loss functions that mutually boost each other. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the family of new loss functions created by our APL framework can consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods by large margins, especially under large noise rates such as 60% or 80% incorrect labels.

Recently, flat minima are proven to be effective for improving generalization and sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) achieves state-of-the-art performance. Yet the current definition of flatness discussed in SAM and its follow-ups are limited to the zeroth-order flatness (i.e., the worst-case loss within a perturbation radius). We show that the zeroth-order flatness can be insufficient to discriminate minima with low generalization error from those with high generalization error both when there is a single minimum or multiple minima within the given perturbation radius. Thus we present first-order flatness, a stronger measure of flatness focusing on the maximal gradient norm within a perturbation radius which bounds both the maximal eigenvalue of Hessian at local minima and the regularization function of SAM. We also present a novel training procedure named Gradient norm Aware Minimization (GAM) to seek minima with uniformly small curvature across all directions. Experimental results show that GAM improves the generalization of models trained with current optimizers such as SGD and AdamW on various datasets and networks. Furthermore, we show that GAM can help SAM find flatter minima and achieve better generalization.

The extensive need for computational resources poses a significant obstacle to deploying large-scale Deep Neural Networks (DNN) on devices with constrained resources. At the same time, studies have demonstrated that a significant number of these DNN parameters are redundant and extraneous. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for learning structured sparse neural networks, aimed at bridging the DNN hardware deployment challenges. We develop a novel regularization technique, termed Weighted Group Sparse Envelope Function (WGSEF), generalizing the Sparse Envelop Function (SEF), to select (or nullify) neuron groups, thereby reducing redundancy and enhancing computational efficiency. The method speeds up inference time and aims to reduce memory demand and power consumption, thanks to its adaptability which lets any hardware specify group definitions, such as filters, channels, filter shapes, layer depths, a single parameter (unstructured), etc. The properties of the WGSEF enable the pre-definition of a desired sparsity level to be achieved at the training convergence. In the case of redundant parameters, this approach maintains negligible network accuracy degradation or can even lead to improvements in accuracy. Our method efficiently computes the WGSEF regularizer and its proximal operator, in a worst-case linear complexity relative to the number of group variables. Employing a proximal-gradient-based optimization technique, to train the model, it tackles the non-convex minimization problem incorporating the neural network loss and the WGSEF. Finally, we experiment and illustrate the efficiency of our proposed method in terms of the compression ratio, accuracy, and inference latency.

Training deep neural networks is a challenging non-convex optimization problem. Recent work has proven that the strong duality holds (which means zero duality gap) for regularized finite-width two-layer ReLU networks and consequently provided an equivalent convex training problem. However, extending this result to deeper networks remains to be an open problem. In this paper, we prove that the duality gap for deeper linear networks with vector outputs is non-zero. In contrast, we show that the zero duality gap can be obtained by stacking standard deep networks in parallel, which we call a parallel architecture, and modifying the regularization. Therefore, we prove the strong duality and existence of equivalent convex problems that enable globally optimal training of deep networks. As a by-product of our analysis, we demonstrate that the weight decay regularization on the network parameters explicitly encourages low-rank solutions via closed-form expressions. In addition, we show that strong duality holds for three-layer standard ReLU networks given rank-1 data matrices.

We propose the Wasserstein Auto-Encoder (WAE)---a new algorithm for building a generative model of the data distribution. WAE minimizes a penalized form of the Wasserstein distance between the model distribution and the target distribution, which leads to a different regularizer than the one used by the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). This regularizer encourages the encoded training distribution to match the prior. We compare our algorithm with several other techniques and show that it is a generalization of adversarial auto-encoders (AAE). Our experiments show that WAE shares many of the properties of VAEs (stable training, encoder-decoder architecture, nice latent manifold structure) while generating samples of better quality, as measured by the FID score.

We derive a simple and model-independent formula for the change in the generalization gap due to a gradient descent update. We then compare the change in the test error for stochastic gradient descent to the change in test error from an equivalent number of gradient descent updates and show explicitly that stochastic gradient descent acts to regularize generalization error by decorrelating nearby updates. These calculations depends on the details of the model only through the mean and covariance of the gradient distribution, which may be readily measured for particular models of interest. We discuss further improvements to these calculations and comment on possible implications for stochastic optimization.

Dropout is a simple but efficient regularization technique for achieving better generalization of deep neural networks (DNNs); hence it is widely used in tasks based on DNNs. During training, dropout randomly discards a portion of the neurons to avoid overfitting. This paper presents an enhanced dropout technique, which we call multi-sample dropout, for both accelerating training and improving generalization over the original dropout. The original dropout creates a randomly selected subset (called a dropout sample) from the input in each training iteration while the multi-sample dropout creates multiple dropout samples. The loss is calculated for each sample, and then the sample losses are averaged to obtain the final loss. This technique can be easily implemented by duplicating a part of the network after the dropout layer while sharing the weights among the duplicated fully connected layers. Experimental results using image classification tasks including ImageNet, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 showed that multi-sample dropout accelerates training. Moreover, the networks trained using multi-sample dropout achieved lower error rates compared to networks trained with the original dropout. The additional computation cost due to the duplicated operations is not significant for deep convolutional networks because most of the computation time is consumed in the convolution layers before the dropout layer, which are not duplicated.

Grokking, the sudden generalization that occurs after prolonged overfitting, is a surprising phenomenon challenging our understanding of deep learning. Although significant progress has been made in understanding grokking, the reasons behind the delayed generalization and its dependence on regularization remain unclear. In this work, we argue that without regularization, grokking tasks push models to the edge of numerical stability, introducing floating point errors in the Softmax function, which we refer to as Softmax Collapse (SC). We demonstrate that SC prevents grokking and that mitigating SC enables grokking without regularization. Investigating the root cause of SC, we find that beyond the point of overfitting, the gradients strongly align with what we call the na\"ive loss minimization (NLM) direction. This component of the gradient does not alter the model's predictions but decreases the loss by scaling the logits, typically by scaling the weights along their current direction. We show that this scaling of the logits explains the delay in generalization characteristic of grokking and eventually leads to SC, halting further learning. To validate our hypotheses, we introduce two key contributions that address the challenges in grokking tasks: StableMax, a new activation function that prevents SC and enables grokking without regularization, and perpGrad, a training algorithm that promotes quick generalization in grokking tasks by preventing NLM altogether. These contributions provide new insights into grokking, elucidating its delayed generalization, reliance on regularization, and the effectiveness of existing grokking-inducing methods. Code for this paper is available at https://github.com/LucasPrietoAl/grokking-at-the-edge-of-numerical-stability.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool rivaling GANs in generating high-quality samples with improved fidelity, flexibility, and robustness. A key component of these models is to learn the score function through score matching. Despite empirical success on various tasks, it remains unclear whether gradient-based algorithms can learn the score function with a provable accuracy. As a first step toward answering this question, this paper establishes a mathematical framework for analyzing score estimation using neural networks trained by gradient descent. Our analysis covers both the optimization and the generalization aspects of the learning procedure. In particular, we propose a parametric form to formulate the denoising score-matching problem as a regression with noisy labels. Compared to the standard supervised learning setup, the score-matching problem introduces distinct challenges, including unbounded input, vector-valued output, and an additional time variable, preventing existing techniques from being applied directly. In this paper, we show that with proper designs, the evolution of neural networks during training can be accurately modeled by a series of kernel regression tasks. Furthermore, by applying an early-stopping rule for gradient descent and leveraging recent developments in neural tangent kernels, we establish the first generalization error (sample complexity) bounds for learning the score function with neural networks, despite the presence of noise in the observations. Our analysis is grounded in a novel parametric form of the neural network and an innovative connection between score matching and regression analysis, facilitating the application of advanced statistical and optimization techniques.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, represented by LoRA, play an essential role in adapting large-scale pre-trained models to downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning LoRA-series models also faces the risk of overfitting on the training dataset, and yet there's still a lack of theoretical guidance and practical mechanism to control overfitting on LoRA-based PEFT methods. In this paper, we propose a LoRA Dropout mechanism for the LoRA-based methods by introducing random noises to the learnable low-rank matrices and increasing parameter sparsity. We then demonstrate the theoretical mechanism of our LoRA Dropout mechanism from the perspective of sparsity regularization by providing a generalization error bound under this framework. Theoretical results show that appropriate sparsity would help tighten the gap between empirical and generalization risks and thereby control overfitting. Furthermore, based on the LoRA Dropout framework, we introduce a test-time ensemble strategy and provide theoretical evidence demonstrating that the ensemble method can further compress the error bound, and lead to better performance during inference time. Extensive experiments on various NLP tasks provide practical validations of the effectiveness of our LoRA Dropout framework in improving model accuracy and calibration.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) trained for image denoising are able to generate high-quality samples with score-based reverse diffusion algorithms. These impressive capabilities seem to imply an escape from the curse of dimensionality, but recent reports of memorization of the training set raise the question of whether these networks are learning the "true" continuous density of the data. Here, we show that two DNNs trained on non-overlapping subsets of a dataset learn nearly the same score function, and thus the same density, when the number of training images is large enough. In this regime of strong generalization, diffusion-generated images are distinct from the training set, and are of high visual quality, suggesting that the inductive biases of the DNNs are well-aligned with the data density. We analyze the learned denoising functions and show that the inductive biases give rise to a shrinkage operation in a basis adapted to the underlying image. Examination of these bases reveals oscillating harmonic structures along contours and in homogeneous regions. We demonstrate that trained denoisers are inductively biased towards these geometry-adaptive harmonic bases since they arise not only when the network is trained on photographic images, but also when it is trained on image classes supported on low-dimensional manifolds for which the harmonic basis is suboptimal. Finally, we show that when trained on regular image classes for which the optimal basis is known to be geometry-adaptive and harmonic, the denoising performance of the networks is near-optimal.

There are two widely known issues with properly training Recurrent Neural Networks, the vanishing and the exploding gradient problems detailed in Bengio et al. (1994). In this paper we attempt to improve the understanding of the underlying issues by exploring these problems from an analytical, a geometric and a dynamical systems perspective. Our analysis is used to justify a simple yet effective solution. We propose a gradient norm clipping strategy to deal with exploding gradients and a soft constraint for the vanishing gradients problem. We validate empirically our hypothesis and proposed solutions in the experimental section.

We provide a new efficient version of the backpropagation algorithm, specialized to the case where the weights of the neural network being trained are sparse. Our algorithm is general, as it applies to arbitrary (unstructured) sparsity and common layer types (e.g., convolutional or linear). We provide a fast vectorized implementation on commodity CPUs, and show that it can yield speedups in end-to-end runtime experiments, both in transfer learning using already-sparsified networks, and in training sparse networks from scratch. Thus, our results provide the first support for sparse training on commodity hardware.

Domain adversarial training has been ubiquitous for achieving invariant representations and is used widely for various domain adaptation tasks. In recent times, methods converging to smooth optima have shown improved generalization for supervised learning tasks like classification. In this work, we analyze the effect of smoothness enhancing formulations on domain adversarial training, the objective of which is a combination of task loss (eg. classification, regression, etc.) and adversarial terms. We find that converging to a smooth minima with respect to (w.r.t.) task loss stabilizes the adversarial training leading to better performance on target domain. In contrast to task loss, our analysis shows that converging to smooth minima w.r.t. adversarial loss leads to sub-optimal generalization on the target domain. Based on the analysis, we introduce the Smooth Domain Adversarial Training (SDAT) procedure, which effectively enhances the performance of existing domain adversarial methods for both classification and object detection tasks. Our analysis also provides insight into the extensive usage of SGD over Adam in the community for domain adversarial training.

The asymptotically precise estimation of the generalization of kernel methods has recently received attention due to the parallels between neural networks and their associated kernels. However, prior works derive such estimates for training by kernel ridge regression (KRR), whereas neural networks are typically trained with gradient descent (GD). In the present work, we consider the training of kernels with a family of spectral algorithms specified by profile h(lambda), and including KRR and GD as special cases. Then, we derive the generalization error as a functional of learning profile h(lambda) for two data models: high-dimensional Gaussian and low-dimensional translation-invariant model. Under power-law assumptions on the spectrum of the kernel and target, we use our framework to (i) give full loss asymptotics for both noisy and noiseless observations (ii) show that the loss localizes on certain spectral scales, giving a new perspective on the KRR saturation phenomenon (iii) conjecture, and demonstrate for the considered data models, the universality of the loss w.r.t. non-spectral details of the problem, but only in case of noisy observation.

There is a widely-spread claim that GANs are difficult to train, and GAN architectures in the literature are littered with empirical tricks. We provide evidence against this claim and build a modern GAN baseline in a more principled manner. First, we derive a well-behaved regularized relativistic GAN loss that addresses issues of mode dropping and non-convergence that were previously tackled via a bag of ad-hoc tricks. We analyze our loss mathematically and prove that it admits local convergence guarantees, unlike most existing relativistic losses. Second, our new loss allows us to discard all ad-hoc tricks and replace outdated backbones used in common GANs with modern architectures. Using StyleGAN2 as an example, we present a roadmap of simplification and modernization that results in a new minimalist baseline -- R3GAN. Despite being simple, our approach surpasses StyleGAN2 on FFHQ, ImageNet, CIFAR, and Stacked MNIST datasets, and compares favorably against state-of-the-art GANs and diffusion models.

We develop an analytical framework to characterize the set of optimal ReLU neural networks by reformulating the non-convex training problem as a convex program. We show that the global optima of the convex parameterization are given by a polyhedral set and then extend this characterization to the optimal set of the non-convex training objective. Since all stationary points of the ReLU training problem can be represented as optima of sub-sampled convex programs, our work provides a general expression for all critical points of the non-convex objective. We then leverage our results to provide an optimal pruning algorithm for computing minimal networks, establish conditions for the regularization path of ReLU networks to be continuous, and develop sensitivity results for minimal ReLU networks.

Sparsely gated Mixture of Experts (MoE) models have been shown to be a compute-efficient method to scale model capacity for multilingual machine translation. However, for low-resource tasks, MoE models severely over-fit. We show effective regularization strategies, namely dropout techniques for MoE layers in EOM and FOM, Conditional MoE Routing and Curriculum Learning methods that prevent over-fitting and improve the performance of MoE models on low-resource tasks without adversely affecting high-resource tasks. On a massively multilingual machine translation benchmark, our strategies result in about +1 chrF++ improvement in very low resource language pairs. We perform an extensive analysis of the learned MoE routing to better understand the impact of our regularization methods and how we can improve them.

We study a family of loss functions named label-distributionally robust (LDR) losses for multi-class classification that are formulated from distributionally robust optimization (DRO) perspective, where the uncertainty in the given label information are modeled and captured by taking the worse case of distributional weights. The benefits of this perspective are several fold: (i) it provides a unified framework to explain the classical cross-entropy (CE) loss and SVM loss and their variants, (ii) it includes a special family corresponding to the temperature-scaled CE loss, which is widely adopted but poorly understood; (iii) it allows us to achieve adaptivity to the uncertainty degree of label information at an instance level. Our contributions include: (1) we study both consistency and robustness by establishing top-k (forall kgeq 1) consistency of LDR losses for multi-class classification, and a negative result that a top-1 consistent and symmetric robust loss cannot achieve top-k consistency simultaneously for all kgeq 2; (2) we propose a new adaptive LDR loss that automatically adapts the individualized temperature parameter to the noise degree of class label of each instance; (3) we demonstrate stable and competitive performance for the proposed adaptive LDR loss on 7 benchmark datasets under 6 noisy label and 1 clean settings against 13 loss functions, and on one real-world noisy dataset. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Optimization-AI/ICML2023_LDR.

Policy optimization methods are popular reinforcement learning algorithms in practice. Recent works have built theoretical foundation for them by proving T regret bounds even when the losses are adversarial. Such bounds are tight in the worst case but often overly pessimistic. In this work, we show that in tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs), by properly designing the regularizer, the exploration bonus and the learning rates, one can achieve a more favorable polylog(T) regret when the losses are stochastic, without sacrificing the worst-case guarantee in the adversarial regime. To our knowledge, this is also the first time a gap-dependent polylog(T) regret bound is shown for policy optimization. Specifically, we achieve this by leveraging a Tsallis entropy or a Shannon entropy regularizer in the policy update. Then we show that under known transitions, we can further obtain a first-order regret bound in the adversarial regime by leveraging the log-barrier regularizer.

Diffusion models are known to be vulnerable to outliers in training data. In this paper we study an alternative diffusion loss function, which can preserve the high quality of generated data like the original squared L_{2} loss while at the same time being robust to outliers. We propose to use pseudo-Huber loss function with a time-dependent parameter to allow for the trade-off between robustness on the most vulnerable early reverse-diffusion steps and fine details restoration on the final steps. We show that pseudo-Huber loss with the time-dependent parameter exhibits better performance on corrupted datasets in both image and audio domains. In addition, the loss function we propose can potentially help diffusion models to resist dataset corruption while not requiring data filtering or purification compared to conventional training algorithms.

Dynamic model pruning is a recent direction that allows for the inference of a different sub-network for each input sample during deployment. However, current dynamic methods rely on learning a continuous channel gating through regularization by inducing sparsity loss. This formulation introduces complexity in balancing different losses (e.g task loss, regularization loss). In addition, regularization based methods lack transparent tradeoff hyperparameter selection to realize a computational budget. Our contribution is two-fold: 1) decoupled task and pruning losses. 2) Simple hyperparameter selection that enables FLOPs reduction estimation before training. Inspired by the Hebbian theory in Neuroscience: "neurons that fire together wire together", we propose to predict a mask to process k filters in a layer based on the activation of its previous layer. We pose the problem as a self-supervised binary classification problem. Each mask predictor module is trained to predict if the log-likelihood for each filter in the current layer belongs to the top-k activated filters. The value k is dynamically estimated for each input based on a novel criterion using the mass of heatmaps. We show experiments on several neural architectures, such as VGG, ResNet and MobileNet on CIFAR and ImageNet datasets. On CIFAR, we reach similar accuracy to SOTA methods with 15% and 24% higher FLOPs reduction. Similarly in ImageNet, we achieve lower drop in accuracy with up to 13% improvement in FLOPs reduction.

This paper provides a pair similarity optimization viewpoint on deep feature learning, aiming to maximize the within-class similarity s_p and minimize the between-class similarity s_n. We find a majority of loss functions, including the triplet loss and the softmax plus cross-entropy loss, embed s_n and s_p into similarity pairs and seek to reduce (s_n-s_p). Such an optimization manner is inflexible, because the penalty strength on every single similarity score is restricted to be equal. Our intuition is that if a similarity score deviates far from the optimum, it should be emphasized. To this end, we simply re-weight each similarity to highlight the less-optimized similarity scores. It results in a Circle loss, which is named due to its circular decision boundary. The Circle loss has a unified formula for two elemental deep feature learning approaches, i.e. learning with class-level labels and pair-wise labels. Analytically, we show that the Circle loss offers a more flexible optimization approach towards a more definite convergence target, compared with the loss functions optimizing (s_n-s_p). Experimentally, we demonstrate the superiority of the Circle loss on a variety of deep feature learning tasks. On face recognition, person re-identification, as well as several fine-grained image retrieval datasets, the achieved performance is on par with the state of the art.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a class of deep generative models which aim to learn a target distribution in an unsupervised fashion. While they were successfully applied to many problems, training a GAN is a notoriously challenging task and requires a significant number of hyperparameter tuning, neural architecture engineering, and a non-trivial amount of "tricks". The success in many practical applications coupled with the lack of a measure to quantify the failure modes of GANs resulted in a plethora of proposed losses, regularization and normalization schemes, as well as neural architectures. In this work we take a sober view of the current state of GANs from a practical perspective. We discuss and evaluate common pitfalls and reproducibility issues, open-source our code on Github, and provide pre-trained models on TensorFlow Hub.

Recent work has shown that the training of a one-hidden-layer, scalar-output fully-connected ReLU neural network can be reformulated as a finite-dimensional convex program. Unfortunately, the scale of such a convex program grows exponentially in data size. In this work, we prove that a stochastic procedure with a linear complexity well approximates the exact formulation. Moreover, we derive a convex optimization approach to efficiently solve the "adversarial training" problem, which trains neural networks that are robust to adversarial input perturbations. Our method can be applied to binary classification and regression, and provides an alternative to the current adversarial training methods, such as Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). We demonstrate in experiments that the proposed method achieves a noticeably better adversarial robustness and performance than the existing methods.

Sample selection is a prevalent method in learning with noisy labels, where small-loss data are typically considered as correctly labeled data. However, this method may not effectively identify clean hard examples with large losses, which are critical for achieving the model's close-to-optimal generalization performance. In this paper, we propose a new framework, Late Stopping, which leverages the intrinsic robust learning ability of DNNs through a prolonged training process. Specifically, Late Stopping gradually shrinks the noisy dataset by removing high-probability mislabeled examples while retaining the majority of clean hard examples in the training set throughout the learning process. We empirically observe that mislabeled and clean examples exhibit differences in the number of epochs required for them to be consistently and correctly classified, and thus high-probability mislabeled examples can be removed. Experimental results on benchmark-simulated and real-world noisy datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts.

To improve how neural networks function it is crucial to understand their learning process. The information bottleneck theory of deep learning proposes that neural networks achieve good generalization by compressing their representations to disregard information that is not relevant to the task. However, empirical evidence for this theory is conflicting, as compression was only observed when networks used saturating activation functions. In contrast, networks with non-saturating activation functions achieved comparable levels of task performance but did not show compression. In this paper we developed more robust mutual information estimation techniques, that adapt to hidden activity of neural networks and produce more sensitive measurements of activations from all functions, especially unbounded functions. Using these adaptive estimation techniques, we explored compression in networks with a range of different activation functions. With two improved methods of estimation, firstly, we show that saturation of the activation function is not required for compression, and the amount of compression varies between different activation functions. We also find that there is a large amount of variation in compression between different network initializations. Secondary, we see that L2 regularization leads to significantly increased compression, while preventing overfitting. Finally, we show that only compression of the last layer is positively correlated with generalization.

Weight decay is a broadly used technique for training state-of-the-art deep networks from image classification to large language models. Despite its widespread usage and being extensively studied in the classical literature, its role remains poorly understood for deep learning. In this work, we highlight that the role of weight decay in modern deep learning is different from its regularization effect studied in classical learning theory. For deep networks on vision tasks trained with multipass SGD, we show how weight decay modifies the optimization dynamics enhancing the ever-present implicit regularization of SGD via the loss stabilization mechanism. In contrast, for large language models trained with nearly one-epoch training, we describe how weight decay balances the bias-variance tradeoff in stochastic optimization leading to lower training loss and improved training stability. Overall, we present a unifying perspective from ResNets on vision tasks to LLMs: weight decay is never useful as an explicit regularizer but instead changes the training dynamics in a desirable way. The code is available at https://github.com/tml-epfl/why-weight-decay

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in improving the interpretability of neural network activations, but can learn features that are not features of the input, limiting their effectiveness. We propose Mutual Feature Regularization (MFR), a regularization technique for improving feature learning by encouraging SAEs trained in parallel to learn similar features. We motivate MFR by showing that features learned by multiple SAEs are more likely to correlate with features of the input. By training on synthetic data with known features of the input, we show that MFR can help SAEs learn those features, as we can directly compare the features learned by the SAE with the input features for the synthetic data. We then scale MFR to SAEs that are trained to denoise electroencephalography (EEG) data and SAEs that are trained to reconstruct GPT-2 Small activations. We show that MFR can improve the reconstruction loss of SAEs by up to 21.21\% on GPT-2 Small, and 6.67\% on EEG data. Our results suggest that the similarity between features learned by different SAEs can be leveraged to improve SAE training, thereby enhancing performance and the usefulness of SAEs for model interpretability.

Despite the widespread empirical success of ResNet, the generalization properties of deep ResNet are rarely explored beyond the lazy training regime. In this work, we investigate scaled ResNet in the limit of infinitely deep and wide neural networks, of which the gradient flow is described by a partial differential equation in the large-neural network limit, i.e., the mean-field regime. To derive the generalization bounds under this setting, our analysis necessitates a shift from the conventional time-invariant Gram matrix employed in the lazy training regime to a time-variant, distribution-dependent version. To this end, we provide a global lower bound on the minimum eigenvalue of the Gram matrix under the mean-field regime. Besides, for the traceability of the dynamic of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, we establish the linear convergence of the empirical error and estimate the upper bound of the KL divergence over parameters distribution. Finally, we build the uniform convergence for generalization bound via Rademacher complexity. Our results offer new insights into the generalization ability of deep ResNet beyond the lazy training regime and contribute to advancing the understanding of the fundamental properties of deep neural networks.

Dropout is a widely utilized regularization technique in the training of neural networks, nevertheless, its underlying mechanism and its impact on achieving good generalization abilities remain poorly understood. In this work, we derive the stochastic modified equations for analyzing the dynamics of dropout, where its discrete iteration process is approximated by a class of stochastic differential equations. In order to investigate the underlying mechanism by which dropout facilitates the identification of flatter minima, we study the noise structure of the derived stochastic modified equation for dropout. By drawing upon the structural resemblance between the Hessian and covariance through several intuitive approximations, we empirically demonstrate the universal presence of the inverse variance-flatness relation and the Hessian-variance relation, throughout the training process of dropout. These theoretical and empirical findings make a substantial contribution to our understanding of the inherent tendency of dropout to locate flatter minima.

The Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) principle was first proposed by Arjovsky et al. [2019] to address the domain generalization problem by leveraging data heterogeneity from differing experimental conditions. Specifically, IRM seeks to find a data representation under which an optimal classifier remains invariant across all domains. Despite the conceptual appeal of IRM, the effectiveness of the originally proposed invariance penalty has recently been brought into question. In particular, there exists counterexamples for which that invariance penalty can be arbitrarily small for non-invariant data representations. We propose an alternative invariance penalty by revisiting the Gramian matrix of the data representation. We discuss the role of its eigenvalues in the relationship between the risk and the invariance penalty, and demonstrate that it is ill-conditioned for said counterexamples. The proposed approach is guaranteed to recover an invariant representation for linear settings under mild non-degeneracy conditions. Its effectiveness is substantiated by experiments on DomainBed and InvarianceUnitTest, two extensive test beds for domain generalization.

The recent integration of deep learning and pairwise similarity annotation-based constrained clustering -- i.e., deep constrained clustering (DCC) -- has proven effective for incorporating weak supervision into massive data clustering: Less than 1% of pair similarity annotations can often substantially enhance the clustering accuracy. However, beyond empirical successes, there is a lack of understanding of DCC. In addition, many DCC paradigms are sensitive to annotation noise, but performance-guaranteed noisy DCC methods have been largely elusive. This work first takes a deep look into a recently emerged logistic loss function of DCC, and characterizes its theoretical properties. Our result shows that the logistic DCC loss ensures the identifiability of data membership under reasonable conditions, which may shed light on its effectiveness in practice. Building upon this understanding, a new loss function based on geometric factor analysis is proposed to fend against noisy annotations. It is shown that even under unknown annotation confusions, the data membership can still be provably identified under our proposed learning criterion. The proposed approach is tested over multiple datasets to validate our claims.

Imposing orthogonality on the layers of neural networks is known to facilitate the learning by limiting the exploding/vanishing of the gradient; decorrelate the features; improve the robustness. This paper studies the theoretical properties of orthogonal convolutional layers.We establish necessary and sufficient conditions on the layer architecture guaranteeing the existence of an orthogonal convolutional transform. The conditions prove that orthogonal convolutional transforms exist for almost all architectures used in practice for 'circular' padding.We also exhibit limitations with 'valid' boundary conditions and 'same' boundary conditions with zero-padding.Recently, a regularization term imposing the orthogonality of convolutional layers has been proposed, and impressive empirical results have been obtained in different applications (Wang et al. 2020).The second motivation of the present paper is to specify the theory behind this.We make the link between this regularization term and orthogonality measures. In doing so, we show that this regularization strategy is stable with respect to numerical and optimization errors and that, in the presence of small errors and when the size of the signal/image is large, the convolutional layers remain close to isometric.The theoretical results are confirmed with experiments and the landscape of the regularization term is studied. Experiments on real data sets show that when orthogonality is used to enforce robustness, the parameter multiplying the regularization termcan be used to tune a tradeoff between accuracy and orthogonality, for the benefit of both accuracy and robustness.Altogether, the study guarantees that the regularization proposed in Wang et al. (2020) is an efficient, flexible and stable numerical strategy to learn orthogonal convolutional layers.

In this study, we propose Feature-aligned N-BEATS as a domain generalization model for univariate time series forecasting problems. The proposed model is an extension of the doubly residual stacking architecture of N-BEATS (Oreshkin et al. [34]) into a representation learning framework. The model is a new structure that involves marginal feature probability measures (i.e., pushforward measures of multiple source domains) induced by the intricate composition of residual operators of N-BEATS in each stack and aligns them stack-wise via an entropic regularized Wasserstein distance referred to as the Sinkhorn divergence (Genevay et al. [14]). The loss function consists of a typical forecasting loss for multiple source domains and an alignment loss calculated with the Sinkhorn divergence, which allows the model to learn invariant features stack-wise across multiple source data sequences while retaining N-BEATS's interpretable design. We conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of the proposed approach and the results demonstrate the model's forecasting and generalization capabilities in comparison with methods based on the original N-BEATS.

When quantizing neural networks, assigning each floating-point weight to its nearest fixed-point value is the predominant approach. We find that, perhaps surprisingly, this is not the best we can do. In this paper, we propose AdaRound, a better weight-rounding mechanism for post-training quantization that adapts to the data and the task loss. AdaRound is fast, does not require fine-tuning of the network, and only uses a small amount of unlabelled data. We start by theoretically analyzing the rounding problem for a pre-trained neural network. By approximating the task loss with a Taylor series expansion, the rounding task is posed as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem. We simplify this to a layer-wise local loss and propose to optimize this loss with a soft relaxation. AdaRound not only outperforms rounding-to-nearest by a significant margin but also establishes a new state-of-the-art for post-training quantization on several networks and tasks. Without fine-tuning, we can quantize the weights of Resnet18 and Resnet50 to 4 bits while staying within an accuracy loss of 1%.

We introduce Feasible Learning (FL), a sample-centric learning paradigm where models are trained by solving a feasibility problem that bounds the loss for each training sample. In contrast to the ubiquitous Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) framework, which optimizes for average performance, FL demands satisfactory performance on every individual data point. Since any model that meets the prescribed performance threshold is a valid FL solution, the choice of optimization algorithm and its dynamics play a crucial role in shaping the properties of the resulting solutions. In particular, we study a primal-dual approach which dynamically re-weights the importance of each sample during training. To address the challenge of setting a meaningful threshold in practice, we introduce a relaxation of FL that incorporates slack variables of minimal norm. Our empirical analysis, spanning image classification, age regression, and preference optimization in large language models, demonstrates that models trained via FL can learn from data while displaying improved tail behavior compared to ERM, with only a marginal impact on average performance.

Macro-AUC is the arithmetic mean of the class-wise AUCs in multi-label learning and is commonly used in practice. However, its theoretical understanding is far lacking. Toward solving it, we characterize the generalization properties of various learning algorithms based on the corresponding surrogate losses w.r.t. Macro-AUC. We theoretically identify a critical factor of the dataset affecting the generalization bounds: the label-wise class imbalance. Our results on the imbalance-aware error bounds show that the widely-used univariate loss-based algorithm is more sensitive to the label-wise class imbalance than the proposed pairwise and reweighted loss-based ones, which probably implies its worse performance. Moreover, empirical results on various datasets corroborate our theory findings. To establish it, technically, we propose a new (and more general) McDiarmid-type concentration inequality, which may be of independent interest.

The information bottleneck (IB) approach is popular to improve the generalization, robustness and explainability of deep neural networks. Essentially, it aims to find a minimum sufficient representation t by striking a trade-off between a compression term I(x;t) and a prediction term I(y;t), where I(cdot;cdot) refers to the mutual information (MI). MI is for the IB for the most part expressed in terms of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, which in the regression case corresponds to prediction based on mean squared error (MSE) loss with Gaussian assumption and compression approximated by variational inference. In this paper, we study the IB principle for the regression problem and develop a new way to parameterize the IB with deep neural networks by exploiting favorable properties of the Cauchy-Schwarz (CS) divergence. By doing so, we move away from MSE-based regression and ease estimation by avoiding variational approximations or distributional assumptions. We investigate the improved generalization ability of our proposed CS-IB and demonstrate strong adversarial robustness guarantees. We demonstrate its superior performance on six real-world regression tasks over other popular deep IB approaches. We additionally observe that the solutions discovered by CS-IB always achieve the best trade-off between prediction accuracy and compression ratio in the information plane. The code is available at https://github.com/SJYuCNEL/Cauchy-Schwarz-Information-Bottleneck.

This paper introduces Least Volume-a simple yet effective regularization inspired by geometric intuition-that can reduce the necessary number of latent dimensions needed by an autoencoder without requiring any prior knowledge of the intrinsic dimensionality of the dataset. We show that the Lipschitz continuity of the decoder is the key to making it work, provide a proof that PCA is just a linear special case of it, and reveal that it has a similar PCA-like importance ordering effect when applied to nonlinear models. We demonstrate the intuition behind the regularization on some pedagogical toy problems, and its effectiveness on several benchmark problems, including MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CelebA.

Despite their tremendous success in modelling high-dimensional data manifolds, deep neural networks suffer from the threat of adversarial attacks - Existence of perceptually valid input-like samples obtained through careful perturbation that lead to degradation in the performance of the underlying model. Major concerns with existing defense mechanisms include non-generalizability across different attacks, models and large inference time. In this paper, we propose a generalized defense mechanism capitalizing on the expressive power of regularized latent space based generative models. We design an adversarial filter, devoid of access to classifier and adversaries, which makes it usable in tandem with any classifier. The basic idea is to learn a Lipschitz constrained mapping from the data manifold, incorporating adversarial perturbations, to a quantized latent space and re-map it to the true data manifold. Specifically, we simultaneously auto-encode the data manifold and its perturbations implicitly through the perturbations of the regularized and quantized generative latent space, realized using variational inference. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed formulation in providing resilience against multiple attack types (black and white box) and methods, while being almost real-time. Our experiments show that the proposed method surpasses the state-of-the-art techniques in several cases.

The loss landscape of neural networks is a critical aspect of their training, and understanding its properties is essential for improving their performance. In this paper, we investigate how the loss surface changes when the sample size increases, a previously unexplored issue. We theoretically analyze the convergence of the loss landscape in a fully connected neural network and derive upper bounds for the difference in loss function values when adding a new object to the sample. Our empirical study confirms these results on various datasets, demonstrating the convergence of the loss function surface for image classification tasks. Our findings provide insights into the local geometry of neural loss landscapes and have implications for the development of sample size determination techniques.

Since the introduction of deep learning, a wide scope of representation properties, such as decorrelation, whitening, disentanglement, rank, isotropy, and mutual information, have been studied to improve the quality of representation. However, manipulating such properties can be challenging in terms of implementational effectiveness and general applicability. To address these limitations, we propose to regularize von Neumann entropy~(VNE) of representation. First, we demonstrate that the mathematical formulation of VNE is superior in effectively manipulating the eigenvalues of the representation autocorrelation matrix. Then, we demonstrate that it is widely applicable in improving state-of-the-art algorithms or popular benchmark algorithms by investigating domain-generalization, meta-learning, self-supervised learning, and generative models. In addition, we formally establish theoretical connections with rank, disentanglement, and isotropy of representation. Finally, we provide discussions on the dimension control of VNE and the relationship with Shannon entropy. Code is available at: https://github.com/jaeill/CVPR23-VNE.

It is not fully understood why adversarial examples can deceive neural networks and transfer between different networks. To elucidate this, several studies have hypothesized that adversarial perturbations, while appearing as noises, contain class features. This is supported by empirical evidence showing that networks trained on mislabeled adversarial examples can still generalize well to correctly labeled test samples. However, a theoretical understanding of how perturbations include class features and contribute to generalization is limited. In this study, we provide a theoretical framework for understanding learning from perturbations using a one-hidden-layer network trained on mutually orthogonal samples. Our results highlight that various adversarial perturbations, even perturbations of a few pixels, contain sufficient class features for generalization. Moreover, we reveal that the decision boundary when learning from perturbations matches that from standard samples except for specific regions under mild conditions. The code is available at https://github.com/s-kumano/learning-from-adversarial-perturbations.

Self-supervision is often used for pre-training to foster performance on a downstream task by constructing meaningful representations of samples. Self-supervised learning (SSL) generally involves generating different views of the same sample and thus requires data augmentations that are challenging to construct for tabular data. This constitutes one of the main challenges of self-supervision for structured data. In the present work, we propose a novel augmentation-free SSL method for tabular data. Our approach, T-JEPA, relies on a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) and is akin to mask reconstruction in the latent space. It involves predicting the latent representation of one subset of features from the latent representation of a different subset within the same sample, thereby learning rich representations without augmentations. We use our method as a pre-training technique and train several deep classifiers on the obtained representation. Our experimental results demonstrate a substantial improvement in both classification and regression tasks, outperforming models trained directly on samples in their original data space. Moreover, T-JEPA enables some methods to consistently outperform or match the performance of traditional methods likes Gradient Boosted Decision Trees. To understand why, we extensively characterize the obtained representations and show that T-JEPA effectively identifies relevant features for downstream tasks without access to the labels. Additionally, we introduce regularization tokens, a novel regularization method critical for training of JEPA-based models on structured data.

Vision Transformer models trained on large-scale datasets, although effective, often exhibit artifacts in the patch token they extract. While such defects can be alleviated by re-training the entire model with additional classification tokens, the underlying reasons for the presence of these tokens remain unclear. In this paper, we conduct a thorough investigation of this phenomenon, combining theoretical analysis with empirical observations. Our findings reveal that these artifacts originate from the pre-trained network itself, specifically stemming from the leading left singular vector of the network's weights. Furthermore, to mitigate these defects, we propose a novel fine-tuning smooth regularization that rectifies structural deficiencies using only a small dataset, thereby avoiding the need for complete re-training. We validate our method on various downstream tasks, including unsupervised segmentation, classification, supervised segmentation, and depth estimation, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving model performance. Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/haoqiwang/sinder.

We study the task of agnostically learning halfspaces under the Gaussian distribution. Specifically, given labeled examples (x,y) from an unknown distribution on R^n times { pm 1}, whose marginal distribution on x is the standard Gaussian and the labels y can be arbitrary, the goal is to output a hypothesis with 0-1 loss OPT+epsilon, where OPT is the 0-1 loss of the best-fitting halfspace. We prove a near-optimal computational hardness result for this task, under the widely believed sub-exponential time hardness of the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem. Prior hardness results are either qualitatively suboptimal or apply to restricted families of algorithms. Our techniques extend to yield near-optimal lower bounds for related problems, including ReLU regression.

Recently, it has been observed that when representations are learnt in a way that encourages sparsity, improved performance is obtained on classification tasks. These methods involve combinations of activation functions, sampling steps and different kinds of penalties. To investigate the effectiveness of sparsity by itself, we propose the k-sparse autoencoder, which is an autoencoder with linear activation function, where in hidden layers only the k highest activities are kept. When applied to the MNIST and NORB datasets, we find that this method achieves better classification results than denoising autoencoders, networks trained with dropout, and RBMs. k-sparse autoencoders are simple to train and the encoding stage is very fast, making them well-suited to large problem sizes, where conventional sparse coding algorithms cannot be applied.

Stochastically Extended Adversarial (SEA) model is introduced by Sachs et al. [2022] as an interpolation between stochastic and adversarial online convex optimization. Under the smoothness condition, they demonstrate that the expected regret of optimistic follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL) depends on the cumulative stochastic variance sigma_{1:T}^2 and the cumulative adversarial variation Sigma_{1:T}^2 for convex functions. They also provide a slightly weaker bound based on the maximal stochastic variance sigma_{max}^2 and the maximal adversarial variation Sigma_{max}^2 for strongly convex functions. Inspired by their work, we investigate the theoretical guarantees of optimistic online mirror descent (OMD) for the SEA model. For convex and smooth functions, we obtain the same O(sigma_{1:T^2}+Sigma_{1:T^2}) regret bound, without the convexity requirement of individual functions. For strongly convex and smooth functions, we establish an O(min{log (sigma_{1:T}^2+Sigma_{1:T}^2), (sigma_{max}^2 + Sigma_{max}^2) log T}) bound, better than their O((sigma_{max}^2 + Sigma_{max}^2) log T) bound. For exp-concave and smooth functions, we achieve a new O(dlog(sigma_{1:T}^2+Sigma_{1:T}^2)) bound. Owing to the OMD framework, we can further extend our result to obtain dynamic regret guarantees, which are more favorable in non-stationary online scenarios. The attained results allow us to recover excess risk bounds of the stochastic setting and regret bounds of the adversarial setting, and derive new guarantees for many intermediate scenarios.

Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms making use of Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization as a core component have shown outstanding performance. Yet, only little is understood theoretically about why KL regularization helps, so far. We study KL regularization within an approximate value iteration scheme and show that it implicitly averages q-values. Leveraging this insight, we provide a very strong performance bound, the very first to combine two desirable aspects: a linear dependency to the horizon (instead of quadratic) and an error propagation term involving an averaging effect of the estimation errors (instead of an accumulation effect). We also study the more general case of an additional entropy regularizer. The resulting abstract scheme encompasses many existing RL algorithms. Some of our assumptions do not hold with neural networks, so we complement this theoretical analysis with an extensive empirical study.

Diffusion models have emerged as a pivotal advancement in generative models, setting new standards to the quality of the generated instances. In the current paper we aim to underscore a discrepancy between conventional training methods and the desired conditional sampling behavior of these models. While the prevalent classifier-free guidance technique works well, it's not without flaws. At higher values for the guidance scale parameter w, we often get out of distribution samples and mode collapse, whereas at lower values for w we may not get the desired specificity. To address these challenges, we introduce an updated loss function that better aligns training objectives with sampling behaviors. Experimental validation with FID scores on CIFAR-10 elucidates our method's ability to produce higher quality samples with fewer sampling timesteps, and be more robust to the choice of guidance scale w. We also experiment with fine-tuning Stable Diffusion on the proposed loss, to provide early evidence that large diffusion models may also benefit from this refined loss function.

Adaptive sparse coding methods learn a possibly overcomplete set of basis functions, such that natural image patches can be reconstructed by linearly combining a small subset of these bases. The applicability of these methods to visual object recognition tasks has been limited because of the prohibitive cost of the optimization algorithms required to compute the sparse representation. In this work we propose a simple and efficient algorithm to learn basis functions. After training, this model also provides a fast and smooth approximator to the optimal representation, achieving even better accuracy than exact sparse coding algorithms on visual object recognition tasks.

Optimal Transport is a useful metric to compare probability distributions and to compute a pairing given a ground cost. Its entropic regularization variant (eOT) is crucial to have fast algorithms and reflect fuzzy/noisy matchings. This work focuses on Inverse Optimal Transport (iOT), the problem of inferring the ground cost from samples drawn from a coupling that solves an eOT problem. It is a relevant problem that can be used to infer unobserved/missing links, and to obtain meaningful information about the structure of the ground cost yielding the pairing. On one side, iOT benefits from convexity, but on the other side, being ill-posed, it requires regularization to handle the sampling noise. This work presents an in-depth theoretical study of the l1 regularization to model for instance Euclidean costs with sparse interactions between features. Specifically, we derive a sufficient condition for the robust recovery of the sparsity of the ground cost that can be seen as a far reaching generalization of the Lasso's celebrated Irrepresentability Condition. To provide additional insight into this condition, we work out in detail the Gaussian case. We show that as the entropic penalty varies, the iOT problem interpolates between a graphical Lasso and a classical Lasso, thereby establishing a connection between iOT and graph estimation, an important problem in ML.

In our era of enormous neural networks, empirical progress has been driven by the philosophy that more is better. Recent deep learning practice has found repeatedly that larger model size, more data, and more computation (resulting in lower training loss) improves performance. In this paper, we give theoretical backing to these empirical observations by showing that these three properties hold in random feature (RF) regression, a class of models equivalent to shallow networks with only the last layer trained. Concretely, we first show that the test risk of RF regression decreases monotonically with both the number of features and the number of samples, provided the ridge penalty is tuned optimally. In particular, this implies that infinite width RF architectures are preferable to those of any finite width. We then proceed to demonstrate that, for a large class of tasks characterized by powerlaw eigenstructure, training to near-zero training loss is obligatory: near-optimal performance can only be achieved when the training error is much smaller than the test error. Grounding our theory in real-world data, we find empirically that standard computer vision tasks with convolutional neural tangent kernels clearly fall into this class. Taken together, our results tell a simple, testable story of the benefits of overparameterization, overfitting, and more data in random feature models.

This paper considers the Pointer Value Retrieval (PVR) benchmark introduced in [ZRKB21], where a 'reasoning' function acts on a string of digits to produce the label. More generally, the paper considers the learning of logical functions with gradient descent (GD) on neural networks. It is first shown that in order to learn logical functions with gradient descent on symmetric neural networks, the generalization error can be lower-bounded in terms of the noise-stability of the target function, supporting a conjecture made in [ZRKB21]. It is then shown that in the distribution shift setting, when the data withholding corresponds to freezing a single feature (referred to as canonical holdout), the generalization error of gradient descent admits a tight characterization in terms of the Boolean influence for several relevant architectures. This is shown on linear models and supported experimentally on other models such as MLPs and Transformers. In particular, this puts forward the hypothesis that for such architectures and for learning logical functions such as PVR functions, GD tends to have an implicit bias towards low-degree representations, which in turn gives the Boolean influence for the generalization error under quadratic loss.

Adaptive optimization methods are widely recognized as among the most popular approaches for training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Techniques such as Adam, AdaGrad, and AdaHessian utilize a preconditioner that modifies the search direction by incorporating information about the curvature of the objective function. However, despite their adaptive characteristics, these methods still require manual fine-tuning of the step-size. This, in turn, impacts the time required to solve a particular problem. This paper presents an optimization framework named SANIA to tackle these challenges. Beyond eliminating the need for manual step-size hyperparameter settings, SANIA incorporates techniques to address poorly scaled or ill-conditioned problems. We also explore several preconditioning methods, including Hutchinson's method, which approximates the Hessian diagonal of the loss function. We conclude with an extensive empirical examination of the proposed techniques across classification tasks, covering both convex and non-convex contexts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong general language capabilities. However, fine-tuning these models on domain-specific tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where the model overwrites or loses essential knowledge acquired during pretraining. This phenomenon significantly limits the broader applicability of LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to compute the element-wise importance of model parameters crucial for preserving general knowledge during fine-tuning. Our method utilizes a dual-objective optimization strategy: (1) regularization loss based on element-wise parameter importance, which constrains the updates to parameters crucial for general knowledge; (2) cross-entropy loss to adapt to domain-specific tasks. Additionally, we introduce layer-wise coefficients to account for the varying contributions of different layers, dynamically balancing the dual-objective optimization. Extensive experiments on scientific, medical, and physical tasks using GPT-J and LLaMA-3 demonstrate that our approach mitigates catastrophic forgetting while enhancing model adaptability. Compared to previous methods, our solution is approximately 20 times faster and requires only 10-15% of the storage, highlighting the practical efficiency. The code will be released.

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is a central task in scientific computing. Recently, neural network approximation of PDEs has received increasing attention due to its flexible meshless discretization and its potential for high-dimensional problems. One fundamental numerical difficulty is that random samples in the training set introduce statistical errors into the discretization of loss functional which may become the dominant error in the final approximation, and therefore overshadow the modeling capability of the neural network. In this work, we propose a new minmax formulation to optimize simultaneously the approximate solution, given by a neural network model, and the random samples in the training set, provided by a deep generative model. The key idea is to use a deep generative model to adjust random samples in the training set such that the residual induced by the approximate PDE solution can maintain a smooth profile when it is being minimized. Such an idea is achieved by implicitly embedding the Wasserstein distance between the residual-induced distribution and the uniform distribution into the loss, which is then minimized together with the residual. A nearly uniform residual profile means that its variance is small for any normalized weight function such that the Monte Carlo approximation error of the loss functional is reduced significantly for a certain sample size. The adversarial adaptive sampling (AAS) approach proposed in this work is the first attempt to formulate two essential components, minimizing the residual and seeking the optimal training set, into one minmax objective functional for the neural network approximation of PDEs.

We study the notion of a generalization bound being uniformly tight, meaning that the difference between the bound and the population loss is small for all learning algorithms and all population distributions. Numerous generalization bounds have been proposed in the literature as potential explanations for the ability of neural networks to generalize in the overparameterized setting. However, in their paper ``Fantastic Generalization Measures and Where to Find Them,'' Jiang et al. (2020) examine more than a dozen generalization bounds, and show empirically that none of them are uniformly tight. This raises the question of whether uniformly-tight generalization bounds are at all possible in the overparameterized setting. We consider two types of generalization bounds: (1) bounds that may depend on the training set and the learned hypothesis (e.g., margin bounds). We prove mathematically that no such bound can be uniformly tight in the overparameterized setting; (2) bounds that may in addition also depend on the learning algorithm (e.g., stability bounds). For these bounds, we show a trade-off between the algorithm's performance and the bound's tightness. Namely, if the algorithm achieves good accuracy on certain distributions, then no generalization bound can be uniformly tight for it in the overparameterized setting. We explain how these formal results can, in our view, inform research on generalization bounds for neural networks, while stressing that other interpretations of these results are also possible.

High demand for computation resources severely hinders deployment of large-scale Deep Neural Networks (DNN) in resource constrained devices. In this work, we propose a Structured Sparsity Learning (SSL) method to regularize the structures (i.e., filters, channels, filter shapes, and layer depth) of DNNs. SSL can: (1) learn a compact structure from a bigger DNN to reduce computation cost; (2) obtain a hardware-friendly structured sparsity of DNN to efficiently accelerate the DNNs evaluation. Experimental results show that SSL achieves on average 5.1x and 3.1x speedups of convolutional layer computation of AlexNet against CPU and GPU, respectively, with off-the-shelf libraries. These speedups are about twice speedups of non-structured sparsity; (3) regularize the DNN structure to improve classification accuracy. The results show that for CIFAR-10, regularization on layer depth can reduce 20 layers of a Deep Residual Network (ResNet) to 18 layers while improve the accuracy from 91.25% to 92.60%, which is still slightly higher than that of original ResNet with 32 layers. For AlexNet, structure regularization by SSL also reduces the error by around ~1%. Open source code is in https://github.com/wenwei202/caffe/tree/scnn

With the growing popularity of RAG, the capabilities of embedding models are gaining increasing attention. Embedding models are primarily trained through contrastive loss learning, with negative examples being a key component. Previous work has proposed various hard negative mining strategies, but these strategies are typically employed as preprocessing steps. In this paper, we propose the conan-embedding model, which maximizes the utilization of more and higher-quality negative examples. Specifically, since the model's ability to handle preprocessed negative examples evolves during training, we propose dynamic hard negative mining method to expose the model to more challenging negative examples throughout the training process. Secondly, contrastive learning requires as many negative examples as possible but is limited by GPU memory constraints. Therefore, we use a Cross-GPU balancing Loss to provide more negative examples for embedding training and balance the batch size across multiple tasks. Moreover, we also discovered that the prompt-response pairs from LLMs can be used for embedding training. Our approach effectively enhances the capabilities of embedding models, currently ranking first on the Chinese leaderboard of Massive text embedding benchmark

Inspired by Regularized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (RLTH), which states that competitive smooth (non-binary) subnetworks exist within a dense network in continual learning tasks, we investigate two proposed architecture-based continual learning methods which sequentially learn and select adaptive binary- (WSN) and non-binary Soft-Subnetworks (SoftNet) for each task. WSN and SoftNet jointly learn the regularized model weights and task-adaptive non-binary masks of subnetworks associated with each task whilst attempting to select a small set of weights to be activated (winning ticket) by reusing weights of the prior subnetworks. Our proposed WSN and SoftNet are inherently immune to catastrophic forgetting as each selected subnetwork model does not infringe upon other subnetworks in Task Incremental Learning (TIL). In TIL, binary masks spawned per winning ticket are encoded into one N-bit binary digit mask, then compressed using Huffman coding for a sub-linear increase in network capacity to the number of tasks. Surprisingly, in the inference step, SoftNet generated by injecting small noises to the backgrounds of acquired WSN (holding the foregrounds of WSN) provides excellent forward transfer power for future tasks in TIL. SoftNet shows its effectiveness over WSN in regularizing parameters to tackle the overfitting, to a few examples in Few-shot Class Incremental Learning (FSCIL).

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a promising approach to extracting features from neural networks, enabling model interpretability as well as causal interventions on model internals. SAEs generate sparse feature representations using a sparsifying activation function that implicitly defines a set of token-feature matches. We frame the token-feature matching as a resource allocation problem constrained by a total sparsity upper bound. For example, TopK SAEs solve this allocation problem with the additional constraint that each token matches with at most k features. In TopK SAEs, the k active features per token constraint is the same across tokens, despite some tokens being more difficult to reconstruct than others. To address this limitation, we propose two novel SAE variants, Feature Choice SAEs and Mutual Choice SAEs, which each allow for a variable number of active features per token. Feature Choice SAEs solve the sparsity allocation problem under the additional constraint that each feature matches with at most m tokens. Mutual Choice SAEs solve the unrestricted allocation problem where the total sparsity budget can be allocated freely between tokens and features. Additionally, we introduce a new auxiliary loss function, aux_zipf_loss, which generalises the aux_k_loss to mitigate dead and underutilised features. Our methods result in SAEs with fewer dead features and improved reconstruction loss at equivalent sparsity levels as a result of the inherent adaptive computation. More accurate and scalable feature extraction methods provide a path towards better understanding and more precise control of foundation models.

Recent work have demonstrated that robustness (to "corruption") can be at odds with generalization. Adversarial training, for instance, aims to reduce the problematic susceptibility of modern neural networks to small data perturbations. Surprisingly, overfitting is a major concern in adversarial training despite being mostly absent in standard training. We provide here theoretical evidence for this peculiar "robust overfitting" phenomenon. Subsequently, we advance a novel distributionally robust loss function bridging robustness and generalization. We demonstrate both theoretically as well as empirically the loss to enjoy a certified level of robustness against two common types of corruption--data evasion and poisoning attacks--while ensuring guaranteed generalization. We show through careful numerical experiments that our resulting holistic robust (HR) training procedure yields SOTA performance. Finally, we indicate that HR training can be interpreted as a direct extension of adversarial training and comes with a negligible additional computational burden. A ready-to-use python library implementing our algorithm is available at https://github.com/RyanLucas3/HR_Neural_Networks.