scholarly journals Align, then memorise: the dynamics of learning with feedback alignment

Author(s):  
Maria Refinetti ◽  
Stéphane d'Ascoli ◽  
Ruben Ohana ◽  
Sebastian Goldt

Abstract Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA) is emerging as an eficient and biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation for training deep neural networks. Despite relying on random feedback weights for the backward pass, DFA successfully trains state-of-the-art models such as Transformers. On the other hand, it notoriously fails to train convolutional networks. An understanding of the inner workings of DFA to explain these diverging results remains elusive. Here, we propose a theory of feedback alignment algorithms. We ffrst show that learning in shallow networks proceeds in two steps: an alignment phase, where the model adapts its weights to align the approximate gradient with the true gradient of the loss function, is followed by a memorisation phase, where the model focuses on fftting the data. This two-step process has a degeneracy breaking eflect: out of all the low-loss solutions in the landscape, a network trained with DFA naturally converges to the solution which maximises gradient alignment. We also identify a key quantity underlying alignment in deep linear networks: the conditioning of the alignment matrices. The latter enables a detailed understanding of the impact of data structure on alignment, and suggests a simple explanation for the well-known failure of DFA to train convolutional neural networks. Numerical experiments on MNIST and CIFAR10 clearly demonstrate degeneracy breaking in deep non-linear networks and show that the align-then-memorize process occurs sequentially from the bottom layers of the network to the top.

Author(s):  
Kaiyi Peng ◽  
Bin Fang ◽  
Mingliang Zhou

Liver lesion segmentation from abdomen computed tomography (CT) with deep neural networks remains challenging due to the small volume and the unclear boundary. To effectively tackle these problems, in this paper, we propose a cascaded deeply supervised convolutional networks (CDS-Net). The cascaded deep supervision (CDS) mechanism uses auxiliary losses to construct a cascaded segmentation method in a single network, focusing the network attention on pixels that are more difficult to classify, so that the network can segment the lesion more effectively. CDS mechanism can be easily integrated into standard CNN models and it helps to increase the model sensitivity and prediction accuracy. Based on CDS mechanism, we propose a cascaded deep supervised ResUNet, which is an end-to-end liver lesion segmentation network. We conduct experiments on LiTS and 3DIRCADb dataset. Our method has achieved competitive results compared with other state-of-the-art ones.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 676
Author(s):  
Andrej Zgank

Animal activity acoustic monitoring is becoming one of the necessary tools in agriculture, including beekeeping. It can assist in the control of beehives in remote locations. It is possible to classify bee swarm activity from audio signals using such approaches. A deep neural networks IoT-based acoustic swarm classification is proposed in this paper. Audio recordings were obtained from the Open Source Beehive project. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients features were extracted from the audio signal. The lossless WAV and lossy MP3 audio formats were compared for IoT-based solutions. An analysis was made of the impact of the deep neural network parameters on the classification results. The best overall classification accuracy with uncompressed audio was 94.09%, but MP3 compression degraded the DNN accuracy by over 10%. The evaluation of the proposed deep neural networks IoT-based bee activity acoustic classification showed improved results if compared to the previous hidden Markov models system.


Algorithms ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Carlos Lassance ◽  
Vincent Gripon ◽  
Antonio Ortega

Deep Learning (DL) has attracted a lot of attention for its ability to reach state-of-the-art performance in many machine learning tasks. The core principle of DL methods consists of training composite architectures in an end-to-end fashion, where inputs are associated with outputs trained to optimize an objective function. Because of their compositional nature, DL architectures naturally exhibit several intermediate representations of the inputs, which belong to so-called latent spaces. When treated individually, these intermediate representations are most of the time unconstrained during the learning process, as it is unclear which properties should be favored. However, when processing a batch of inputs concurrently, the corresponding set of intermediate representations exhibit relations (what we call a geometry) on which desired properties can be sought. In this work, we show that it is possible to introduce constraints on these latent geometries to address various problems. In more detail, we propose to represent geometries by constructing similarity graphs from the intermediate representations obtained when processing a batch of inputs. By constraining these Latent Geometry Graphs (LGGs), we address the three following problems: (i) reproducing the behavior of a teacher architecture is achieved by mimicking its geometry, (ii) designing efficient embeddings for classification is achieved by targeting specific geometries, and (iii) robustness to deviations on inputs is achieved via enforcing smooth variation of geometry between consecutive latent spaces. Using standard vision benchmarks, we demonstrate the ability of the proposed geometry-based methods in solving the considered problems.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 230
Author(s):  
Jaechan Cho ◽  
Yongchul Jung ◽  
Seongjoo Lee ◽  
Yunho Jung

Binary neural networks (BNNs) have attracted significant interest for the implementation of deep neural networks (DNNs) on resource-constrained edge devices, and various BNN accelerator architectures have been proposed to achieve higher efficiency. BNN accelerators can be divided into two categories: streaming and layer accelerators. Although streaming accelerators designed for a specific BNN network topology provide high throughput, they are infeasible for various sensor applications in edge AI because of their complexity and inflexibility. In contrast, layer accelerators with reasonable resources can support various network topologies, but they operate with the same parallelism for all the layers of the BNN, which degrades throughput performance at certain layers. To overcome this problem, we propose a BNN accelerator with adaptive parallelism that offers high throughput performance in all layers. The proposed accelerator analyzes target layer parameters and operates with optimal parallelism using reasonable resources. In addition, this architecture is able to fully compute all types of BNN layers thanks to its reconfigurability, and it can achieve a higher area–speed efficiency than existing accelerators. In performance evaluation using state-of-the-art BNN topologies, the designed BNN accelerator achieved an area–speed efficiency 9.69 times higher than previous FPGA implementations and 24% higher than existing VLSI implementations for BNNs.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 735-744 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Koziarski ◽  
Bogusław Cyganek

Abstract Due to the advances made in recent years, methods based on deep neural networks have been able to achieve a state-of-the-art performance in various computer vision problems. In some tasks, such as image recognition, neural-based approaches have even been able to surpass human performance. However, the benchmarks on which neural networks achieve these impressive results usually consist of fairly high quality data. On the other hand, in practical applications we are often faced with images of low quality, affected by factors such as low resolution, presence of noise or a small dynamic range. It is unclear how resilient deep neural networks are to the presence of such factors. In this paper we experimentally evaluate the impact of low resolution on the classification accuracy of several notable neural architectures of recent years. Furthermore, we examine the possibility of improving neural networks’ performance in the task of low resolution image recognition by applying super-resolution prior to classification. The results of our experiments indicate that contemporary neural architectures remain significantly affected by low image resolution. By applying super-resolution prior to classification we were able to alleviate this issue to a large extent as long as the resolution of the images did not decrease too severely. However, in the case of very low resolution images the classification accuracy remained considerably affected.


Author(s):  
Yun-Peng Liu ◽  
Ning Xu ◽  
Yu Zhang ◽  
Xin Geng

The performances of deep neural networks (DNNs) crucially rely on the quality of labeling. In some situations, labels are easily corrupted, and therefore some labels become noisy labels. Thus, designing algorithms that deal with noisy labels is of great importance for learning robust DNNs. However, it is difficult to distinguish between clean labels and noisy labels, which becomes the bottleneck of many methods. To address the problem, this paper proposes a novel method named Label Distribution based Confidence Estimation (LDCE). LDCE estimates the confidence of the observed labels based on label distribution. Then, the boundary between clean labels and noisy labels becomes clear according to confidence scores. To verify the effectiveness of the method, LDCE is combined with the existing learning algorithm to train robust DNNs. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets substantiate the superiority of the proposed algorithm against state-of-the-art methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (12) ◽  
pp. 124101
Author(s):  
Thomas Hirtz ◽  
Steyn Huurman ◽  
He Tian ◽  
Yi Yang ◽  
Tian-Ling Ren

Abstract In a world where data is increasingly important for making breakthroughs, microelectronics is a field where data is sparse and hard to acquire. Only a few entities have the infrastructure that is required to automate the fabrication and testing of semiconductor devices. This infrastructure is crucial for generating sufficient data for the use of new information technologies. This situation generates a cleavage between most of the researchers and the industry. To address this issue, this paper will introduce a widely applicable approach for creating custom datasets using simulation tools and parallel computing. The multi-I–V curves that we obtained were processed simultaneously using convolutional neural networks, which gave us the ability to predict a full set of device characteristics with a single inference. We prove the potential of this approach through two concrete examples of useful deep learning models that were trained using the generated data. We believe that this work can act as a bridge between the state-of-the-art of data-driven methods and more classical semiconductor research, such as device engineering, yield engineering or process monitoring. Moreover, this research gives the opportunity to anybody to start experimenting with deep neural networks and machine learning in the field of microelectronics, without the need for expensive experimentation infrastructure.


Information ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tariq Ahmad ◽  
Allan Ramsay ◽  
Hanady Ahmed

Assigning sentiment labels to documents is, at first sight, a standard multi-label classification task. Many approaches have been used for this task, but the current state-of-the-art solutions use deep neural networks (DNNs). As such, it seems likely that standard machine learning algorithms, such as these, will provide an effective approach. We describe an alternative approach, involving the use of probabilities to construct a weighted lexicon of sentiment terms, then modifying the lexicon and calculating optimal thresholds for each class. We show that this approach outperforms the use of DNNs and other standard algorithms. We believe that DNNs are not a universal panacea and that paying attention to the nature of the data that you are trying to learn from can be more important than trying out ever more powerful general purpose machine learning algorithms.


Algorithms ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 342
Author(s):  
Guojing Huang ◽  
Qingliang Chen ◽  
Congjian Deng

With the development of E-commerce, online advertising began to thrive and has gradually developed into a new mode of business, of which Click-Through Rates (CTR) prediction is the essential driving technology. Given a user, commodities and scenarios, the CTR model can predict the user’s click probability of an online advertisement. Recently, great progress has been made with the introduction of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) into CTR. In order to further advance the DNN-based CTR prediction models, this paper introduces a new model of FO-FTRL-DCN, based on the prestigious model of Deep&Cross Network (DCN) augmented with the latest optimization technique of Follow The Regularized Leader (FTRL) for DNN. The extensive comparative experiments on the iPinYou datasets show that the proposed model has outperformed other state-of-the-art baselines, with better generalization across different datasets in the benchmark.


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