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arXiv research

A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.

168,982 papers · 148 categories

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6.3%12.5%18.8%25.0% · Apr 199319922001200920172026
48 results for Forward-Only Gradient Propagation

This paper proposes an alternating back-propagation algorithm for learning the generator network model. The model is a non-linear generalization of factor analysis. In this model, the mapping from the continuous latent factors to the observed signal is parametrized by a convolutional neural network. The alternating bac…

2016-06-28abs ↗pdf ↗

NES optimizes discrete structured VAEs effectively without gradient propagation.

problem Learning high-dimensional discrete latent spaces in generative models.
method Natural Evolution Strategies (NES) for gradient-free optimization of discrete structures.
result NES effectively optimizes discrete structured VAEs, comparable to gradient-based methods.

Proposes a semi-implicit back propagation method for neural networks.

problem Challenges in training neural networks, especially gradient vanishing and small step sizes.
method Proposes a semi-implicit back propagation method using error back propagation and proximal methods.
result The proposed method leads to better performance in terms of loss decreasing and training/validation accuracy compared to SGD and ProxBP.

A new stochastic algorithm approximates optimal distributions without requiring propagation of chaos.

problem Optimizing functionals over probability distributions using finite particle systems.
method Virtual particle stochastic approximation, viewed as a form of stochastic gradient descent in the Wasserstein space.
result The algorithm's output converges to the optimal distribution and produces i.i.d. samples.

As traditional neural network consumes a significant amount of computing resources during back propagation, \citet{Sun2017mePropSB} propose a simple yet effective technique to alleviate this problem. In this technique, only a small subset of the full gradients are computed to update the model parameters. In this paper …

2017-09-18abs ↗pdf ↗

Uniform-in-time analysis for Stein Variational Gradient Descent across various metrics.

problem Understanding long-term behavior of finite-particle systems in relation to their mean-field limits.
method Developed uniform-in-time propagation-of-chaos results for continuous-time SVGD using cutoff strategies and finite-dimensional theories.
result Uniform-in-time propagation-of-chaos bounds in various metrics, including Langevin kernel Stein discrepancy, Wasserstein-1, and Wasserstein-2 distances.

Interval attacks find more adversarial examples than existing methods.

problem Evaluating robustness of adversarially trained neural networks against unknown attacks.
method Symbolic interval propagation for bound over-approximation and gradient-guided attacks.
result Interval attacks find on average 47% more violations than state-of-the-art methods.

Bilevel optimization has been recently revisited for designing and analyzing algorithms in hyperparameter tuning and meta learning tasks. However, due to its nested structure, evaluating exact gradients for high-dimensional problems is computationally challenging. One heuristic to circumvent this difficulty is to use t…

2018-10-25abs ↗pdf ↗

A new method for target propagation using iterative approximations converges fast and is more biologically plausible.

problem Improving target propagation methods for neural networks.
method Iterative approximate inverses and local auto-encoders.
result The method converges exponentially fast under certain conditions.

Defines a calculus for integrating Moreau envelopes in differentiable programming.

problem Lack of a mathematical framework for applying Moreau envelopes to deep networks and machine learning systems.
method Develops a compositional calculus adapted to Moreau envelopes and integrates it into differentiable programming.
result Integrates Moreau envelopes into differentiable programming, enabling new gradient back-propagation methods.

New method shows random, diverse initializations are not essential for deep neural networks.

problem The necessity of random, diverse initializations in deep neural networks.
method Constructed a deep convolutional network with identical features by initializing weights to 0, enabling signal propagation and stable gradients.
result Random, diverse initializations are not necessary for training neural networks.

A novel method to propagate uncertainty through the soft-thresholding nonlinearity is proposed in this paper. At every layer the current distribution of the target vector is represented as a spike and slab distribution, which represents the probabilities of each variable being zero, or Gaussian-distributed. Using the p…

2018-11-29abs ↗pdf ↗

This work develops a particle system to approximate Fisher-Rao gradient flows in mean-field optimization.

problem Optimizing probability measures in neural network contexts.
method Constructing an interacting particle system approximating Fisher-Rao gradient flows.
result Propagation of chaos for the Fisher-Rao gradient flow in entropic mean-field optimization.

New algorithm optimizes nonlinear SDEs online with convergence guarantees.

problem Optimizing nonlinear stochastic differential equations (SDEs) is computationally challenging.
method Forward propagation algorithm that solves an SDE derived using forward differentiation.
result Convergence theorem for nonlinear dissipative SDEs with bounds on stochastic fluctuations.

Backward propagation rules for warped products under Ricci flow.

problem Understanding how warped product structures behave under Ricci flow.
method Establishing sufficient conditions for backward propagation of warped product structures.
result Asymptotically conical shrinkers are multiply-warped products over Einstein manifolds.

EXODUS improves training of SNNs by stabilizing gradients and reducing complexity.

problem Training SNNs using BPTT is time-consuming and numerically unstable.
method EXODUS modifies SLAYER to account for neuron reset and uses IFT for correct gradient calculation, eliminating manual scaling.
result EXODUS achieves comparable or better performance than SLAYER, especially in tasks with temporal features.

Within many machine learning algorithms, a fundamental problem concerns efficient calculation of an unbiased gradient wrt parameters $\gammav$ for expectation-based objectives $\Ebb_{q_{\gammav} (\yv)} [f(\yv)]$. Most existing methods either (i) suffer from high variance, seeking help from (often) complicated variance-…

2019-01-17abs ↗pdf ↗

The inputs of deep neural network (DNN) from real-world data usually come with uncertainties. Yet, it is challenging to propagate the uncertainty in the input features to the DNN predictions at a low computational cost. This work employs a gradient-based subspace method and response surface technique to accelerate the …

2019-03-10abs ↗pdf ↗

The back-propagation algorithm is widely used for learning in artificial neural networks. A challenge in machine learning is to create models that generalize to new data samples not seen in the training data. Recently, a common flaw in several machine learning algorithms was discovered: small perturbations added to the…

2015-10-14abs ↗pdf ↗

Analyzes self-attention in recurrent networks, proving it mitigates vanishing gradients.

problem Vanishing gradients in recurrent networks when capturing long-term dependencies.
method Formal analysis of self-attention's effect on gradient propagation, proposing a relevancy screening mechanism.
result Self-attention mitigates vanishing gradients in recurrent networks, providing guarantees.

Using back-propagation and its variants to train deep networks is often problematic for new users. Issues such as exploding gradients, vanishing gradients, and high sensitivity to weight initialization strategies often make networks difficult to train, especially when users are experimenting with new architectures. Her…

2018-03-05abs ↗pdf ↗

To make deep neural networks feasible in resource-constrained environments (such as mobile devices), it is beneficial to quantize models by using low-precision weights. One common technique for quantizing neural networks is the straight-through gradient method, which enables back-propagation through the quantization ma…

2018-10-01abs ↗pdf ↗

Artificial neural networks are most commonly trained with the back-propagation algorithm, where the gradient for learning is provided by back-propagating the error, layer by layer, from the output layer to the hidden layers. A recently discovered method called feedback-alignment shows that the weights used for propagat…

2016-09-06abs ↗pdf ↗

Improved convergence rates for MFLD in various gradient estimators.

problem Proving convergence rates for mean-field Langevin dynamics with stochastic gradient updates.
method General framework for propagation of chaos, including finite-particle approximation, time-discretization, and stochastic gradient approximation.
result Improved convergence rates for SGD and SVRG settings.

New metric reveals how topology affects deep network performance.

problem Understanding how topology influences deep network performance.
method Introduced NN-Mass metric to quantify gradient propagation and model performance.
result NN-Mass identifies models with similar accuracy but different sizes/compute requirements.

Multi-layered representation is believed to be the key ingredient of deep neural networks especially in cognitive tasks like computer vision. While non-differentiable models such as gradient boosting decision trees (GBDTs) are the dominant methods for modeling discrete or tabular data, they are hard to incorporate with…

2018-05-31abs ↗pdf ↗

Optimization-based pruning eliminates backpropagation for large language models.

problem Suboptimal pruning performance due to heuristic metrics.
method Optimization of Bernoulli distribution to learn pruning masks without backpropagation.
result Efficient pruning of large language models with improved performance.

Develops a framework for analyzing neural networks and ODE models using control theory.

problem Analyzing deep neural networks and neural ODE models trained with stochastic gradient algorithms.
method Identifies connections between control theory, deep learning, and statistical sampling; derives Pontryagin's optimality principle and Mean-Field Langevin dynamics.
result Derives explicit convergence rates and provides quantitive bounds on generalization error, showing dimension-independent rates.

New EP variants improve inference stability and efficiency.

problem Inference stability and efficiency issues in EP.
method Motivated by natural-gradient optimization, new EP variants are introduced that are robust to Monte Carlo noise and efficient with single samples.
result Improved stability and efficiency in inference tasks.

New theory explains signal propagation in normalization-free transformers.

problem Understanding signal propagation in normalization-free transformers.
method Deriving recurrence relations for activation statistics and APJNs across layers.
result Transformers with elementwise tanh-like nonlinearities exhibit subcritical signal propagation.

A VAE model predicts material properties and microstructures.

problem Building forward and inverse structure-property linkages in materials science.
method Combines VAE with regression, using a two-level prior and multi-modal Gaussian mixture.
result The model achieves accurate forward and inverse predictions of material properties and microstructures.

Theoretical framework for target propagation shows differences from backpropagation.

problem Understanding and improving target propagation for neural networks.
method Mathematical optimization analysis and novel reconstruction loss.
result A novel reconstruction loss improves feedback weight training and introduces architectural flexibility.

Training very deep networks is an important open problem in machine learning. One of many difficulties is that the norm of the back-propagated error gradient can grow or decay exponentially. Here we show that training very deep feed-forward networks (FFNs) is not as difficult as previously thought. Unlike when back-pro…

2014-12-19abs ↗pdf ↗

We conduct mathematical analysis on the effect of batch normalization (BN) on gradient backpropogation in residual network training, which is believed to play a critical role in addressing the gradient vanishing/explosion problem, in this work. By analyzing the mean and variance behavior of the input and the gradient i…

2018-12-02abs ↗pdf ↗

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have experienced a recent surge in popularity, performing competitively in a variety of tasks, especially in computer vision. However, GAN training has shown limited success in natural language processing. This is largely because sequences of text are discrete, and thus gradients …

2018-10-11abs ↗pdf ↗