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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.

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48 results for activation sparsity

This paper studies activation sparsity in large language models, finding key trends and implications.

problem Activation sparsity in large language models (LLMs) can be improved for efficiency and interpretability.
method Proposes PPL-p%p\% sparsity, analyzes trends with training data, width-depth ratio, and parameter scale.
result ReLU is more efficient for sparsity than SiLU, and deeper architectures can improve sparsity.

Dropout is commonly used to help reduce overfitting in deep neural networks. Sparsity is a potentially important property of neural networks, but is not explicitly controlled by Dropout-based regularization. In this work, we propose Sparseout a simple and efficient variant of Dropout that can be used to control the spa…

2019-04-17abs ↗pdf ↗

Sparse activations in neural networks are hard to exploit but lead to advantages in learning.

problem Sparse activations in neural networks are hard to exploit but lead to advantages in learning.
method Formal study of PAC learnability of MLP layers with activation sparsity.
result Classes of functions with activation sparsity lead to provable computational and statistical advantages over their non-sparse counterparts.

New sparsity attacks degrade DNN efficiency, raising concerns for resource-constrained systems.

problem Vulnerabilities in DNNs through energy and latency attacks.
method Proposed sparsity attacks that modify DNN inputs to reduce activation sparsity, increasing execution time and energy consumption.
result Adversarial sparsity attacks can degrade DNN efficiency by up to 1.82x in image recognition DNNs.

Transformers exhibit sparse activation maps, reducing computational load and improving robustness.

problem Sparse activation in Transformer models.
method Extensive experiments on various Transformer architectures and tasks.
result Sparsity in Transformers is a prevalent phenomenon, reducing FLOP count and improving model robustness.

Concerns about interpretability, computational resources, and principled inductive priors have motivated efforts to engineer sparse neural models for NLP tasks. If sparsity is important for NLP, might well-trained neural models naturally become roughly sparse? Using the Taxi-Euclidean norm to measure sparsity, we find …

2019-07-22abs ↗pdf ↗

Sequential learning, also called lifelong learning, studies the problem of learning tasks in a sequence with access restricted to only the data of the current task. In this paper we look at a scenario with fixed model capacity, and postulate that the learning process should not be selfish, i.e. it should account for fu…

2018-06-14abs ↗pdf ↗

Network pruning is aimed at imposing sparsity in a neural network architecture by increasing the portion of zero-valued weights for reducing its size regarding energy-efficiency consideration and increasing evaluation speed. In most of the conducted research efforts, the sparsity is enforced for network pruning without…

2018-02-13abs ↗pdf ↗

A new method for the unsupervised learning of sparse representations using autoencoders is proposed and implemented by ordering the output of the hidden units by their activation value and progressively reconstructing the input in this order. This can be done efficiently in parallel with the use of cumulative sums and …

2016-05-05abs ↗pdf ↗

New proof shows neural networks can memorize training data with high accuracy.

problem Proving neural networks can memorize training data with high accuracy.
method Probabilistic construction exploiting sparsity.
result Proves neural networks with threshold or mixed threshold-ReLU activations can memorize training data.

Improved fMRI analysis models enhance classification performance and select relevant brain regions.

problem Inaccurate selection of relevant brain components in MVPA models.
method Hybrid Sparsity-Ranked LASSO (JSRL) method integrating component-level and voxel-level activity.
result JSRL models achieve up to 51.7% improvement in cross-validated deviance R2R^2 and 7.3% improvement in cross-validated AUC.

New algorithm reduces high-dimensional data processing costs and achieves true sparsity.

problem High computational costs and difficulty in achieving true sparsity in distributed inference.
method Two-stage distributed best subset selection with oracle property.
result Correctly finds true sparsity pattern and achieves the oracle property.

New neural operators learn structured patterns efficiently.

problem Learning and representing complex, structured patterns in data.
method Sparse autoencoder neural operators (SAE-NOs) parameterize concepts as functions, enabling efficient and structured representation.
result SAE-FNOs learn localized patterns and generalize across different scales and discretizations.

Sparse modeling is a powerful framework for data analysis and processing. Traditionally, encoding in this framework is performed by solving an L1-regularized linear regression problem, commonly referred to as Lasso or Basis Pursuit. In this work we combine the sparsity-inducing property of the Lasso model at the indivi…

2010-06-07abs ↗pdf ↗

Model shows loss curve with two distinct exponents due to sparse activations.

problem Sparse activations impact neural network scaling laws.
method Introduced a model for neural scaling laws under sparse activations, derived asymptotic population loss, and analyzed gradient-descent dynamics.
result Loss curve exhibits double-descent peak near interpolation threshold with two distinct scaling exponents.

We investigate filter level sparsity that emerges in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which employ Batch Normalization and ReLU activation, and are trained with adaptive gradient descent techniques and L2 regularization or weight decay. We conduct an extensive experimental study casting our initial findings into hy…

2018-11-29abs ↗pdf ↗

Deep neural networks with piecewise-polynomial activations can approximate smooth functions and their derivatives.

problem Approximating smooth functions and their derivatives with neural networks.
method Derives the depth, width, and sparsity required for approximation in Hölder norms.
result Deep neural networks with bounded weights can approximate Hölder smooth functions and their derivatives.

Polynomial-time convex optimization for CNNs with ReLU activations.

problem Training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with ReLU activations.
method Developed a convex analytic framework using semi-infinite duality to formulate equivalent convex optimization problems for CNN architectures.
result Proved that two-layer CNNs can be globally optimized via an 2\ell_2 norm regularized convex program.

We propose to optimize the activation functions of a deep neural network by adding a corresponding functional regularization to the cost function. We justify the use of a second-order total-variation criterion. This allows us to derive a general representer theorem for deep neural networks that makes a direct connectio…

2018-02-26abs ↗pdf ↗

Sparsity learning with known grouping structure has received considerable attention due to wide modern applications in high-dimensional data analysis. Although advantages of using group information have been well-studied by shrinkage-based approaches, benefits of group sparsity have not been well-documented for greedy-…

2017-07-10abs ↗pdf ↗

Novel active learning framework using sparse approximation for efficient model training.

problem Efficient model training with limited labeled data.
method Formulates batch active learning as sparsity-constrained discontinuous optimization problems, using greedy or proximal iterative hard thresholding algorithms.
result Achieves competitive performance with lower computational complexity across different settings.

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been applied to various machine leaning tasks, including image recognition, speech recognition, and machine translation. However, large DNN models are needed to achieve state-of-the-art performance, exceeding the capabilities of edge devices. Model reduction is thus nee…

2018-12-19abs ↗pdf ↗

This work extends neural networks to automatically select features by stochastically penalizing feature involvement.

problem Feature selection in machine learning models.
method Stochastic regularization to select features instead of layer weights.
result Superior efficiency compared to classical methods with minimal computational overhead.

In this paper we investigate the performance of different types of rectified activation functions in convolutional neural network: standard rectified linear unit (ReLU), leaky rectified linear unit (Leaky ReLU), parametric rectified linear unit (PReLU) and a new randomized leaky rectified linear units (RReLU). We evalu…

2015-05-05abs ↗pdf ↗

LEWIS merges LLMs without training, improving performance on specific tasks.

problem Limited performance improvement of merged models on specific benchmarks.
method Guided model merging using layer-wise sparsity and task-vector pruning.
result Improved model performance by up to 11.3% on math-solving tasks.

Low bit-width integer weights and activations are very important for efficient inference, especially with respect to lower power consumption. We propose Monte Carlo methods to quantize the weights and activations of pre-trained neural networks without any re-training. By performing importance sampling we obtain quantiz…

2019-05-29abs ↗pdf ↗

Smooth activations enable optimal error rates in neural networks for Sobolev function classes.

problem Achieving optimal approximation and estimation error rates for neural networks in Sobolev function classes.
method Study of neural networks with smooth activations, proving optimal rates via approximation and statistical properties.
result Constant-depth networks with smooth activations achieve optimal rates of approximation and estimation, demonstrating smoothness adaptivity.

Sparsification is an efficient approach to accelerate CNN inference, but it is challenging to take advantage of sparsity in training procedure because the involved gradients are dynamically changed. Actually, an important observation shows that most of the activation gradients in back-propagation are very close to zero…

2019-08-01abs ↗pdf ↗

We show implicit filter level sparsity manifests in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which employ Batch Normalization and ReLU activation, and are trained with adaptive gradient descent techniques and L2 regularization or weight decay. Through an extensive empirical study (Mehta et al., 2019) we hypothesize the mec…

2019-05-13abs ↗pdf ↗