This paper studies activation sparsity in large language models, finding key trends and implications.
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Spark Transformer achieves high sparsity in FFN and attention without sacrificing model quality.
New method targets sparsity to prevent overfitting in deep nets.
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…
Sparse activations in neural networks are hard to exploit but lead to advantages in learning.
New sparsity attacks degrade DNN efficiency, raising concerns for resource-constrained systems.
To improve the execution speed and efficiency of neural networks in embedded systems, it is crucial to decrease the model size and computational complexity. In addition to conventional compression techniques, e.g., weight pruning and quantization, removing unimportant activations can reduce the amount of data communica…
Transformers exhibit sparse activation maps, reducing computational load and improving 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 …
"Sparse" neural networks, in which relatively few neurons or connections are active, are common in both machine learning and neuroscience. Whereas in machine learning, "sparsity" is related to a penalty term that leads to some connecting weights becoming small or zero, in biological brains, sparsity is often created wh…
Deep Convolutional Sparse Coding (D-CSC) is a framework reminiscent of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), but by omitting the learning of the dictionaries one can more transparently analyse the role of the activation function and its ability to recover activation paths through the layers. Papyan, Romano, and E…
BatchTopK SAEs improve GPT-2 and Gemma activations with adjustable sparsity.
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…
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…
The paper provides statistical guarantees for sparse deep learning.
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 …
New proof shows neural networks can memorize training data with high accuracy.
Improved fMRI analysis models enhance classification performance and select relevant brain regions.
New algorithm reduces high-dimensional data processing costs and achieves true sparsity.
Deep learning is finding its way into the embedded world with applications such as autonomous driving, smart sensors and aug- mented reality. However, the computation of deep neural networks is demanding in energy, compute power and memory. Various approaches have been investigated to reduce the necessary resources, on…
New neural operators learn structured patterns efficiently.
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…
Model shows loss curve with two distinct exponents due to sparse activations.
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…
There has been a growing interest in expressivity of deep neural networks. However, most of the existing work about this topic focuses only on the specific activation function such as ReLU or sigmoid. In this paper, we investigate the approximation ability of deep neural networks with a broad class of activation functi…
Screening rules help identify active sets in optimization problems.
New method selects variables in groups with few nonzeros, improving support recovery.
Deep neural networks with piecewise-polynomial activations can approximate smooth functions and their derivatives.
Polynomial-time convex optimization for CNNs with ReLU activations.
DNNs with regularization reveal feature learning dynamics and sparsity.
Our community has greatly improved the efficiency of deep learning applications, including by exploiting sparsity in inputs. Most of that work, though, is for inference, where weight sparsity is known statically, and/or for specialized hardware. We propose a scheme to leverage dynamic sparsity during training. In parti…
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…
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-…
Novel active learning framework using sparse approximation for efficient model training.
New method controls false detections in brain activity localization.
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…
Develops a functional mix-of-experts model for multiclass classification.
Study confirms sparse coding in whole brain using MRI data.
This work extends neural networks to automatically select features by stochastically penalizing feature involvement.
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…
LEWIS merges LLMs without training, improving performance on specific tasks.
With the rapid scaling up of deep neural networks (DNNs), extensive research studies on network model compression such as weight pruning have been performed for improving deployment efficiency. This work aims to advance the compression beyond the weights to neuron activations. We propose the joint regularization techni…
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…
The mushroom body is the key network for the representation of learned olfactory stimuli in Drosophila and insects. The sparse activity of Kenyon cells, the principal neurons in the mushroom body, plays a key role in the learned classification of different odours. In the specific case of the fruit fly, the sparseness o…
Smooth activations enable optimal error rates in neural networks for Sobolev function classes.
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…
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…
Batteryless or so called passive wearables are providing new and innovative methods for human activity recognition (HAR), especially in healthcare applications for older people. Passive sensors are low cost, lightweight, unobtrusive and desirably disposable; attractive attributes for healthcare applications in hospital…