arXiv research

The challenge of assigning importance to individual neurons in a network is of interest when interpreting deep learning models. In recent work, Dhamdhere et al. proposed Total Conductance, a "natural refinement of Integrated Gradients" for attributing importance to internal neurons. Unfortunately, the authors found tha…

AKOrN uses synchronized neurons to improve AI tasks.

TENP prunes experts and neurons in Mixture-of-Experts models for efficient deployment.

With the success of deep learning, recent efforts have been focused on analyzing how learned networks make their classifications. We are interested in analyzing the network output based on the network structure and information flow through the network layers. We contribute an algorithm for 1) analyzing a deep network t…

We develop Neuron Shapley as a new framework to quantify the contribution of individual neurons to the prediction and performance of a deep network. By accounting for interactions across neurons, Neuron Shapley is more effective in identifying important filters compared to common approaches based on activation patterns…

Inspired by complexity and diversity of biological neurons, our group proposed quadratic neurons by replacing the inner product in current artificial neurons with a quadratic operation on input data, thereby enhancing the capability of an individual neuron. Along this direction, we are motivated to evaluate the power o…

Recent advancements in language representation models such as BERT have led to a rapid improvement in numerous natural language processing tasks. However, language models usually consist of a few hundred million trainable parameters with embedding space distributed across multiple layers, thus making them challenging t…

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in recent years have made a dramatic impact in science, technology and industry, yet the theoretical mechanism of CNN architecture design remains surprisingly vague. The CNN neurons, including its distinctive element, convolutional filters, are known to be learnable features, yet th…

Sometimes it is not enough for a DNN to produce an outcome. For example, in applications such as healthcare, users need to understand the rationale of the decisions. Therefore, it is imperative to develop algorithms to learn models with good interpretability (Doshi-Velez 2017). An important factor that leads to the lac…

We introduce a mixed integer program (MIP) for assigning importance scores to each neuron in deep neural network architectures which is guided by the impact of their simultaneous pruning on the main learning task of the network. By carefully devising the objective function of the MIP, we drive the solver to minimize th…

With the recent success of deep neural networks in computer vision, it is important to understand the internal working of these networks. What does a given neuron represent? The concepts captured by a neuron may be hard to understand or express in simple terms. The approach we propose in this paper is to characterize t…

Single ReLU neuron's gradient dynamics reveal support vectors as key to generalization.

HNHN learns from hypergraphs with hyperedge neurons for better classification.

Novel 'strong neuron' improves deep learning efficiency and robustness.

An activation boundary for a neuron refers to a separating hyperplane that determines whether the neuron is activated or deactivated. It has been long considered in neural networks that the activations of neurons, rather than their exact output values, play the most important role in forming classification friendly par…

New metric captures individual neuron tuning across neural networks.

Recently, deep learning has achieved huge successes in many important applications. In our previous studies, we proposed quadratic/second-order neurons and deep quadratic neural networks. In a quadratic neuron, the inner product of a vector of data and the corresponding weights in a conventional neuron is replaced with…

OPT framework improves neural network generalization by learning an orthogonal transformation.

Study limits of circadian synchronization under different light signals.

Estimates neuronal connectivity from spike times using flexible Hawkes processes.

A new algorithm trains deep neural networks by adding neurons greedily.

Estimates individualized treatment effects using shared RBF-net neurons.

One conjecture in both deep learning and classical connectionist viewpoint is that the biological brain implements certain kinds of deep networks as its back-end. However, to our knowledge, a detailed correspondence has not yet been set up, which is important if we want to bridge between neuroscience and machine learni…

Captum library simplifies model interpretability for PyTorch.

CLEAS improves neural architecture search for continual learning.

DNN pruning reduces memory footprint and computational work of DNN-based solutions to improve performance and energy-efficiency. An effective pruning scheme should be able to systematically remove connections and/or neurons that are unnecessary or redundant, reducing the DNN size without any loss in accuracy. In this p…

In this work, we investigate the use of three information-theoretic quantities -- entropy, mutual information with the class variable, and a class selectivity measure based on Kullback-Leibler divergence -- to understand and study the behavior of already trained fully-connected feed-forward neural networks. We analyze …

For using neural networks in safety critical domains, it is important to know if a decision made by a neural network is supported by prior similarities in training. We propose runtime neuron activation pattern monitoring - after the standard training process, one creates a monitor by feeding the training data to the ne…

T-SVM improves learning in spiking neurons by maximizing dynamical margin.

Improved uncertainty estimation through diverse sampling in neural networks.

The recent discovered spatial-temporal information processing capability of bio-inspired Spiking neural networks (SNN) has enabled some interesting models and applications. However designing large-scale and high-performance model is yet a challenge due to the lack of robust training algorithms. A bio-plausible SNN mode…

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…

Improves neural network verification by merging abstract domains and Lagrangian methods.

Gaudy images help train deep neural networks with less data.

Neural plasticity is an important functionality of human brain, in which number of neurons and synapses can shrink or expand in response to stimuli throughout the span of life. We model this dynamic learning process as an $L_0$-norm regularized binary optimization problem, in which each unit of a neural network (e.g., …

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are currently being used as function approximators in many state-of-the-art Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been shown to drastically reduce the energy consumption of ANNs by encoding information in sparse temporal binary spike streams, hence…

Describes explaining neurons in deep representations using compositional logical concepts.

Optimization geometry affects deep learning performance.

SeReNe prunes neurons with low sensitivity to reduce network size.

Under-parameterized networks can either copy or average teacher weights, leading to universal optimal solutions.

Modeling hidden neurons in SNNs using mesoscopic approximations.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly powering high-stakes applications such as autonomous cars and healthcare; however, DNNs are often treated as "black boxes" in such applications. Recent research has also revealed that DNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, raising serious concerns over deploying …

Topological methods improve neuron analysis and tracer injection summary.

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…

We propose a new generic type of stochastic neurons, called $q$-neurons, that considers activation functions based on Jackson's $q$-derivatives with stochastic parameters $q$. Our generalization of neural network architectures with $q$-neurons is shown to be both scalable and very easy to implement. We demonstrate expe…

Spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) which observed in the brain has proven to be important in biological learning. On the other hand, artificial neural networks use a different way to learn, such as Back-Propagation or Contrastive Hebbian Learning. In this work, we propose a new framework called mstdp that learn a…

It will be shown that according to theorems of K. Menger, every neuron grid if identified with a curve is able to preserve the adopted qualitative structure of a data space. Furthermore, if this identification is made, the neuron grid structure can always be mapped to a subset of a universal neuron grid which is constr…

As neural networks become widely deployed in different applications and on different hardware, it has become increasingly important to optimize inference time and model size along with model accuracy. Most current techniques optimize model size, model accuracy and inference time in different stages, resulting in subopt…