We consider the problem of neural association for a network of non-binary neurons. Here, the task is to first memorize a set of patterns using a network of neurons whose states assume values from a finite number of integer levels. Later, the same network should be able to recall previously memorized patterns from their noisy versions. Prior work in this area consider storing a finite number of purely random patterns, and have shown that the pattern retrieval capacities (maximum number of patterns that can be memorized) scale only linearly with the number of neurons in the network. In our formulation of the problem, we concentrate on exploiting redundancy and internal structure of the patterns in order to improve the pattern retrieval capacity. Our first result shows that if the given patterns have a suitable linear-algebraic structure, i.e. comprise a sub-space of the set of all possible patterns, then the pattern retrieval capacity is in fact exponential in terms of the number of neurons. The second result extends the previous finding to cases where the patterns have weak minor components, i.e. the smallest eigenvalues of the correlation matrix tend toward zero. We will use these minor components (or the basis vectors of the pattern null space) to both increase the pattern retrieval capacity and error correction capabilities. An iterative algorithm is proposed for the learning phase, and two simple neural update algorithms are presented for the recall phase. Using analytical results and simulations, we show that the proposed methods can tolerate a fair amount of errors in the input while being able to memorize an exponentially large number of patterns.
Another important point to note is that learning linear constraints by a neural network is hardly a new topic as one can learn a matrix orthogonal to a set of patterns in the training set (i.e., @math ) using simple neural learning rules (we refer the interested readers to @cite_4 and @cite_6 ). However, to the best of our knowledge, finding such a matrix subject to the sparsity constraints has not been investigated before. This problem can also be regarded as an instance of compressed sensing @cite_30 , in which the measurement matrix is given by the big patterns matrix @math and the set of measurements are the constraints we look to satisfy, denoted by the tall vector @math , which for simplicity reasons we assume to be all zero. Thus, we are interested in finding a sparse vector @math such that @math . Nevertheless, many decoders proposed in this area are very complicated and cannot be implemented by a neural network using simple neuron operations. Some exceptions are @cite_23 and @cite_20 which are closely related to the learning algorithm proposed in this paper.
@cite_30 @cite_4 @cite_6 @cite_23 @cite_20
2128007683 2178314882 2963446085 2806448755
It has been known for a while that l1-norm relaxation can in certain cases solve an under-determined system of linear equations. Recently, E. Candes ("Robust uncertainty principles: Exact signal reconstruction from highly incomplete frequency information," IEEE Trans. Information Theory, vol. 52, no. 12, pp. 489-509, Dec. 2006) and D. Donoho ("High-dimensional centrally symmetric polytopes with neighborlines proportional to dimension," Disc. Comput. Geometry, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 617-652, 2006) proved (in a large dimensional and statistical context) that if the number of equations (measurements in the compressed sensing terminology) in the system is proportional to the length of the unknown vector then there is a sparsity (number of nonzero elements of the unknown vector) also proportional to the length of the unknown vector such that l1-norm relaxation succeeds in solving the system. In this paper, in a large dimensional and statistical context, we determine sharp lower bounds on the values of allowable sparsity for any given number (proportional to the length of the unknown vector) of equations for the case of the so-called block-sparse unknown vectors considered in "On the reconstruction of block-sparse signals with an optimal number of measurements," (M. , IEEE Trans, Signal Processing, submitted for publication. Recent success in training deep neural networks have prompted active investigation into the features learned on their intermediate layers. Such research is difficult because it requires making sense of non-linear computations performed by millions of parameters, but valuable because it increases our ability to understand current models and create improved versions of them. In this paper we investigate the extent to which neural networks exhibit what we call convergent learning, which is when the representations learned by multiple nets converge to a set of features which are either individually similar between networks or where subsets of features span similar low-dimensional spaces. We propose a specific method of probing representations: training multiple networks and then comparing and contrasting their individual, learned representations at the level of neurons or groups of neurons. We begin research into this question using three techniques to approximately align different neural networks on a feature level: a bipartite matching approach that makes one-to-one assignments between neurons, a sparse prediction approach that finds one-to-many mappings, and a spectral clustering approach that finds many-to-many mappings. This initial investigation reveals a few previously unknown properties of neural networks, and we argue that future research into the question of convergent learning will yield many more. The insights described here include (1) that some features are learned reliably in multiple networks, yet other features are not consistently learned; (2) that units learn to span low-dimensional subspaces and, while these subspaces are common to multiple networks, the specific basis vectors learned are not; (3) that the representation codes show evidence of being a mix between a local code and slightly, but not fully, distributed codes across multiple units. In this paper, we prove a conjecture published in 1989 and also partially address an open problem announced at the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 2015. For an expected loss function of a deep nonlinear neural network, we prove the following statements under the independence assumption adopted from recent work: 1) the function is non-convex and non-concave, 2) every local minimum is a global minimum, 3) every critical point that is not a global minimum is a saddle point, and 4) the property of saddle points differs for shallow networks (with three layers) and deeper networks (with more than three layers). Moreover, we prove that the same four statements hold for deep linear neural networks with any depth, any widths and no unrealistic assumptions. As a result, we present an instance, for which we can answer to the following question: how difficult to directly train a deep model in theory? It is more difficult than the classical machine learning models (because of the non-convexity), but not too difficult (because of the nonexistence of poor local minima and the property of the saddle points). We note that even though we have advanced the theoretical foundations of deep learning, there is still a gap between theory and practice. In this work, we propose a new training method for finding minimum weight norm solutions in over-parameterized neural networks (NNs). This method seeks to improve training speed and generalization performance by framing NN training as a constrained optimization problem wherein the sum of the norm of the weights in each layer of the network is minimized, under the constraint of exactly fitting training data. It draws inspiration from support vector machines (SVMs), which are able to generalize well, despite often having an infinite number of free parameters in their primal form, and from recent theoretical generalization bounds on NNs which suggest that lower norm solutions generalize better. To solve this constrained optimization problem, our method employs Lagrange multipliers that act as integrators of error over training and identify support vector'-like examples. The method can be implemented as a wrapper around gradient based methods and uses standard back-propagation of gradients from the NN for both regression and classification versions of the algorithm. We provide theoretical justifications for the effectiveness of this algorithm in comparison to early stopping and @math -regularization using simple, analytically tractable settings. In particular, we show faster convergence to the max-margin hyperplane in a shallow network (compared to vanilla gradient descent); faster convergence to the minimum-norm solution in a linear chain (compared to @math -regularization); and initialization-independent generalization performance in a deep linear network. Finally, using the MNIST dataset, we demonstrate that this algorithm can boost test accuracy and identify difficult examples in real-world datasets.