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Main Authors: Price, Ilan, Ball, Nicholas Daultry, Lam, Samuel C. H., Jones, Adam C., Tanner, Jared
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16184
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author Price, Ilan
Ball, Nicholas Daultry
Lam, Samuel C. H.
Jones, Adam C.
Tanner, Jared
author_facet Price, Ilan
Ball, Nicholas Daultry
Lam, Samuel C. H.
Jones, Adam C.
Tanner, Jared
contents Inducing and leveraging sparse activations during training and inference is a promising avenue for improving the computational efficiency of deep networks, which is increasingly important as network sizes continue to grow and their application becomes more widespread. Here we use the large width Gaussian process limit to analyze the behaviour, at random initialization, of nonlinear activations that induce sparsity in the hidden outputs. A previously unreported form of training instability is proven for arguably two of the most natural candidates for hidden layer sparsification; those being a shifted ReLU ($ϕ(x)=\max(0, x-τ)$ for $τ\ge 0$) and soft thresholding ($ϕ(x)=0$ for $|x|\leτ$ and $x-\text{sign}(x)τ$ for $|x|>τ$). We show that this instability is overcome by clipping the nonlinear activation magnitude, at a level prescribed by the shape of the associated Gaussian process variance map. Numerical experiments verify the theory and show that the proposed magnitude clipped sparsifying activations can be trained with training and test fractional sparsity as high as 85\% while retaining close to full accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_16184
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Neural Network Initialization with Sparsity Inducing Activations
Price, Ilan
Ball, Nicholas Daultry
Lam, Samuel C. H.
Jones, Adam C.
Tanner, Jared
Machine Learning
Inducing and leveraging sparse activations during training and inference is a promising avenue for improving the computational efficiency of deep networks, which is increasingly important as network sizes continue to grow and their application becomes more widespread. Here we use the large width Gaussian process limit to analyze the behaviour, at random initialization, of nonlinear activations that induce sparsity in the hidden outputs. A previously unreported form of training instability is proven for arguably two of the most natural candidates for hidden layer sparsification; those being a shifted ReLU ($ϕ(x)=\max(0, x-τ)$ for $τ\ge 0$) and soft thresholding ($ϕ(x)=0$ for $|x|\leτ$ and $x-\text{sign}(x)τ$ for $|x|>τ$). We show that this instability is overcome by clipping the nonlinear activation magnitude, at a level prescribed by the shape of the associated Gaussian process variance map. Numerical experiments verify the theory and show that the proposed magnitude clipped sparsifying activations can be trained with training and test fractional sparsity as high as 85\% while retaining close to full accuracy.
title Deep Neural Network Initialization with Sparsity Inducing Activations
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16184