Growing Tiny Networks: Spotting Expressivity Bottlenecks and Fixing Them Optimally

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Verbockhaven, Manon, Chevallier, Sylvain, Charpiat, Guillaume, Rudkiewicz, Théo
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Verbockhaven, Manon
Chevallier, Sylvain
Charpiat, Guillaume
Rudkiewicz, Théo
author_facet Verbockhaven, Manon
Chevallier, Sylvain
Charpiat, Guillaume
Rudkiewicz, Théo
contents Machine learning tasks are generally formulated as optimization problems, where one searches for an optimal function within a certain functional space. In practice, parameterized functional spaces are considered, in order to be able to perform gradient descent. Typically, a neural network architecture is chosen and fixed, and its parameters (connection weights) are optimized, yielding an architecture-dependent result. This way of proceeding however forces the evolution of the function during training to lie within the realm of what is expressible with the chosen architecture, and prevents any optimization across architectures. Costly architectural hyper-parameter optimization is often performed to compensate for this. Instead, we propose to adapt the architecture on the fly during training. We show that the information about desirable architectural changes, due to expressivity bottlenecks when attempting to follow the functional gradient, can be extracted from backpropagation. To do this, we propose a mathematical definition of expressivity bottlenecks, which enables us to detect, quantify and solve them while training, by adding suitable neurons. Thus, while the standard approach requires large networks, in terms of number of neurons per layer, for expressivity and optimization reasons, we provide tools and properties to develop an architecture starting with a very small number of neurons. As a proof of concept, we show results~on the CIFAR dataset, matching large neural network accuracy, with competitive training time, while removing the need for standard architectural hyper-parameter search.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_19816
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Growing Tiny Networks: Spotting Expressivity Bottlenecks and Fixing Them Optimally
Verbockhaven, Manon
Chevallier, Sylvain
Charpiat, Guillaume
Rudkiewicz, Théo
Artificial Intelligence
Machine learning tasks are generally formulated as optimization problems, where one searches for an optimal function within a certain functional space. In practice, parameterized functional spaces are considered, in order to be able to perform gradient descent. Typically, a neural network architecture is chosen and fixed, and its parameters (connection weights) are optimized, yielding an architecture-dependent result. This way of proceeding however forces the evolution of the function during training to lie within the realm of what is expressible with the chosen architecture, and prevents any optimization across architectures. Costly architectural hyper-parameter optimization is often performed to compensate for this. Instead, we propose to adapt the architecture on the fly during training. We show that the information about desirable architectural changes, due to expressivity bottlenecks when attempting to follow the functional gradient, can be extracted from backpropagation. To do this, we propose a mathematical definition of expressivity bottlenecks, which enables us to detect, quantify and solve them while training, by adding suitable neurons. Thus, while the standard approach requires large networks, in terms of number of neurons per layer, for expressivity and optimization reasons, we provide tools and properties to develop an architecture starting with a very small number of neurons. As a proof of concept, we show results~on the CIFAR dataset, matching large neural network accuracy, with competitive training time, while removing the need for standard architectural hyper-parameter search.
title Growing Tiny Networks: Spotting Expressivity Bottlenecks and Fixing Them Optimally
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19816