Daily Papers

Advancing the frontier of subquadratic architectures for Language Models (LMs) is crucial in the rapidly evolving field of natural language processing. Current innovations, including State Space Models, were initially celebrated for surpassing Transformer performance on language modeling tasks. However, these models have revealed deficiencies in essential In-Context Learning capabilities - a domain where the Transformer traditionally shines. The Based model emerged as a hybrid solution, blending a Linear Transformer with a kernel inspired by the Taylor expansion of exponential functions, augmented by convolutional networks. Mirroring the Transformer's in-context adeptness, it became a strong contender in the field. In our work, we present a singular, elegant alteration to the Based kernel that amplifies its In-Context Learning abilities evaluated with the Multi-Query Associative Recall task and overall language modeling process, as demonstrated on the Pile dataset.

In this paper we present a novel method for efficient and effective 3D surface reconstruction in open scenes. Existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) based works typically require extensive training and rendering time due to the adopted implicit representations. In contrast, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) uses an explicit and discrete representation, hence the reconstructed surface is built by the huge number of Gaussian primitives, which leads to excessive memory consumption and rough surface details in sparse Gaussian areas. To address these issues, we propose Gaussian Voxel Kernel Functions (GVKF), which establish a continuous scene representation based on discrete 3DGS through kernel regression. The GVKF integrates fast 3DGS rasterization and highly effective scene implicit representations, achieving high-fidelity open scene surface reconstruction. Experiments on challenging scene datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed GVKF, featuring with high reconstruction quality, real-time rendering speed, significant savings in storage and training memory consumption.

We present a novel method for reconstructing a 3D implicit surface from a large-scale, sparse, and noisy point cloud. Our approach builds upon the recently introduced Neural Kernel Fields (NKF) representation. It enjoys similar generalization capabilities to NKF, while simultaneously addressing its main limitations: (a) We can scale to large scenes through compactly supported kernel functions, which enable the use of memory-efficient sparse linear solvers. (b) We are robust to noise, through a gradient fitting solve. (c) We minimize training requirements, enabling us to learn from any dataset of dense oriented points, and even mix training data consisting of objects and scenes at different scales. Our method is capable of reconstructing millions of points in a few seconds, and handling very large scenes in an out-of-core fashion. We achieve state-of-the-art results on reconstruction benchmarks consisting of single objects, indoor scenes, and outdoor scenes.

A recent trend in explainable AI research has focused on surrogate modeling, where neural networks are approximated as simpler ML algorithms such as kernel machines. A second trend has been to utilize kernel functions in various explain-by-example or data attribution tasks. In this work, we combine these two trends to analyze approximate empirical neural tangent kernels (eNTK) for data attribution. Approximation is critical for eNTK analysis due to the high computational cost to compute the eNTK. We define new approximate eNTK and perform novel analysis on how well the resulting kernel machine surrogate models correlate with the underlying neural network. We introduce two new random projection variants of approximate eNTK which allow users to tune the time and memory complexity of their calculation. We conclude that kernel machines using approximate neural tangent kernel as the kernel function are effective surrogate models, with the introduced trace NTK the most consistent performer. Open source software allowing users to efficiently calculate kernel functions in the PyTorch framework is available (https://github.com/pnnl/projection\_ntk).

Debiased collaborative filtering aims to learn an unbiased prediction model by removing different biases in observational datasets. To solve this problem, one of the simple and effective methods is based on the propensity score, which adjusts the observational sample distribution to the target one by reweighting observed instances. Ideally, propensity scores should be learned with causal balancing constraints. However, existing methods usually ignore such constraints or implement them with unreasonable approximations, which may affect the accuracy of the learned propensity scores. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we first analyze the gaps between the causal balancing requirements and existing methods such as learning the propensity with cross-entropy loss or manually selecting functions to balance. Inspired by these gaps, we propose to approximate the balancing functions in reproducing kernel Hilbert space and demonstrate that, based on the universal property and representer theorem of kernel functions, the causal balancing constraints can be better satisfied. Meanwhile, we propose an algorithm that adaptively balances the kernel function and theoretically analyze the generalization error bound of our methods. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, and to promote this research direction, we have released our project at https://github.com/haoxuanli-pku/ICLR24-Kernel-Balancing.

Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) is a powerful and practical approach for learning sequential decision-making policies. Different from Reinforcement Learning (RL), GAIL takes advantage of demonstration data by experts (e.g., human), and learns both the policy and reward function of the unknown environment. Despite the significant empirical progresses, the theory behind GAIL is still largely unknown. The major difficulty comes from the underlying temporal dependency of the demonstration data and the minimax computational formulation of GAIL without convex-concave structure. To bridge such a gap between theory and practice, this paper investigates the theoretical properties of GAIL. Specifically, we show: (1) For GAIL with general reward parameterization, the generalization can be guaranteed as long as the class of the reward functions is properly controlled; (2) For GAIL, where the reward is parameterized as a reproducing kernel function, GAIL can be efficiently solved by stochastic first order optimization algorithms, which attain sublinear convergence to a stationary solution. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first results on statistical and computational guarantees of imitation learning with reward/policy function approximation. Numerical experiments are provided to support our analysis.

Contrastive learning is a powerful self-supervised learning method, but we have a limited theoretical understanding of how it works and why it works. In this paper, we prove that contrastive learning with the standard InfoNCE loss is equivalent to spectral clustering on the similarity graph. Using this equivalence as the building block, we extend our analysis to the CLIP model and rigorously characterize how similar multi-modal objects are embedded together. Motivated by our theoretical insights, we introduce the kernel mixture loss, incorporating novel kernel functions that outperform the standard Gaussian kernel on several vision datasets.

Vision transformers (ViTs) have pushed the state-of-the-art for visual perception tasks. The self-attention mechanism underpinning the strength of ViTs has a quadratic complexity in both computation and memory usage. This motivates the development of approximating the self-attention at linear complexity. However, an in-depth analysis in this work reveals that existing methods are either theoretically flawed or empirically ineffective for visual recognition. We identify that their limitations are rooted in the inheritance of softmax-based self-attention during approximations, that is, normalizing the scaled dot-product between token feature vectors using the softmax function. As preserving the softmax operation challenges any subsequent linearization efforts. By this insight, a family of Softmax-Free Transformers (SOFT) are proposed. Specifically, a Gaussian kernel function is adopted to replace the dot-product similarity, enabling a full self-attention matrix to be approximated under low-rank matrix decomposition. For computational robustness, we estimate the Moore-Penrose inverse using an iterative Newton-Raphson method in the forward process only, while calculating its theoretical gradients only once in the backward process. To further expand applicability (e.g., dense prediction tasks), an efficient symmetric normalization technique is introduced. Extensive experiments on ImageNet, COCO, and ADE20K show that our SOFT significantly improves the computational efficiency of existing ViT variants. With linear complexity, much longer token sequences are permitted by SOFT, resulting in superior trade-off between accuracy and complexity. Code and models are available at https://github.com/fudan-zvg/SOFT.

The existing definitions of graph convolution, either from spatial or spectral perspectives, are inflexible and not unified. Defining a general convolution operator in the graph domain is challenging due to the lack of canonical coordinates, the presence of irregular structures, and the properties of graph symmetries. In this work, we propose a novel and general graph convolution framework by parameterizing the kernels as continuous functions of pseudo-coordinates derived via graph positional encoding. We name this Continuous Kernel Graph Convolution (CKGConv). Theoretically, we demonstrate that CKGConv is flexible and expressive. CKGConv encompasses many existing graph convolutions, and exhibits a stronger expressiveness, as powerful as graph transformers in terms of distinguishing non-isomorphic graphs. Empirically, we show that CKGConv-based Networks outperform existing graph convolutional networks and perform comparably to the best graph transformers across a variety of graph datasets. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/networkslab/CKGConv.

Particle-based representations of radiance fields such as 3D Gaussian Splatting have found great success for reconstructing and re-rendering of complex scenes. Most existing methods render particles via rasterization, projecting them to screen space tiles for processing in a sorted order. This work instead considers ray tracing the particles, building a bounding volume hierarchy and casting a ray for each pixel using high-performance GPU ray tracing hardware. To efficiently handle large numbers of semi-transparent particles, we describe a specialized rendering algorithm which encapsulates particles with bounding meshes to leverage fast ray-triangle intersections, and shades batches of intersections in depth-order. The benefits of ray tracing are well-known in computer graphics: processing incoherent rays for secondary lighting effects such as shadows and reflections, rendering from highly-distorted cameras common in robotics, stochastically sampling rays, and more. With our renderer, this flexibility comes at little cost compared to rasterization. Experiments demonstrate the speed and accuracy of our approach, as well as several applications in computer graphics and vision. We further propose related improvements to the basic Gaussian representation, including a simple use of generalized kernel functions which significantly reduces particle hit counts.

Machine learning and quantum computing are two technologies each with the potential for altering how computation is performed to address previously untenable problems. Kernel methods for machine learning are ubiquitous for pattern recognition, with support vector machines (SVMs) being the most well-known method for classification problems. However, there are limitations to the successful solution to such problems when the feature space becomes large, and the kernel functions become computationally expensive to estimate. A core element to computational speed-ups afforded by quantum algorithms is the exploitation of an exponentially large quantum state space through controllable entanglement and interference. Here, we propose and experimentally implement two novel methods on a superconducting processor. Both methods represent the feature space of a classification problem by a quantum state, taking advantage of the large dimensionality of quantum Hilbert space to obtain an enhanced solution. One method, the quantum variational classifier builds on [1,2] and operates through using a variational quantum circuit to classify a training set in direct analogy to conventional SVMs. In the second, a quantum kernel estimator, we estimate the kernel function and optimize the classifier directly. The two methods present a new class of tools for exploring the applications of noisy intermediate scale quantum computers [3] to machine learning.

Federated learning is an emerging framework that builds centralized machine learning models with training data distributed across multiple devices. Most of the previous works about federated learning focus on the privacy protection and communication cost reduction. However, how to achieve fairness in federated learning is under-explored and challenging especially when testing data distribution is different from training distribution or even unknown. Introducing simple fairness constraints on the centralized model cannot achieve model fairness on unknown testing data. In this paper, we develop a fairness-aware agnostic federated learning framework (AgnosticFair) to deal with the challenge of unknown testing distribution. We use kernel reweighing functions to assign a reweighing value on each training sample in both loss function and fairness constraint. Therefore, the centralized model built from AgnosticFair can achieve high accuracy and fairness guarantee on unknown testing data. Moreover, the built model can be directly applied to local sites as it guarantees fairness on local data distributions. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to achieve fairness in federated learning. Experimental results on two real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness in terms of both utility and fairness under data shift scenarios.

The paper introduces the weighted convolution, a novel approach to the convolution for signals defined on regular grids (e.g., 2D images) through the application of an optimal density function to scale the contribution of neighbouring pixels based on their distance from the central pixel. This choice differs from the traditional uniform convolution, which treats all neighbouring pixels equally. Our weighted convolution can be applied to convolutional neural network problems to improve the approximation accuracy. Given a convolutional network, we define a framework to compute the optimal density function through a minimisation model. The framework separates the optimisation of the convolutional kernel weights (using stochastic gradient descent) from the optimisation of the density function (using DIRECT-L). Experimental results on a learning model for an image-to-image task (e.g., image denoising) show that the weighted convolution significantly reduces the loss (up to 53% improvement) and increases the test accuracy compared to standard convolution. While this method increases execution time by 11%, it is robust across several hyperparameters of the learning model. Future work will apply the weighted convolution to real-case 2D and 3D image convolutional learning problems.

The goal of this paper is to revisit Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) through dualization of a difference of convex functions. This allows to naturally extend KPCA to multiple objective functions and leads to efficient gradient-based algorithms avoiding the expensive SVD of the Gram matrix. Particularly, we consider objective functions that can be written as Moreau envelopes, demonstrating how to promote robustness and sparsity within the same framework. The proposed method is evaluated on synthetic and real-world benchmarks, showing significant speedup in KPCA training time as well as highlighting the benefits in terms of robustness and sparsity.

Dot-product attention mechanism plays a crucial role in modern deep architectures (e.g., Transformer) for sequence modeling, however, na\"ive exact computation of this model incurs quadratic time and memory complexities in sequence length, hindering the training of long-sequence models. Critical bottlenecks are due to the computation of partition functions in the denominator of softmax function as well as the multiplication of the softmax matrix with the matrix of values. Our key observation is that the former can be reduced to a variant of the kernel density estimation (KDE) problem, and an efficient KDE solver can be further utilized to accelerate the latter via subsampling-based fast matrix products. Our proposed KDEformer can approximate the attention in sub-quadratic time with provable spectral norm bounds, while all prior results merely provide entry-wise error bounds. Empirically, we verify that KDEformer outperforms other attention approximations in terms of accuracy, memory, and runtime on various pre-trained models. On BigGAN image generation, we achieve better generative scores than the exact computation with over 4times speedup. For ImageNet classification with T2T-ViT, KDEformer shows over 18times speedup while the accuracy drop is less than 0.5%.

We present a novel type of neural fields that uses general radial bases for signal representation. State-of-the-art neural fields typically rely on grid-based representations for storing local neural features and N-dimensional linear kernels for interpolating features at continuous query points. The spatial positions of their neural features are fixed on grid nodes and cannot well adapt to target signals. Our method instead builds upon general radial bases with flexible kernel position and shape, which have higher spatial adaptivity and can more closely fit target signals. To further improve the channel-wise capacity of radial basis functions, we propose to compose them with multi-frequency sinusoid functions. This technique extends a radial basis to multiple Fourier radial bases of different frequency bands without requiring extra parameters, facilitating the representation of details. Moreover, by marrying adaptive radial bases with grid-based ones, our hybrid combination inherits both adaptivity and interpolation smoothness. We carefully designed weighting schemes to let radial bases adapt to different types of signals effectively. Our experiments on 2D image and 3D signed distance field representation demonstrate the higher accuracy and compactness of our method than prior arts. When applied to neural radiance field reconstruction, our method achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality, with small model size and comparable training speed.

Existing GPU libraries often struggle to fully exploit the parallel resources and on-chip memory (SRAM) of GPUs when chaining multiple GPU functions as individual kernels. While Kernel Fusion (KF) techniques like Horizontal Fusion (HF) and Vertical Fusion (VF) can mitigate this, current library implementations often require library developers to manually create fused kernels. Hence, library users rely on limited sets of pre-compiled or template-based fused kernels. This limits the use cases that can benefit from HF and VF and increases development costs. In order to solve these issues, we present a novel methodology for building GPU libraries that enables automatic on-demand HF and VF for arbitrary combinations of GPU library functions. Our methodology defines reusable, fusionable components that users combine via high-level programming interfaces. Leveraging C++17 metaprogramming features available in compilers like nvcc, our methodology generates a single and optimized fused kernel tailored to the user's specific sequence of operations at compile time, without needing a custom compiler or manual development and pre-compilation of kernel combinations. This approach abstracts low-level GPU complexities while maximizing GPU resource utilization and keeping intermediate data in SRAM. We provide an open-source implementation demonstrating significant speedups compared to traditional libraries in various benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of this methodology for improving GPU performance in the range of 2x to more than 1000x, while preserving high-level programmability.

Large pre-trained vision-language models such as CLIP provide compact and general-purpose representations of text and images that are demonstrably effective across multiple downstream zero-shot prediction tasks. However, owing to the nature of their training process, these models have the potential to 1) propagate or amplify societal biases in the training data and 2) learn to rely on spurious features. This paper proposes FairerCLIP, a general approach for making zero-shot predictions of CLIP more fair and robust to spurious correlations. We formulate the problem of jointly debiasing CLIP's image and text representations in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), which affords multiple benefits: 1) Flexibility: Unlike existing approaches, which are specialized to either learn with or without ground-truth labels, FairerCLIP is adaptable to learning in both scenarios. 2) Ease of Optimization: FairerCLIP lends itself to an iterative optimization involving closed-form solvers, which leads to 4times-10times faster training than the existing methods. 3) Sample Efficiency: Under sample-limited conditions, FairerCLIP significantly outperforms baselines when they fail entirely. And, 4) Performance: Empirically, FairerCLIP achieves appreciable accuracy gains on benchmark fairness and spurious correlation datasets over their respective baselines.

Conventional neural architectures for sequential data present important limitations. Recurrent networks suffer from exploding and vanishing gradients, small effective memory horizons, and must be trained sequentially. Convolutional networks are unable to handle sequences of unknown size and their memory horizon must be defined a priori. In this work, we show that all these problems can be solved by formulating convolutional kernels in CNNs as continuous functions. The resulting Continuous Kernel Convolution (CKConv) allows us to model arbitrarily long sequences in a parallel manner, within a single operation, and without relying on any form of recurrence. We show that Continuous Kernel Convolutional Networks (CKCNNs) obtain state-of-the-art results in multiple datasets, e.g., permuted MNIST, and, thanks to their continuous nature, are able to handle non-uniformly sampled datasets and irregularly-sampled data natively. CKCNNs match or perform better than neural ODEs designed for these purposes in a faster and simpler manner.

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is an effective technique for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs). While many studies focus on quantizing both weights and activations, it is still a challenge to maintain the accuracy of LLM after activating quantization. To investigate the primary cause, we extend the concept of kernel from linear algebra to quantization functions to define a new term, "quantization kernel", which refers to the set of elements in activations that are quantized to zero. Through quantitative analysis of the quantization kernel, we find that these elements are crucial for maintaining the accuracy of quantized LLMs. With the decrease of quantization kernel, the precision of quantized LLMs increases. If the quantization kernel proportion is kept below 19% for OPT models and below 1% for LLaMA models, the precision loss from quantizing activations to INT8 becomes negligible. Motivated by the goal of developing a quantization method with small quantization kernel, we propose CrossQuant: a simple yet effective method for quantizing activations. CrossQuant cross-quantizes elements using row and column-wise absolute maximum vectors, achieving a quantization kernel of approximately 16% for OPT models and less than 0.1% for LLaMA models. Experimental results on LLMs (LLaMA, OPT) ranging from 6.7B to 70B parameters demonstrate that CrossQuant improves or maintains perplexity and accuracy in language modeling, zero-shot, and few-shot tasks.

We derive a Fast Multipole Method (FMM) where a low-rank approximation of the kernel is obtained using the Empirical Interpolation Method (EIM). Contrary to classical interpolation-based FMM, where the interpolation points and basis are fixed beforehand, the EIM is a nonlinear approximation method which constructs interpolation points and basis which are adapted to the kernel under consideration. The basis functions are obtained using evaluations of the kernel itself. We restrict ourselves to translation-invariant kernels, for which a modified version of the EIM approximation can be used in a multilevel FMM context; we call the obtained algorithm Empirical Interpolation Fast Multipole Method (EIFMM). An important feature of the EIFMM is a built-in error estimation of the interpolation error made by the low-rank approximation of the far-field behavior of the kernel: the algorithm selects the optimal number of interpolation points required to ensure a given accuracy for the result, leading to important gains for inhomogeneous kernels.

We consider the problem of approximating a function from L^2 by an element of a given m-dimensional space V_m, associated with some feature map varphi, using evaluations of the function at random points x_1,dots,x_n. After recalling some results on optimal weighted least-squares using independent and identically distributed points, we consider weighted least-squares using projection determinantal point processes (DPP) or volume sampling. These distributions introduce dependence between the points that promotes diversity in the selected features varphi(x_i). We first provide a generalized version of volume-rescaled sampling yielding quasi-optimality results in expectation with a number of samples n = O(mlog(m)), that means that the expected L^2 error is bounded by a constant times the best approximation error in L^2. Also, further assuming that the function is in some normed vector space H continuously embedded in L^2, we further prove that the approximation is almost surely bounded by the best approximation error measured in the H-norm. This includes the cases of functions from L^infty or reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Finally, we present an alternative strategy consisting in using independent repetitions of projection DPP (or volume sampling), yielding similar error bounds as with i.i.d. or volume sampling, but in practice with a much lower number of samples. Numerical experiments illustrate the performance of the different strategies.

Transformer has shown state-of-the-art performance on various applications and has recently emerged as a promising tool for surrogate modeling of partial differential equations (PDEs). Despite the introduction of linear-complexity variant, applying attention to a large number of grid points can result in instability and is still expensive to compute. In this work, we propose Factorized Transformer(FactFormer), which is based on an axial factorized kernel integral. Concretely, we introduce a learnable projection operator that decomposes the input function into multiple sub-functions with one-dimensional domain. These sub-functions are then evaluated and used to compute the instance-based kernel with an axial factorized scheme. We showcase that the proposed model is able to simulate 2D Kolmogorov flow on a 256 by 256 grid and 3D smoke buoyancy on a 64 by 64 by 64 grid with good accuracy and efficiency. In addition, we find out that with the factorization scheme, the attention matrices enjoy a more compact spectrum than full softmax-free attention matrices.

A neural architecture with randomly initialized weights, in the infinite width limit, is equivalent to a Gaussian Random Field whose covariance function is the so-called Neural Network Gaussian Process kernel (NNGP). We prove that a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) defined by the NNGP contains only functions that can be approximated by the architecture. To achieve a certain approximation error the required number of neurons in each layer is defined by the RKHS norm of the target function. Moreover, the approximation can be constructed from a supervised dataset by a random multi-layer representation of an input vector, together with training of the last layer's weights. For a 2-layer NN and a domain equal to an n-1-dimensional sphere in {mathbb R}^n, we compare the number of neurons required by Barron's theorem and by the multi-layer features construction. We show that if eigenvalues of the integral operator of the NNGP decay slower than k^{-n-2{3}} where k is an order of an eigenvalue, then our theorem guarantees a more succinct neural network approximation than Barron's theorem. We also make some computational experiments to verify our theoretical findings. Our experiments show that realistic neural networks easily learn target functions even when both theorems do not give any guarantees.

We study the problem of learning hierarchical polynomials over the standard Gaussian distribution with three-layer neural networks. We specifically consider target functions of the form h = g circ p where p : R^d rightarrow R is a degree k polynomial and g: R rightarrow R is a degree q polynomial. This function class generalizes the single-index model, which corresponds to k=1, and is a natural class of functions possessing an underlying hierarchical structure. Our main result shows that for a large subclass of degree k polynomials p, a three-layer neural network trained via layerwise gradient descent on the square loss learns the target h up to vanishing test error in mathcal{O}(d^k) samples and polynomial time. This is a strict improvement over kernel methods, which require widetilde Theta(d^{kq}) samples, as well as existing guarantees for two-layer networks, which require the target function to be low-rank. Our result also generalizes prior works on three-layer neural networks, which were restricted to the case of p being a quadratic. When p is indeed a quadratic, we achieve the information-theoretically optimal sample complexity mathcal{O}(d^2), which is an improvement over prior work~nichani2023provable requiring a sample size of widetildeTheta(d^4). Our proof proceeds by showing that during the initial stage of training the network performs feature learning to recover the feature p with mathcal{O}(d^k) samples. This work demonstrates the ability of three-layer neural networks to learn complex features and as a result, learn a broad class of hierarchical functions.

Modern machine learning algorithms, especially deep learning based techniques, typically involve careful hyperparameter tuning to achieve the best performance. Despite the surge of intense interest in practical techniques like Bayesian optimization and random search based approaches to automating this laborious and compute intensive task, the fundamental learning theoretic complexity of tuning hyperparameters for deep neural networks is poorly understood. Inspired by this glaring gap, we initiate the formal study of hyperparameter tuning complexity in deep learning through a recently introduced data driven setting. We assume that we have a series of deep learning tasks, and we have to tune hyperparameters to do well on average over the distribution of tasks. A major difficulty is that the utility function as a function of the hyperparameter is very volatile and furthermore, it is given implicitly by an optimization problem over the model parameters. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a new technique to characterize the discontinuities and oscillations of the utility function on any fixed problem instance as we vary the hyperparameter; our analysis relies on subtle concepts including tools from differential/algebraic geometry and constrained optimization. This can be used to show that the learning theoretic complexity of the corresponding family of utility functions is bounded. We instantiate our results and provide sample complexity bounds for concrete applications tuning a hyperparameter that interpolates neural activation functions and setting the kernel parameter in graph neural networks.

We consider the neural contextual bandit problem. In contrast to the existing work which primarily focuses on ReLU neural nets, we consider a general set of smooth activation functions. Under this more general setting, (i) we derive non-asymptotic error bounds on the difference between an overparameterized neural net and its corresponding neural tangent kernel, (ii) we propose an algorithm with a provably sublinear regret bound that is also efficient in the finite regime as demonstrated by empirical studies. The non-asymptotic error bounds may be of broader interest as a tool to establish the relation between the smoothness of the activation functions in neural contextual bandits and the smoothness of the kernels in kernel bandits.

This paper focuses on over-parameterized deep neural networks (DNNs) with ReLU activation functions and proves that when the data distribution is well-separated, DNNs can achieve Bayes-optimal test error for classification while obtaining (nearly) zero-training error under the lazy training regime. For this purpose, we unify three interrelated concepts of overparameterization, benign overfitting, and the Lipschitz constant of DNNs. Our results indicate that interpolating with smoother functions leads to better generalization. Furthermore, we investigate the special case where interpolating smooth ground-truth functions is performed by DNNs under the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) regime for generalization. Our result demonstrates that the generalization error converges to a constant order that only depends on label noise and initialization noise, which theoretically verifies benign overfitting. Our analysis provides a tight lower bound on the normalized margin under non-smooth activation functions, as well as the minimum eigenvalue of NTK under high-dimensional settings, which has its own interest in learning theory.

Recent work has shown that training loss scales as a power law with both model size and the number of tokens, and that achieving compute-optimal models requires scaling model size and token count together. However, these scaling laws assume an infinite supply of data and apply primarily in compute-bound settings. As modern large language models increasingly rely on massive internet-scale datasets, the assumption that they are compute-bound is becoming less valid. This shift highlights the need for architectures that prioritize token efficiency. In this work, we investigate the use of the 2-simplicial Transformer, an architecture that generalizes standard dot-product attention to trilinear functions through an efficient Triton kernel implementation. We demonstrate that the 2-simplicial Transformer achieves better token efficiency than standard Transformers: for a fixed token budget, similarly sized models outperform their dot-product counterparts on tasks involving mathematics, coding, reasoning, and logic. We quantify these gains by demonstrating that 2-simplicial attention changes the exponent in the scaling laws for knowledge and reasoning tasks compared to dot product attention.

We propose Super-resolution Neural Operator (SRNO), a deep operator learning framework that can resolve high-resolution (HR) images at arbitrary scales from the low-resolution (LR) counterparts. Treating the LR-HR image pairs as continuous functions approximated with different grid sizes, SRNO learns the mapping between the corresponding function spaces. From the perspective of approximation theory, SRNO first embeds the LR input into a higher-dimensional latent representation space, trying to capture sufficient basis functions, and then iteratively approximates the implicit image function with a kernel integral mechanism, followed by a final dimensionality reduction step to generate the RGB representation at the target coordinates. The key characteristics distinguishing SRNO from prior continuous SR works are: 1) the kernel integral in each layer is efficiently implemented via the Galerkin-type attention, which possesses non-local properties in the spatial domain and therefore benefits the grid-free continuum; and 2) the multilayer attention architecture allows for the dynamic latent basis update, which is crucial for SR problems to "hallucinate" high-frequency information from the LR image. Experiments show that SRNO outperforms existing continuous SR methods in terms of both accuracy and running time. Our code is at https://github.com/2y7c3/Super-Resolution-Neural-Operator

Accurate and fast scene understanding is one of the challenging task for autonomous driving, which requires to take full advantage of LiDAR point clouds for semantic segmentation. In this paper, we present a concise and efficient image-based semantic segmentation network, named CENet. In order to improve the descriptive power of learned features and reduce the computational as well as time complexity, our CENet integrates the convolution with larger kernel size instead of MLP, carefully-selected activation functions, and multiple auxiliary segmentation heads with corresponding loss functions into architecture. Quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on publicly available benchmarks, SemanticKITTI and SemanticPOSS, demonstrate that our pipeline achieves much better mIoU and inference performance compared with state-of-the-art models. The code will be available at https://github.com/huixiancheng/CENet.

Many methods in differentially private model training rely on computing the similarity between a query point (such as public or synthetic data) and private data. We abstract out this common subroutine and study the following fundamental algorithmic problem: Given a similarity function f and a large high-dimensional private dataset X subset R^d, output a differentially private (DP) data structure which approximates sum_{x in X} f(x,y) for any query y. We consider the cases where f is a kernel function, such as f(x,y) = e^{-|x-y|_2^2/sigma^2} (also known as DP kernel density estimation), or a distance function such as f(x,y) = |x-y|_2, among others. Our theoretical results improve upon prior work and give better privacy-utility trade-offs as well as faster query times for a wide range of kernels and distance functions. The unifying approach behind our results is leveraging `low-dimensional structures' present in the specific functions f that we study, using tools such as provable dimensionality reduction, approximation theory, and one-dimensional decomposition of the functions. Our algorithms empirically exhibit improved query times and accuracy over prior state of the art. We also present an application to DP classification. Our experiments demonstrate that the simple methodology of classifying based on average similarity is orders of magnitude faster than prior DP-SGD based approaches for comparable accuracy.

In this work we introduce KERNELIZED TRANSFORMER, a generic, scalable, data driven framework for learning the kernel function in Transformers. Our framework approximates the Transformer kernel as a dot product between spectral feature maps and learns the kernel by learning the spectral distribution. This not only helps in learning a generic kernel end-to-end, but also reduces the time and space complexity of Transformers from quadratic to linear. We show that KERNELIZED TRANSFORMERS achieve performance comparable to existing efficient Transformer architectures, both in terms of accuracy as well as computational efficiency. Our study also demonstrates that the choice of the kernel has a substantial impact on performance, and kernel learning variants are competitive alternatives to fixed kernel Transformers, both in long as well as short sequence tasks.

Kernel methods are widely used in machine learning, especially for classification problems. However, the theoretical analysis of kernel classification is still limited. This paper investigates the statistical performances of kernel classifiers. With some mild assumptions on the conditional probability eta(x)=P(Y=1mid X=x), we derive an upper bound on the classification excess risk of a kernel classifier using recent advances in the theory of kernel regression. We also obtain a minimax lower bound for Sobolev spaces, which shows the optimality of the proposed classifier. Our theoretical results can be extended to the generalization error of overparameterized neural network classifiers. To make our theoretical results more applicable in realistic settings, we also propose a simple method to estimate the interpolation smoothness of 2eta(x)-1 and apply the method to real datasets.

At initialization, artificial neural networks (ANNs) are equivalent to Gaussian processes in the infinite-width limit, thus connecting them to kernel methods. We prove that the evolution of an ANN during training can also be described by a kernel: during gradient descent on the parameters of an ANN, the network function f_theta (which maps input vectors to output vectors) follows the kernel gradient of the functional cost (which is convex, in contrast to the parameter cost) w.r.t. a new kernel: the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK). This kernel is central to describe the generalization features of ANNs. While the NTK is random at initialization and varies during training, in the infinite-width limit it converges to an explicit limiting kernel and it stays constant during training. This makes it possible to study the training of ANNs in function space instead of parameter space. Convergence of the training can then be related to the positive-definiteness of the limiting NTK. We prove the positive-definiteness of the limiting NTK when the data is supported on the sphere and the non-linearity is non-polynomial. We then focus on the setting of least-squares regression and show that in the infinite-width limit, the network function f_theta follows a linear differential equation during training. The convergence is fastest along the largest kernel principal components of the input data with respect to the NTK, hence suggesting a theoretical motivation for early stopping. Finally we study the NTK numerically, observe its behavior for wide networks, and compare it to the infinite-width limit.

Gaussian splatting has achieved impressive improvements for both novel-view synthesis and surface reconstruction from multi-view images. However, current methods still struggle to reconstruct high-quality surfaces from only sparse view input images using Gaussian splatting. In this paper, we propose a novel method called SolidGS to address this problem. We observed that the reconstructed geometry can be severely inconsistent across multi-views, due to the property of Gaussian function in geometry rendering. This motivates us to consolidate all Gaussians by adopting a more solid kernel function, which effectively improves the surface reconstruction quality. With the additional help of geometrical regularization and monocular normal estimation, our method achieves superior performance on the sparse view surface reconstruction than all the Gaussian splatting methods and neural field methods on the widely used DTU, Tanks-and-Temples, and LLFF datasets.

Integral reinforcement learning (IntRL) demands the precise computation of the utility function's integral at its policy evaluation (PEV) stage. This is achieved through quadrature rules, which are weighted sums of utility functions evaluated from state samples obtained in discrete time. Our research reveals a critical yet underexplored phenomenon: the choice of the computational method -- in this case, the quadrature rule -- can significantly impact control performance. This impact is traced back to the fact that computational errors introduced in the PEV stage can affect the policy iteration's convergence behavior, which in turn affects the learned controller. To elucidate how computation impacts control, we draw a parallel between IntRL's policy iteration and Newton's method applied to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. In this light, computational error in PEV manifests as an extra error term in each iteration of Newton's method, with its upper bound proportional to the computational error. Further, we demonstrate that when the utility function resides in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), the optimal quadrature is achievable by employing Bayesian quadrature with the RKHS-inducing kernel function. We prove that the local convergence rates for IntRL using the trapezoidal rule and Bayesian quadrature with a Mat\'ern kernel to be O(N^{-2}) and O(N^{-b}), where N is the number of evenly-spaced samples and b is the Mat\'ern kernel's smoothness parameter. These theoretical findings are finally validated by two canonical control tasks.

We propose Sortformer, a novel neural model for speaker diarization, trained with unconventional objectives compared to existing end-to-end diarization models. The permutation problem in speaker diarization has long been regarded as a critical challenge. Most prior end-to-end diarization systems employ permutation invariant loss (PIL), which optimizes for the permutation that yields the lowest error. In contrast, we introduce Sort Loss, which enables a diarization model to autonomously resolve permutation, with or without PIL. We demonstrate that combining Sort Loss and PIL achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art end-to-end diarization models trained exclusively with PIL. Crucially, we present a streamlined multispeaker ASR architecture that leverages Sortformer as a speaker supervision model, embedding speaker label estimation within the ASR encoder state using a sinusoidal kernel function. This approach resolves the speaker permutation problem through sorted objectives, effectively bridging speaker-label timestamps and speaker tokens. In our experiments, we show that the proposed multispeaker ASR architecture, enhanced with speaker supervision, improves performance via adapter techniques. Code and trained models will be made publicly available via the NVIDIA NeMo framework

The kernel thinning (KT) algorithm of Dwivedi and Mackey (2021) compresses a probability distribution more effectively than independent sampling by targeting a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) and leveraging a less smooth square-root kernel. Here we provide four improvements. First, we show that KT applied directly to the target RKHS yields tighter, dimension-free guarantees for any kernel, any distribution, and any fixed function in the RKHS. Second, we show that, for analytic kernels like Gaussian, inverse multiquadric, and sinc, target KT admits maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) guarantees comparable to or better than those of square-root KT without making explicit use of a square-root kernel. Third, we prove that KT with a fractional power kernel yields better-than-Monte-Carlo MMD guarantees for non-smooth kernels, like Laplace and Mat\'ern, that do not have square-roots. Fourth, we establish that KT applied to a sum of the target and power kernels (a procedure we call KT+) simultaneously inherits the improved MMD guarantees of power KT and the tighter individual function guarantees of target KT. In our experiments with target KT and KT+, we witness significant improvements in integration error even in 100 dimensions and when compressing challenging differential equation posteriors.

The asymptotically precise estimation of the generalization of kernel methods has recently received attention due to the parallels between neural networks and their associated kernels. However, prior works derive such estimates for training by kernel ridge regression (KRR), whereas neural networks are typically trained with gradient descent (GD). In the present work, we consider the training of kernels with a family of spectral algorithms specified by profile h(lambda), and including KRR and GD as special cases. Then, we derive the generalization error as a functional of learning profile h(lambda) for two data models: high-dimensional Gaussian and low-dimensional translation-invariant model. Under power-law assumptions on the spectrum of the kernel and target, we use our framework to (i) give full loss asymptotics for both noisy and noiseless observations (ii) show that the loss localizes on certain spectral scales, giving a new perspective on the KRR saturation phenomenon (iii) conjecture, and demonstrate for the considered data models, the universality of the loss w.r.t. non-spectral details of the problem, but only in case of noisy observation.

We propose a novel random walk-based algorithm for unbiased estimation of arbitrary functions of a weighted adjacency matrix, coined universal graph random features (u-GRFs). This includes many of the most popular examples of kernels defined on the nodes of a graph. Our algorithm enjoys subquadratic time complexity with respect to the number of nodes, overcoming the notoriously prohibitive cubic scaling of exact graph kernel evaluation. It can also be trivially distributed across machines, permitting learning on much larger networks. At the heart of the algorithm is a modulation function which upweights or downweights the contribution from different random walks depending on their lengths. We show that by parameterising it with a neural network we can obtain u-GRFs that give higher-quality kernel estimates or perform efficient, scalable kernel learning. We provide robust theoretical analysis and support our findings with experiments including pointwise estimation of fixed graph kernels, solving non-homogeneous graph ordinary differential equations, node clustering and kernel regression on triangular meshes.

We here propose a machine learning approach for monitoring particle detectors in real-time. The goal is to assess the compatibility of incoming experimental data with a reference dataset, characterising the data behaviour under normal circumstances, via a likelihood-ratio hypothesis test. The model is based on a modern implementation of kernel methods, nonparametric algorithms that can learn any continuous function given enough data. The resulting approach is efficient and agnostic to the type of anomaly that may be present in the data. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of this strategy on multivariate data from drift tube chamber muon detectors.

Privacy-utility tradeoff remains as one of the fundamental issues of differentially private machine learning. This paper introduces a geometrically inspired kernel-based approach to mitigate the accuracy-loss issue in classification. In this approach, a representation of the affine hull of given data points is learned in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS). This leads to a novel distance measure that hides privacy-sensitive information about individual data points and improves the privacy-utility tradeoff via significantly reducing the risk of membership inference attacks. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through experiments on MNIST dataset, Freiburg groceries dataset, and a real biomedical dataset. It is verified that the approach remains computationally practical. The application of the approach to federated learning is considered and it is observed that the accuracy-loss due to data being distributed is either marginal or not significantly high.

In the misspecified kernel ridge regression problem, researchers usually assume the underground true function f_{rho}^{*} in [H]^{s}, a less-smooth interpolation space of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) H for some sin (0,1). The existing minimax optimal results require |f_{rho}^{*}|_{L^{infty}}<infty which implicitly requires s > alpha_{0} where alpha_{0}in (0,1) is the embedding index, a constant depending on H. Whether the KRR is optimal for all sin (0,1) is an outstanding problem lasting for years. In this paper, we show that KRR is minimax optimal for any sin (0,1) when the H is a Sobolev RKHS.

We consider the problem of contextual kernel bandits with stochastic contexts, where the underlying reward function belongs to a known Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). We study this problem under the additional constraint of joint differential privacy, where the agents needs to ensure that the sequence of query points is differentially private with respect to both the sequence of contexts and rewards. We propose a novel algorithm that improves upon the state of the art and achieves an error rate of Oleft(frac{gamma_T{T}} + gamma_T{T varepsilon}right) after T queries for a large class of kernel families, where gamma_T represents the effective dimensionality of the kernel and varepsilon > 0 is the privacy parameter. Our results are based on a novel estimator for the reward function that simultaneously enjoys high utility along with a low-sensitivity to observed rewards and contexts, which is crucial to obtain an order optimal learning performance with improved dependence on the privacy parameter.

Unlabeled data is a key component of modern machine learning. In general, the role of unlabeled data is to impose a form of smoothness, usually from the similarity information encoded in a base kernel, such as the epsilon-neighbor kernel or the adjacency matrix of a graph. This work revisits the classical idea of spectrally transformed kernel regression (STKR), and provides a new class of general and scalable STKR estimators able to leverage unlabeled data. Intuitively, via spectral transformation, STKR exploits the data distribution for which unlabeled data can provide additional information. First, we show that STKR is a principled and general approach, by characterizing a universal type of "target smoothness", and proving that any sufficiently smooth function can be learned by STKR. Second, we provide scalable STKR implementations for the inductive setting and a general transformation function, while prior work is mostly limited to the transductive setting. Third, we derive statistical guarantees for two scenarios: STKR with a known polynomial transformation, and STKR with kernel PCA when the transformation is unknown. Overall, we believe that this work helps deepen our understanding of how to work with unlabeled data, and its generality makes it easier to inspire new methods.

We introduce the concept of scalable neural network kernels (SNNKs), the replacements of regular feedforward layers (FFLs), capable of approximating the latter, but with favorable computational properties. SNNKs effectively disentangle the inputs from the parameters of the neural network in the FFL, only to connect them in the final computation via the dot-product kernel. They are also strictly more expressive, as allowing to model complicated relationships beyond the functions of the dot-products of parameter-input vectors. We also introduce the neural network bundling process that applies SNNKs to compactify deep neural network architectures, resulting in additional compression gains. In its extreme version, it leads to the fully bundled network whose optimal parameters can be expressed via explicit formulae for several loss functions (e.g. mean squared error), opening a possibility to bypass backpropagation. As a by-product of our analysis, we introduce the mechanism of the universal random features (or URFs), applied to instantiate several SNNK variants, and interesting on its own in the context of scalable kernel methods. We provide rigorous theoretical analysis of all these concepts as well as an extensive empirical evaluation, ranging from point-wise kernel estimation to Transformers' fine-tuning with novel adapter layers inspired by SNNKs. Our mechanism provides up to 5x reduction in the number of trainable parameters, while maintaining competitive accuracy.

We present a unified representation of the most popular neural network activation functions. Adopting Mittag-Leffler functions of fractional calculus, we propose a flexible and compact functional form that is able to interpolate between various activation functions and mitigate common problems in training neural networks such as vanishing and exploding gradients. The presented gated representation extends the scope of fixed-shape activation functions to their adaptive counterparts whose shape can be learnt from the training data. The derivatives of the proposed functional form can also be expressed in terms of Mittag-Leffler functions making it a suitable candidate for gradient-based backpropagation algorithms. By training multiple neural networks of different complexities on various datasets with different sizes, we demonstrate that adopting a unified gated representation of activation functions offers a promising and affordable alternative to individual built-in implementations of activation functions in conventional machine learning frameworks.

Black box optimisation of an unknown function from expensive and noisy evaluations is a ubiquitous problem in machine learning, academic research and industrial production. An abstraction of the problem can be formulated as a kernel based bandit problem (also known as Bayesian optimisation), where a learner aims at optimising a kernelized function through sequential noisy observations. The existing work predominantly assumes feedback is immediately available; an assumption which fails in many real world situations, including recommendation systems, clinical trials and hyperparameter tuning. We consider a kernel bandit problem under stochastically delayed feedback, and propose an algorithm with mathcal{O}(Gamma_k(T)T+E[tau]) regret, where T is the number of time steps, Gamma_k(T) is the maximum information gain of the kernel with T observations, and tau is the delay random variable. This represents a significant improvement over the state of the art regret bound of mathcal{O}(Gamma_k(T)T+E[tau]Gamma_k(T)) reported in Verma et al. (2022). In particular, for very non-smooth kernels, the information gain grows almost linearly in time, trivializing the existing results. We also validate our theoretical results with simulations.

Recent studies indicate that kernel machines can often perform similarly or better than deep neural networks (DNNs) on small datasets. The interest in kernel machines has been additionally bolstered by the discovery of their equivalence to wide neural networks in certain regimes. However, a key feature of DNNs is their ability to scale the model size and training data size independently, whereas in traditional kernel machines model size is tied to data size. Because of this coupling, scaling kernel machines to large data has been computationally challenging. In this paper, we provide a way forward for constructing large-scale general kernel models, which are a generalization of kernel machines that decouples the model and data, allowing training on large datasets. Specifically, we introduce EigenPro 3.0, an algorithm based on projected dual preconditioned SGD and show scaling to model and data sizes which have not been possible with existing kernel methods.

Standard infinite-width limits of neural networks sacrifice the ability for intermediate layers to learn representations from data. Recent work (A theory of representation learning gives a deep generalisation of kernel methods, Yang et al. 2023) modified the Neural Network Gaussian Process (NNGP) limit of Bayesian neural networks so that representation learning is retained. Furthermore, they found that applying this modified limit to a deep Gaussian process gives a practical learning algorithm which they dubbed the deep kernel machine (DKM). However, they only considered the simplest possible setting: regression in small, fully connected networks with e.g. 10 input features. Here, we introduce convolutional deep kernel machines. This required us to develop a novel inter-domain inducing point approximation, as well as introducing and experimentally assessing a number of techniques not previously seen in DKMs, including analogues to batch normalisation, different likelihoods, and different types of top-layer. The resulting model trains in roughly 77 GPU hours, achieving around 99% test accuracy on MNIST, 72% on CIFAR-100, and 92.7% on CIFAR-10, which is SOTA for kernel methods.

We introduce in this paper the mechanism of graph random features (GRFs). GRFs can be used to construct unbiased randomized estimators of several important kernels defined on graphs' nodes, in particular the regularized Laplacian kernel. As regular RFs for non-graph kernels, they provide means to scale up kernel methods defined on graphs to larger networks. Importantly, they give substantial computational gains also for smaller graphs, while applied in downstream applications. Consequently, GRFs address the notoriously difficult problem of cubic (in the number of the nodes of the graph) time complexity of graph kernels algorithms. We provide a detailed theoretical analysis of GRFs and an extensive empirical evaluation: from speed tests, through Frobenius relative error analysis to kmeans graph-clustering with graph kernels. We show that the computation of GRFs admits an embarrassingly simple distributed algorithm that can be applied if the graph under consideration needs to be split across several machines. We also introduce a (still unbiased) quasi Monte Carlo variant of GRFs, q-GRFs, relying on the so-called reinforced random walks, that might be used to optimize the variance of GRFs. As a byproduct, we obtain a novel approach to solve certain classes of linear equations with positive and symmetric matrices.

Bessel functions are critical in scientific computing for applications such as machine learning, protein structure modeling, and robotics. However, currently, available routines lack precision or fail for certain input ranges, such as when the order v is large, and GPU-specific implementations are limited. We address the precision limitations of current numerical implementations while dramatically improving the runtime. We propose two novel algorithms for computing the logarithm of modified Bessel functions of the first and second kinds by computing intermediate values on a logarithmic scale. Our algorithms are robust and never have issues with underflows or overflows while having relative errors on the order of machine precision, even for inputs where existing libraries fail. In C++/CUDA, our algorithms have median and maximum speedups of 45x and 6150x for GPU and 17x and 3403x for CPU, respectively, over the ranges of inputs and third-party libraries tested. Compared to SciPy, the algorithms have median and maximum speedups of 77x and 300x for GPU and 35x and 98x for CPU, respectively, over the tested inputs. The ability to robustly compute a solution and the low relative errors allow us to fit von Mises-Fisher, vMF, distributions to high-dimensional neural network features. This is, e.g., relevant for uncertainty quantification in metric learning. We obtain image feature data by processing CIFAR10 training images with the convolutional layers of a pre-trained ResNet50. We successfully fit vMF distributions to 2048-, 8192-, and 32768-dimensional image feature data using our algorithms. Our approach provides fast and accurate results while existing implementations in SciPy and mpmath fail to fit successfully. Our approach is readily implementable on GPUs, and we provide a fast open-source implementation alongside this paper.

This paper presents a novel and uniform algorithm for edge detection based on SVM (support vector machine) with Three-dimensional Gaussian radial basis function with kernel. Because of disadvantages in traditional edge detection such as inaccurate edge location, rough edge and careless on detect soft edge. The experimental results indicate how the SVM can detect edge in efficient way. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with existing methods, including Sobel and canny detectors. The results show that this method is better than classical algorithm such as canny and Sobel detector.

Finding the mode of a high dimensional probability distribution D is a fundamental algorithmic problem in statistics and data analysis. There has been particular interest in efficient methods for solving the problem when D is represented as a mixture model or kernel density estimate, although few algorithmic results with worst-case approximation and runtime guarantees are known. In this work, we significantly generalize a result of (LeeLiMusco:2021) on mode approximation for Gaussian mixture models. We develop randomized dimensionality reduction methods for mixtures involving a broader class of kernels, including the popular logistic, sigmoid, and generalized Gaussian kernels. As in Lee et al.'s work, our dimensionality reduction results yield quasi-polynomial algorithms for mode finding with multiplicative accuracy (1-epsilon) for any epsilon > 0. Moreover, when combined with gradient descent, they yield efficient practical heuristics for the problem. In addition to our positive results, we prove a hardness result for box kernels, showing that there is no polynomial time algorithm for finding the mode of a kernel density estimate, unless P = NP. Obtaining similar hardness results for kernels used in practice (like Gaussian or logistic kernels) is an interesting future direction.

We study a setting of collecting and learning from private data distributed across end users. In the shuffled model of differential privacy, the end users partially protect their data locally before sharing it, and their data is also anonymized during its collection to enhance privacy. This model has recently become a prominent alternative to central DP, which requires full trust in a central data curator, and local DP, where fully local data protection takes a steep toll on downstream accuracy. Our main technical result is a shuffled DP protocol for privately estimating the kernel density function of a distributed dataset, with accuracy essentially matching central DP. We use it to privately learn a classifier from the end user data, by learning a private density function per class. Moreover, we show that the density function itself can recover the semantic content of its class, despite having been learned in the absence of any unprotected data. Our experiments show the favorable downstream performance of our approach, and highlight key downstream considerations and trade-offs in a practical ML deployment of shuffled DP.

Normalization layers and activation functions are fundamental components in deep networks and typically co-locate with each other. Here we propose to design them using an automated approach. Instead of designing them separately, we unify them into a single tensor-to-tensor computation graph, and evolve its structure starting from basic mathematical functions. Examples of such mathematical functions are addition, multiplication and statistical moments. The use of low-level mathematical functions, in contrast to the use of high-level modules in mainstream NAS, leads to a highly sparse and large search space which can be challenging for search methods. To address the challenge, we develop efficient rejection protocols to quickly filter out candidate layers that do not work well. We also use multi-objective evolution to optimize each layer's performance across many architectures to prevent overfitting. Our method leads to the discovery of EvoNorms, a set of new normalization-activation layers with novel, and sometimes surprising structures that go beyond existing design patterns. For example, some EvoNorms do not assume that normalization and activation functions must be applied sequentially, nor need to center the feature maps, nor require explicit activation functions. Our experiments show that EvoNorms work well on image classification models including ResNets, MobileNets and EfficientNets but also transfer well to Mask R-CNN with FPN/SpineNet for instance segmentation and to BigGAN for image synthesis, outperforming BatchNorm and GroupNorm based layers in many cases.

This paper studies Kernel density estimation for a high-dimensional distribution rho(x). Traditional approaches have focused on the limit of large number of data points n and fixed dimension d. We analyze instead the regime where both the number n of data points y_i and their dimensionality d grow with a fixed ratio alpha=(log n)/d. Our study reveals three distinct statistical regimes for the kernel-based estimate of the density hat rho_h^{D}(x)=1{n h^d}sum_{i=1}^n Kleft(x-y_i{h}right), depending on the bandwidth h: a classical regime for large bandwidth where the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) holds, which is akin to the one found in traditional approaches. Below a certain value of the bandwidth, h_{CLT}(alpha), we find that the CLT breaks down. The statistics of hat rho_h^{D}(x) for a fixed x drawn from rho(x) is given by a heavy-tailed distribution (an alpha-stable distribution). In particular below a value h_G(alpha), we find that hat rho_h^{D}(x) is governed by extreme value statistics: only a few points in the database matter and give the dominant contribution to the density estimator. We provide a detailed analysis for high-dimensional multivariate Gaussian data. We show that the optimal bandwidth threshold based on Kullback-Leibler divergence lies in the new statistical regime identified in this paper. Our findings reveal limitations of classical approaches, show the relevance of these new statistical regimes, and offer new insights for Kernel density estimation in high-dimensional settings.

We propose a goodness-of-fit measure for probability densities modeling observations with varying dimensionality, such as text documents of differing lengths or variable-length sequences. The proposed measure is an instance of the kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD), which has been used to construct goodness-of-fit tests for unnormalized densities. The KSD is defined by its Stein operator: current operators used in testing apply to fixed-dimensional spaces. As our main contribution, we extend the KSD to the variable-dimension setting by identifying appropriate Stein operators, and propose a novel KSD goodness-of-fit test. As with the previous variants, the proposed KSD does not require the density to be normalized, allowing the evaluation of a large class of models. Our test is shown to perform well in practice on discrete sequential data benchmarks.

Feature preprocessing continues to play a critical role when applying machine learning and statistical methods to tabular data. In this paper, we propose the use of the kernel density integral transformation as a feature preprocessing step. Our approach subsumes the two leading feature preprocessing methods as limiting cases: linear min-max scaling and quantile transformation. We demonstrate that, without hyperparameter tuning, the kernel density integral transformation can be used as a simple drop-in replacement for either method, offering protection from the weaknesses of each. Alternatively, with tuning of a single continuous hyperparameter, we frequently outperform both of these methods. Finally, we show that the kernel density transformation can be profitably applied to statistical data analysis, particularly in correlation analysis and univariate clustering.

Control variates are variance reduction tools for Monte Carlo estimators. They can provide significant variance reduction, but usually require a large number of samples, which can be prohibitive when sampling or evaluating the integrand is computationally expensive. Furthermore, there are many scenarios where we need to compute multiple related integrals simultaneously or sequentially, which can further exacerbate computational costs. In this paper, we propose vector-valued control variates, an extension of control variates which can be used to reduce the variance of multiple Monte Carlo estimators jointly. This allows for the transfer of information across integration tasks, and hence reduces the need for a large number of samples. We focus on control variates based on kernel interpolants and our novel construction is obtained through a generalised Stein identity and the development of novel matrix-valued Stein reproducing kernels. We demonstrate our methodology on a range of problems including multifidelity modelling, Bayesian inference for dynamical systems, and model evidence computation through thermodynamic integration.

Motivated by the paradigm of reservoir computing, we consider randomly initialized controlled ResNets defined as Euler-discretizations of neural controlled differential equations (Neural CDEs), a unified architecture which enconpasses both RNNs and ResNets. We show that in the infinite-width-depth limit and under proper scaling, these architectures converge weakly to Gaussian processes indexed on some spaces of continuous paths and with kernels satisfying certain partial differential equations (PDEs) varying according to the choice of activation function, extending the results of Hayou (2022); Hayou & Yang (2023) to the controlled and homogeneous case. In the special, homogeneous, case where the activation is the identity, we show that the equation reduces to a linear PDE and the limiting kernel agrees with the signature kernel of Salvi et al. (2021a). We name this new family of limiting kernels neural signature kernels. Finally, we show that in the infinite-depth regime, finite-width controlled ResNets converge in distribution to Neural CDEs with random vector fields which, depending on whether the weights are shared across layers, are either time-independent and Gaussian or behave like a matrix-valued Brownian motion.

This paper studies the online node classification problem under a transductive learning setting. Current methods either invert a graph kernel matrix with O(n^3) runtime and O(n^2) space complexity or sample a large volume of random spanning trees, thus are difficult to scale to large graphs. In this work, we propose an improvement based on the online relaxation technique introduced by a series of works (Rakhlin et al.,2012; Rakhlin and Sridharan, 2015; 2017). We first prove an effective regret O(n^{1+gamma}) when suitable parameterized graph kernels are chosen, then propose an approximate algorithm FastONL enjoying O(kn^{1+gamma}) regret based on this relaxation. The key of FastONL is a generalized local push method that effectively approximates inverse matrix columns and applies to a series of popular kernels. Furthermore, the per-prediction cost is O(vol({S})log 1/epsilon) locally dependent on the graph with linear memory cost. Experiments show that our scalable method enjoys a better tradeoff between local and global consistency.

Empirical neural tangent kernels (eNTKs) can provide a good understanding of a given network's representation: they are often far less expensive to compute and applicable more broadly than infinite width NTKs. For networks with O output units (e.g. an O-class classifier), however, the eNTK on N inputs is of size NO times NO, taking O((NO)^2) memory and up to O((NO)^3) computation. Most existing applications have therefore used one of a handful of approximations yielding N times N kernel matrices, saving orders of magnitude of computation, but with limited to no justification. We prove that one such approximation, which we call "sum of logits", converges to the true eNTK at initialization for any network with a wide final "readout" layer. Our experiments demonstrate the quality of this approximation for various uses across a range of settings.

Which functions can be used as activations in deep neural networks? This article explores families of functions based on orthonormal bases, including the Hermite polynomial basis and the Fourier trigonometric basis, as well as a basis resulting from the tropicalization of a polynomial basis. Our study shows that, through simple variance-preserving initialization and without additional clamping mechanisms, these activations can successfully be used to train deep models, such as GPT-2 for next-token prediction on OpenWebText and ConvNeXt for image classification on ImageNet. Our work addresses the issue of exploding and vanishing activations and gradients, particularly prevalent with polynomial activations, and opens the door for improving the efficiency of large-scale learning tasks. Furthermore, our approach provides insight into the structure of neural networks, revealing that networks with polynomial activations can be interpreted as multivariate polynomial mappings. Finally, using Hermite interpolation, we show that our activations can closely approximate classical ones in pre-trained models by matching both the function and its derivative, making them especially useful for fine-tuning tasks. These activations are available in the torchortho library, which can be accessed via: https://github.com/K-H-Ismail/torchortho.

Temporal point processes (TPP) are a natural tool for modeling event-based data. Among all TPP models, Hawkes processes have proven to be the most widely used, mainly due to their adequate modeling for various applications, particularly when considering exponential or non-parametric kernels. Although non-parametric kernels are an option, such models require large datasets. While exponential kernels are more data efficient and relevant for specific applications where events immediately trigger more events, they are ill-suited for applications where latencies need to be estimated, such as in neuroscience. This work aims to offer an efficient solution to TPP inference using general parametric kernels with finite support. The developed solution consists of a fast ell_2 gradient-based solver leveraging a discretized version of the events. After theoretically supporting the use of discretization, the statistical and computational efficiency of the novel approach is demonstrated through various numerical experiments. Finally, the method's effectiveness is evaluated by modeling the occurrence of stimuli-induced patterns from brain signals recorded with magnetoencephalography (MEG). Given the use of general parametric kernels, results show that the proposed approach leads to an improved estimation of pattern latency than the state-of-the-art.

We study the cost of overfitting in noisy kernel ridge regression (KRR), which we define as the ratio between the test error of the interpolating ridgeless model and the test error of the optimally-tuned model. We take an "agnostic" view in the following sense: we consider the cost as a function of sample size for any target function, even if the sample size is not large enough for consistency or the target is outside the RKHS. We analyze the cost of overfitting under a Gaussian universality ansatz using recently derived (non-rigorous) risk estimates in terms of the task eigenstructure. Our analysis provides a more refined characterization of benign, tempered and catastrophic overfitting (cf. Mallinar et al. 2022).

Selecting hyperparameters in deep learning greatly impacts its effectiveness but requires manual effort and expertise. Recent works show that Bayesian model selection with Laplace approximations can allow to optimize such hyperparameters just like standard neural network parameters using gradients and on the training data. However, estimating a single hyperparameter gradient requires a pass through the entire dataset, limiting the scalability of such algorithms. In this work, we overcome this issue by introducing lower bounds to the linearized Laplace approximation of the marginal likelihood. In contrast to previous estimators, these bounds are amenable to stochastic-gradient-based optimization and allow to trade off estimation accuracy against computational complexity. We derive them using the function-space form of the linearized Laplace, which can be estimated using the neural tangent kernel. Experimentally, we show that the estimators can significantly accelerate gradient-based hyperparameter optimization.

Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD) is a score-based discrepancy widely used in goodness-of-fit tests. It can be applied even when the target distribution has an unknown normalising factor, such as in Bayesian analysis. We show theoretically and empirically that the KSD test can suffer from low power when the target and the alternative distributions have the same well-separated modes but differ in mixing proportions. We propose to perturb the observed sample via Markov transition kernels, with respect to which the target distribution is invariant. This allows us to then employ the KSD test on the perturbed sample. We provide numerical evidence that with suitably chosen transition kernels the proposed approach can lead to substantially higher power than the KSD test.

This paper proposes a novel method for deep learning based on the analytical convolution of multidimensional Gaussian mixtures. In contrast to tensors, these do not suffer from the curse of dimensionality and allow for a compact representation, as data is only stored where details exist. Convolution kernels and data are Gaussian mixtures with unconstrained weights, positions, and covariance matrices. Similar to discrete convolutional networks, each convolution step produces several feature channels, represented by independent Gaussian mixtures. Since traditional transfer functions like ReLUs do not produce Gaussian mixtures, we propose using a fitting of these functions instead. This fitting step also acts as a pooling layer if the number of Gaussian components is reduced appropriately. We demonstrate that networks based on this architecture reach competitive accuracy on Gaussian mixtures fitted to the MNIST and ModelNet data sets.

We present Manifold Diffusion Fields (MDF), an approach to learn generative models of continuous functions defined over Riemannian manifolds. Leveraging insights from spectral geometry analysis, we define an intrinsic coordinate system on the manifold via the eigen-functions of the Laplace-Beltrami Operator. MDF represents functions using an explicit parametrization formed by a set of multiple input-output pairs. Our approach allows to sample continuous functions on manifolds and is invariant with respect to rigid and isometric transformations of the manifold. Empirical results on several datasets and manifolds show that MDF can capture distributions of such functions with better diversity and fidelity than previous approaches.

Invariance and equivariance to geometrical transformations have proven to be very useful inductive biases when training (convolutional) neural network models, especially in the low-data regime. Much work has focused on the case where the symmetry group employed is compact or abelian, or both. Recent work has explored enlarging the class of transformations used to the case of Lie groups, principally through the use of their Lie algebra, as well as the group exponential and logarithm maps. The applicability of such methods to larger transformation groups is limited by the fact that depending on the group of interest G, the exponential map may not be surjective. Further limitations are encountered when G is neither compact nor abelian. Using the structure and geometry of Lie groups and their homogeneous spaces, we present a framework by which it is possible to work with such groups primarily focusing on the Lie groups G = GL^{+}(n, R) and G = SL(n, R), as well as their representation as affine transformations R^{n} rtimes G. Invariant integration as well as a global parametrization is realized by decomposing the `larger` groups into subgroups and submanifolds which can be handled individually. Under this framework, we show how convolution kernels can be parametrized to build models equivariant with respect to affine transformations. We evaluate the robustness and out-of-distribution generalisation capability of our model on the standard affine-invariant benchmark classification task, where we outperform all previous equivariant models as well as all Capsule Network proposals.

Tucker decomposition is a powerful tensor model to handle multi-aspect data. It demonstrates the low-rank property by decomposing the grid-structured data as interactions between a core tensor and a set of object representations (factors). A fundamental assumption of such decomposition is that there are finite objects in each aspect or mode, corresponding to discrete indexes of data entries. However, real-world data is often not naturally posed in this setting. For example, geographic data is represented as continuous indexes of latitude and longitude coordinates, and cannot fit tensor models directly. To generalize Tucker decomposition to such scenarios, we propose Functional Bayesian Tucker Decomposition (FunBaT). We treat the continuous-indexed data as the interaction between the Tucker core and a group of latent functions. We use Gaussian processes (GP) as functional priors to model the latent functions. Then, we convert each GP into a state-space prior by constructing an equivalent stochastic differential equation (SDE) to reduce computational cost. An efficient inference algorithm is developed for scalable posterior approximation based on advanced message-passing techniques. The advantage of our method is shown in both synthetic data and several real-world applications. We release the code of FunBaT at https://github.com/xuangu-fang/Functional-Bayesian-Tucker-Decomposition.

As vast databases of chemical identities become increasingly available, the challenge shifts to how we effectively explore and leverage these resources to study molecular properties. This paper presents an active learning approach for molecular discovery using Deep Kernel Learning (DKL), demonstrated on the QM9 dataset. DKL links structural embeddings directly to properties, creating organized latent spaces that prioritize relevant property information. By iteratively recalculating embedding vectors in alignment with target properties, DKL uncovers concentrated maxima representing key molecular properties and reveals unexplored regions with potential for innovation. This approach underscores DKL's potential in advancing molecular research and discovery.

Bayesian optimization (BO) has established itself as a leading strategy for efficiently optimizing expensive-to-evaluate functions. Existing BO methods mostly rely on Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models and are not applicable to (doubly-stochastic) Gaussian Cox processes, where the observation process is modulated by a latent intensity function modeled as a GP. In this paper, we propose a novel maximum a posteriori inference of Gaussian Cox processes. It leverages the Laplace approximation and change of kernel technique to transform the problem into a new reproducing kernel Hilbert space, where it becomes more tractable computationally. It enables us to obtain both a functional posterior of the latent intensity function and the covariance of the posterior, thus extending existing works that often focus on specific link functions or estimating the posterior mean. Using the result, we propose a BO framework based on the Gaussian Cox process model and further develop a Nystr\"om approximation for efficient computation. Extensive evaluations on various synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate significant improvement over state-of-the-art inference solutions for Gaussian Cox processes, as well as effective BO with a wide range of acquisition functions designed through the underlying Gaussian Cox process model.

Understanding how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can efficiently learn high-dimensional functions remains a fundamental challenge. A popular belief is that these models harness the local and hierarchical structure of natural data such as images. Yet, we lack a quantitative understanding of how such structure affects performance, e.g., the rate of decay of the generalisation error with the number of training samples. In this paper, we study infinitely-wide deep CNNs in the kernel regime. First, we show that the spectrum of the corresponding kernel inherits the hierarchical structure of the network, and we characterise its asymptotics. Then, we use this result together with generalisation bounds to prove that deep CNNs adapt to the spatial scale of the target function. In particular, we find that if the target function depends on low-dimensional subsets of adjacent input variables, then the decay of the error is controlled by the effective dimensionality of these subsets. Conversely, if the target function depends on the full set of input variables, then the error decay is controlled by the input dimension. We conclude by computing the generalisation error of a deep CNN trained on the output of another deep CNN with randomly-initialised parameters. Interestingly, we find that, despite their hierarchical structure, the functions generated by infinitely-wide deep CNNs are too rich to be efficiently learnable in high dimension.

Multitask Gaussian process (MTGP) is powerful for joint learning of multiple tasks with complicated correlation patterns. However, due to the assembling of additive independent latent functions, all current MTGPs including the salient linear model of coregionalization (LMC) and convolution frameworks cannot effectively represent and learn the hierarchical latent interactions between its latent functions. In this paper, we further investigate the interactions in LMC of MTGP and then propose a novel kernel representation of the hierarchical interactions, which ameliorates both the expressiveness and the interpretability of MTGP. Specifically, we express the interaction as a product of function interaction and coefficient interaction. The function interaction is modeled by using cross convolution of latent functions. The coefficient interaction between the LMCs is described as a cross coregionalization term. We validate that considering the interactions can promote knowledge transferring in MTGP and compare our approach with some state-of-the-art MTGPs on both synthetic- and real-world datasets.

The acquisition of labels for supervised learning can be expensive. To improve the sample efficiency of neural network regression, we study active learning methods that adaptively select batches of unlabeled data for labeling. We present a framework for constructing such methods out of (network-dependent) base kernels, kernel transformations, and selection methods. Our framework encompasses many existing Bayesian methods based on Gaussian process approximations of neural networks as well as non-Bayesian methods. Additionally, we propose to replace the commonly used last-layer features with sketched finite-width neural tangent kernels and to combine them with a novel clustering method. To evaluate different methods, we introduce an open-source benchmark consisting of 15 large tabular regression data sets. Our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art on our benchmark, scales to large data sets, and works out-of-the-box without adjusting the network architecture or training code. We provide open-source code that includes efficient implementations of all kernels, kernel transformations, and selection methods, and can be used for reproducing our results.

Knowledge distillation is classically a procedure where a neural network is trained on the output of another network along with the original targets in order to transfer knowledge between the architectures. The special case of self-distillation, where the network architectures are identical, has been observed to improve generalization accuracy. In this paper, we consider an iterative variant of self-distillation in a kernel regression setting, in which successive steps incorporate both model outputs and the ground-truth targets. This allows us to provide the first theoretical results on the importance of using the weighted ground-truth targets in self-distillation. Our focus is on fitting nonlinear functions to training data with a weighted mean square error objective function suitable for distillation, subject to ell_2 regularization of the model parameters. We show that any such function obtained with self-distillation can be calculated directly as a function of the initial fit, and that infinite distillation steps yields the same optimization problem as the original with amplified regularization. Furthermore, we provide a closed form solution for the optimal choice of weighting parameter at each step, and show how to efficiently estimate this weighting parameter for deep learning and significantly reduce the computational requirements compared to a grid search.

Neural networks have proven to be a highly effective tool for solving complex problems in many areas of life. Recently, their importance and practical usability have further been reinforced with the advent of deep learning. One of the important conditions for the success of neural networks is the choice of an appropriate activation function introducing non-linearity into the model. Many types of these functions have been proposed in the literature in the past, but there is no single comprehensive source containing their exhaustive overview. The absence of this overview, even in our experience, leads to redundancy and the unintentional rediscovery of already existing activation functions. To bridge this gap, our paper presents an extensive survey involving 400 activation functions, which is several times larger in scale than previous surveys. Our comprehensive compilation also references these surveys; however, its main goal is to provide the most comprehensive overview and systematization of previously published activation functions with links to their original sources. The secondary aim is to update the current understanding of this family of functions.

Estimating truncated density models is difficult, as these models have intractable normalising constants and hard to satisfy boundary conditions. Score matching can be adapted to solve the truncated density estimation problem, but requires a continuous weighting function which takes zero at the boundary and is positive elsewhere. Evaluation of such a weighting function (and its gradient) often requires a closed-form expression of the truncation boundary and finding a solution to a complicated optimisation problem. In this paper, we propose approximate Stein classes, which in turn leads to a relaxed Stein identity for truncated density estimation. We develop a novel discrepancy measure, truncated kernelised Stein discrepancy (TKSD), which does not require fixing a weighting function in advance, and can be evaluated using only samples on the boundary. We estimate a truncated density model by minimising the Lagrangian dual of TKSD. Finally, experiments show the accuracy of our method to be an improvement over previous works even without the explicit functional form of the boundary.

While neural networks are used for classification tasks across domains, a long-standing open problem in machine learning is determining whether neural networks trained using standard procedures are optimal for classification, i.e., whether such models minimize the probability of misclassification for arbitrary data distributions. In this work, we identify and construct an explicit set of neural network classifiers that achieve optimality. Since effective neural networks in practice are typically both wide and deep, we analyze infinitely wide networks that are also infinitely deep. In particular, using the recent connection between infinitely wide neural networks and Neural Tangent Kernels, we provide explicit activation functions that can be used to construct networks that achieve optimality. Interestingly, these activation functions are simple and easy to implement, yet differ from commonly used activations such as ReLU or sigmoid. More generally, we create a taxonomy of infinitely wide and deep networks and show that these models implement one of three well-known classifiers depending on the activation function used: (1) 1-nearest neighbor (model predictions are given by the label of the nearest training example); (2) majority vote (model predictions are given by the label of the class with greatest representation in the training set); or (3) singular kernel classifiers (a set of classifiers containing those that achieve optimality). Our results highlight the benefit of using deep networks for classification tasks, in contrast to regression tasks, where excessive depth is harmful.

The classical development of neural networks has primarily focused on learning mappings between finite-dimensional Euclidean spaces. Recently, this has been generalized to neural operators that learn mappings between function spaces. For partial differential equations (PDEs), neural operators directly learn the mapping from any functional parametric dependence to the solution. Thus, they learn an entire family of PDEs, in contrast to classical methods which solve one instance of the equation. In this work, we formulate a new neural operator by parameterizing the integral kernel directly in Fourier space, allowing for an expressive and efficient architecture. We perform experiments on Burgers' equation, Darcy flow, and Navier-Stokes equation. The Fourier neural operator is the first ML-based method to successfully model turbulent flows with zero-shot super-resolution. It is up to three orders of magnitude faster compared to traditional PDE solvers. Additionally, it achieves superior accuracy compared to previous learning-based solvers under fixed resolution.

Moment restrictions and their conditional counterparts emerge in many areas of machine learning and statistics ranging from causal inference to reinforcement learning. Estimators for these tasks, generally called methods of moments, include the prominent generalized method of moments (GMM) which has recently gained attention in causal inference. GMM is a special case of the broader family of empirical likelihood estimators which are based on approximating a population distribution by means of minimizing a varphi-divergence to an empirical distribution. However, the use of varphi-divergences effectively limits the candidate distributions to reweightings of the data samples. We lift this long-standing limitation and provide a method of moments that goes beyond data reweighting. This is achieved by defining an empirical likelihood estimator based on maximum mean discrepancy which we term the kernel method of moments (KMM). We provide a variant of our estimator for conditional moment restrictions and show that it is asymptotically first-order optimal for such problems. Finally, we show that our method achieves competitive performance on several conditional moment restriction tasks.

The successes of modern deep machine learning methods are founded on their ability to transform inputs across multiple layers to build good high-level representations. It is therefore critical to understand this process of representation learning. However, standard theoretical approaches (formally NNGPs) involving infinite width limits eliminate representation learning. We therefore develop a new infinite width limit, the Bayesian representation learning limit, that exhibits representation learning mirroring that in finite-width models, yet at the same time, retains some of the simplicity of standard infinite-width limits. In particular, we show that Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) in the Bayesian representation learning limit have exactly multivariate Gaussian posteriors, and the posterior covariances can be obtained by optimizing an interpretable objective combining a log-likelihood to improve performance with a series of KL-divergences which keep the posteriors close to the prior. We confirm these results experimentally in wide but finite DGPs. Next, we introduce the possibility of using this limit and objective as a flexible, deep generalisation of kernel methods, that we call deep kernel machines (DKMs). Like most naive kernel methods, DKMs scale cubically in the number of datapoints. We therefore use methods from the Gaussian process inducing point literature to develop a sparse DKM that scales linearly in the number of datapoints. Finally, we extend these approaches to NNs (which have non-Gaussian posteriors) in the Appendices.

We investigate the learning of implicit neural representation (INR) using an overparameterized multilayer perceptron (MLP) via a novel nonparametric teaching perspective. The latter offers an efficient example selection framework for teaching nonparametrically defined (viz. non-closed-form) target functions, such as image functions defined by 2D grids of pixels. To address the costly training of INRs, we propose a paradigm called Implicit Neural Teaching (INT) that treats INR learning as a nonparametric teaching problem, where the given signal being fitted serves as the target function. The teacher then selects signal fragments for iterative training of the MLP to achieve fast convergence. By establishing a connection between MLP evolution through parameter-based gradient descent and that of function evolution through functional gradient descent in nonparametric teaching, we show for the first time that teaching an overparameterized MLP is consistent with teaching a nonparametric learner. This new discovery readily permits a convenient drop-in of nonparametric teaching algorithms to broadly enhance INR training efficiency, demonstrating 30%+ training time savings across various input modalities.

The trade-off between regret and computational cost is a fundamental problem for online kernel regression, and previous algorithms worked on the trade-off can not keep optimal regret bounds at a sublinear computational complexity. In this paper, we propose two new algorithms, AOGD-ALD and NONS-ALD, which can keep nearly optimal regret bounds at a sublinear computational complexity, and give sufficient conditions under which our algorithms work. Both algorithms dynamically maintain a group of nearly orthogonal basis used to approximate the kernel mapping, and keep nearly optimal regret bounds by controlling the approximate error. The number of basis depends on the approximate error and the decay rate of eigenvalues of the kernel matrix. If the eigenvalues decay exponentially, then AOGD-ALD and NONS-ALD separately achieves a regret of O(L(f)) and O(d_{eff}(mu)T) at a computational complexity in O(ln^2{T}). If the eigenvalues decay polynomially with degree pgeq 1, then our algorithms keep the same regret bounds at a computational complexity in o(T) in the case of p>4 and pgeq 10, respectively. L(f) is the cumulative losses of f and d_{eff}(mu) is the effective dimension of the problem. The two regret bounds are nearly optimal and are not comparable.

Continuous convolution has recently gained prominence due to its ability to handle irregularly sampled data and model long-term dependency. Also, the promising experimental results of using large convolutional kernels have catalyzed the development of continuous convolution since they can construct large kernels very efficiently. Leveraging neural networks, more specifically multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), is by far the most prevalent approach to implementing continuous convolution. However, there are a few drawbacks, such as high computational costs, complex hyperparameter tuning, and limited descriptive power of filters. This paper suggests an alternative approach to building a continuous convolution without neural networks, resulting in more computationally efficient and improved performance. We present self-moving point representations where weight parameters freely move, and interpolation schemes are used to implement continuous functions. When applied to construct convolutional kernels, the experimental results have shown improved performance with drop-in replacement in the existing frameworks. Due to its lightweight structure, we are first to demonstrate the effectiveness of continuous convolution in a large-scale setting, e.g., ImageNet, presenting the improvements over the prior arts. Our code is available on https://github.com/sangnekim/SMPConv

Despite their many desirable properties, Gaussian processes (GPs) are often compared unfavorably to deep neural networks (NNs) for lacking the ability to learn representations. Recent efforts to bridge the gap between GPs and deep NNs have yielded a new class of inter-domain variational GPs in which the inducing variables correspond to hidden units of a feedforward NN. In this work, we examine some practical issues associated with this approach and propose an extension that leverages the orthogonal decomposition of GPs to mitigate these limitations. In particular, we introduce spherical inter-domain features to construct more flexible data-dependent basis functions for both the principal and orthogonal components of the GP approximation and show that incorporating NN activation features under this framework not only alleviates these shortcomings but is more scalable than alternative strategies. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

We present a simple picture of the training process of joint embedding self-supervised learning methods. We find that these methods learn their high-dimensional embeddings one dimension at a time in a sequence of discrete, well-separated steps. We arrive at this conclusion via the study of a linearized model of Barlow Twins applicable to the case in which the trained network is infinitely wide. We solve the training dynamics of this model from small initialization, finding that the model learns the top eigenmodes of a certain contrastive kernel in a stepwise fashion, and obtain a closed-form expression for the final learned representations. Remarkably, we then see the same stepwise learning phenomenon when training deep ResNets using the Barlow Twins, SimCLR, and VICReg losses. Our theory suggests that, just as kernel regression can be thought of as a model of supervised learning, kernel PCA may serve as a useful model of self-supervised learning.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool rivaling GANs in generating high-quality samples with improved fidelity, flexibility, and robustness. A key component of these models is to learn the score function through score matching. Despite empirical success on various tasks, it remains unclear whether gradient-based algorithms can learn the score function with a provable accuracy. As a first step toward answering this question, this paper establishes a mathematical framework for analyzing score estimation using neural networks trained by gradient descent. Our analysis covers both the optimization and the generalization aspects of the learning procedure. In particular, we propose a parametric form to formulate the denoising score-matching problem as a regression with noisy labels. Compared to the standard supervised learning setup, the score-matching problem introduces distinct challenges, including unbounded input, vector-valued output, and an additional time variable, preventing existing techniques from being applied directly. In this paper, we show that with proper designs, the evolution of neural networks during training can be accurately modeled by a series of kernel regression tasks. Furthermore, by applying an early-stopping rule for gradient descent and leveraging recent developments in neural tangent kernels, we establish the first generalization error (sample complexity) bounds for learning the score function with neural networks, despite the presence of noise in the observations. Our analysis is grounded in a novel parametric form of the neural network and an innovative connection between score matching and regression analysis, facilitating the application of advanced statistical and optimization techniques.

We study the problem of designing models for machine learning tasks defined on sets. In contrast to traditional approach of operating on fixed dimensional vectors, we consider objective functions defined on sets that are invariant to permutations. Such problems are widespread, ranging from estimation of population statistics poczos13aistats, to anomaly detection in piezometer data of embankment dams Jung15Exploration, to cosmology Ntampaka16Dynamical,Ravanbakhsh16ICML1. Our main theorem characterizes the permutation invariant functions and provides a family of functions to which any permutation invariant objective function must belong. This family of functions has a special structure which enables us to design a deep network architecture that can operate on sets and which can be deployed on a variety of scenarios including both unsupervised and supervised learning tasks. We also derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for permutation equivariance in deep models. We demonstrate the applicability of our method on population statistic estimation, point cloud classification, set expansion, and outlier detection.

The emergence of new nanoscale technologies has imposed significant challenges to designing reliable electronic systems in radiation environments. A few types of radiation like Total Ionizing Dose (TID) effects often cause permanent damages on such nanoscale electronic devices, and current state-of-the-art technologies to tackle TID make use of expensive radiation-hardened devices. This paper focuses on a novel and different approach: using machine learning algorithms on consumer electronic level Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to tackle TID effects and monitor them to replace before they stop working. This condition has a research challenge to anticipate when the board results in a total failure due to TID effects. We observed internal measurements of the FPGA boards under gamma radiation and used three different anomaly detection machine learning (ML) algorithms to detect anomalies in the sensor measurements in a gamma-radiated environment. The statistical results show a highly significant relationship between the gamma radiation exposure levels and the board measurements. Moreover, our anomaly detection results have shown that a One-Class Support Vector Machine with Radial Basis Function Kernel has an average Recall score of 0.95. Also, all anomalies can be detected before the boards stop working.

When designing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), one must select the size\break of the convolutional kernels before training. Recent works show CNNs benefit from different kernel sizes at different layers, but exploring all possible combinations is unfeasible in practice. A more efficient approach is to learn the kernel size during training. However, existing works that learn the kernel size have a limited bandwidth. These approaches scale kernels by dilation, and thus the detail they can describe is limited. In this work, we propose FlexConv, a novel convolutional operation with which high bandwidth convolutional kernels of learnable kernel size can be learned at a fixed parameter cost. FlexNets model long-term dependencies without the use of pooling, achieve state-of-the-art performance on several sequential datasets, outperform recent works with learned kernel sizes, and are competitive with much deeper ResNets on image benchmark datasets. Additionally, FlexNets can be deployed at higher resolutions than those seen during training. To avoid aliasing, we propose a novel kernel parameterization with which the frequency of the kernels can be analytically controlled. Our novel kernel parameterization shows higher descriptive power and faster convergence speed than existing parameterizations. This leads to important improvements in classification accuracy.

The training process of neural networks usually optimize weights and bias parameters of linear transformations, while nonlinear activation functions are pre-specified and fixed. This work develops a systematic approach to constructing matrix activation functions whose entries are generalized from ReLU. The activation is based on matrix-vector multiplications using only scalar multiplications and comparisons. The proposed activation functions depend on parameters that are trained along with the weights and bias vectors. Neural networks based on this approach are simple and efficient and are shown to be robust in numerical experiments.

This paper focuses on solving a fault detection problem using multivariate time series of vibration signals collected from planetary gearboxes in a test rig. Various traditional machine learning and deep learning methods have been proposed for multivariate time-series classification, including distance-based, functional data-oriented, feature-driven, and convolution kernel-based methods. Recent studies have shown using convolution kernel-based methods like ROCKET, and 1D convolutional neural networks with ResNet and FCN, have robust performance for multivariate time-series data classification. We propose an ensemble of three convolution kernel-based methods and show its efficacy on this fault detection problem by outperforming other approaches and achieving an accuracy of more than 98.8\%.

Recent studies of gradient descent with large step sizes have shown that there is often a regime with an initial increase in the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian (progressive sharpening), followed by a stabilization of the eigenvalue near the maximum value which allows convergence (edge of stability). These phenomena are intrinsically non-linear and do not happen for models in the constant Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) regime, for which the predictive function is approximately linear in the parameters. As such, we consider the next simplest class of predictive models, namely those that are quadratic in the parameters, which we call second-order regression models. For quadratic objectives in two dimensions, we prove that this second-order regression model exhibits progressive sharpening of the NTK eigenvalue towards a value that differs slightly from the edge of stability, which we explicitly compute. In higher dimensions, the model generically shows similar behavior, even without the specific structure of a neural network, suggesting that progressive sharpening and edge-of-stability behavior aren't unique features of neural networks, and could be a more general property of discrete learning algorithms in high-dimensional non-linear models.

We consider a number of graph kernels and proximity measures including commute time kernel, regularized Laplacian kernel, heat kernel, exponential diffusion kernel (also called "communicability"), etc., and the corresponding distances as applied to clustering nodes in random graphs and several well-known datasets. The model of generating random graphs involves edge probabilities for the pairs of nodes that belong to the same class or different predefined classes of nodes. It turns out that in most cases, logarithmic measures (i.e., measures resulting after taking logarithm of the proximities) perform better while distinguishing underlying classes than the "plain" measures. A comparison in terms of reject curves of inter-class and intra-class distances confirms this conclusion. A similar conclusion can be made for several well-known datasets. A possible origin of this effect is that most kernels have a multiplicative nature, while the nature of distances used in cluster algorithms is an additive one (cf. the triangle inequality). The logarithmic transformation is a tool to transform the first nature to the second one. Moreover, some distances corresponding to the logarithmic measures possess a meaningful cutpoint additivity property. In our experiments, the leader is usually the logarithmic Communicability measure. However, we indicate some more complicated cases in which other measures, typically, Communicability and plain Walk, can be the winners.

Despite the growing popularity of explainable and interpretable machine learning, there is still surprisingly limited work on inherently interpretable clustering methods. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in explaining the classic k-means algorithm, leading to efficient algorithms that approximate k-means clusters using axis-aligned decision trees. However, interpretable variants of k-means have limited applicability in practice, where more flexible clustering methods are often needed to obtain useful partitions of the data. In this work, we investigate interpretable kernel clustering, and propose algorithms that construct decision trees to approximate the partitions induced by kernel k-means, a nonlinear extension of k-means. We further build on previous work on explainable k-means and demonstrate how a suitable choice of features allows preserving interpretability without sacrificing approximation guarantees on the interpretable model.

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have inspired numerous works exploring their applications across a wide range of scientific problems, with the potential to replace Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs). While many KANs are designed using basis and polynomial functions, such as B-splines, ReLU-KAN utilizes a combination of ReLU functions to mimic the structure of B-splines and take advantage of ReLU's speed. However, ReLU-KAN is not built for multiple inputs, and its limitations stem from ReLU's handling of negative values, which can restrict feature extraction. To address these issues, we introduce Activation Function-Based Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (AF-KAN), expanding ReLU-KAN with various activations and their function combinations. This novel KAN also incorporates parameter reduction methods, primarily attention mechanisms and data normalization, to enhance performance on image classification datasets. We explore different activation functions, function combinations, grid sizes, and spline orders to validate the effectiveness of AF-KAN and determine its optimal configuration. In the experiments, AF-KAN significantly outperforms MLP, ReLU-KAN, and other KANs with the same parameter count. It also remains competitive even when using fewer than 6 to 10 times the parameters while maintaining the same network structure. However, AF-KAN requires a longer training time and consumes more FLOPs. The repository for this work is available at https://github.com/hoangthangta/All-KAN.

We propose the use of low bit-depth Sigma-Delta and distributed noise-shaping methods for quantizing the Random Fourier features (RFFs) associated with shift-invariant kernels. We prove that our quantized RFFs -- even in the case of 1-bit quantization -- allow a high accuracy approximation of the underlying kernels, and the approximation error decays at least polynomially fast as the dimension of the RFFs increases. We also show that the quantized RFFs can be further compressed, yielding an excellent trade-off between memory use and accuracy. Namely, the approximation error now decays exponentially as a function of the bits used. Moreover, we empirically show by testing the performance of our methods on several machine learning tasks that our method compares favorably to other state of the art quantization methods in this context.

Recent research on remote sensing object detection has largely focused on improving the representation of oriented bounding boxes but has overlooked the unique prior knowledge presented in remote sensing scenarios. Such prior knowledge can be useful because tiny remote sensing objects may be mistakenly detected without referencing a sufficiently long-range context, and the long-range context required by different types of objects can vary. In this paper, we take these priors into account and propose the Large Selective Kernel Network (LSKNet). LSKNet can dynamically adjust its large spatial receptive field to better model the ranging context of various objects in remote sensing scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that large and selective kernel mechanisms have been explored in the field of remote sensing object detection. Without bells and whistles, LSKNet sets new state-of-the-art scores on standard benchmarks, i.e., HRSC2016 (98.46\% mAP), DOTA-v1.0 (81.85\% mAP) and FAIR1M-v1.0 (47.87\% mAP). Based on a similar technique, we rank 2nd place in 2022 the Greater Bay Area International Algorithm Competition. Code is available at https://github.com/zcablii/Large-Selective-Kernel-Network.

This article investigates signal estimation in wireless transmission (i.e., receive beamforming) from the perspective of statistical machine learning, where the transmit signals may be from an integrated sensing and communication system; that is, 1) signals may be not only discrete constellation points but also arbitrary complex values; 2) signals may be spatially correlated. Particular attention is paid to handling various uncertainties such as the uncertainty of the transmit signal covariance, the uncertainty of the channel matrix, the uncertainty of the channel noise covariance, the existence of channel impulse noises, and the limited sample size of pilots. To proceed, a distributionally robust machine learning framework that is insensitive to the above uncertainties is proposed, which reveals that channel estimation is not a necessary operation. For optimal linear estimation, the proposed framework includes several existing beamformers as special cases such as diagonal loading and eigenvalue thresholding. For optimal nonlinear estimation, estimators are limited in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and neural network function spaces, and corresponding uncertainty-aware solutions (e.g., kernelized diagonal loading) are derived. In addition, we prove that the ridge and kernel ridge regression methods in machine learning are distributionally robust against diagonal perturbation in feature covariance.

Convolutional neural networks are now seeing widespread use in a variety of fields, including image classification, facial and object recognition, medical imaging analysis, and many more. In addition, there are applications such as physics-informed simulators in which accurate forecasts in real time with a minimal lag are required. The present neural network designs include millions of parameters, which makes it difficult to install such complex models on devices that have limited memory. Compression techniques might be able to resolve these issues by decreasing the size of CNN models that are created by reducing the number of parameters that contribute to the complexity of the models. We propose a compressed tensor format of convolutional layer, a priori, before the training of the neural network. 3-way kernels or 2-way kernels in convolutional layers are replaced by one-way fiters. The overfitting phenomena will be reduced also. The time needed to make predictions or time required for training using the original Convolutional Neural Networks model would be cut significantly if there were fewer parameters to deal with. In this paper we present a method of a priori compressing convolutional neural networks for finite element (FE) predictions of physical data. Afterwards we validate our a priori compressed models on physical data from a FE model solving a 2D wave equation. We show that the proposed convolutinal compression technique achieves equivalent performance as classical convolutional layers with fewer trainable parameters and lower memory footprint.

In recent years, the use of large convolutional kernels has become popular in designing convolutional neural networks due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and provide large receptive fields. However, the increase in kernel size also leads to a quadratic growth in the number of parameters, resulting in heavy computation and memory requirements. To address this challenge, we propose a neighborhood attention (NA) module that upgrades the standard convolution with a self-attention mechanism. The NA module efficiently extracts long-range dependencies in a sliding window pattern, thereby achieving similar performance to large convolutional kernels but with fewer parameters. Building upon the NA module, we propose a lightweight single image super-resolution (SISR) network named TCSR. Additionally, we introduce an enhanced feed-forward network (EFFN) in TCSR to improve the SISR performance. EFFN employs a parameter-free spatial-shift operation for efficient feature aggregation. Our extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that TCSR outperforms existing lightweight SISR methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Aitical/TCSR.

Selecting the most suitable activation function is a critical factor in the effectiveness of deep learning models, as it influences their learning capacity, stability, and computational efficiency. In recent years, the Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU) activation function has emerged as a dominant method, surpassing traditional functions such as the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) in various applications. This study presents a rigorous mathematical investigation of the GELU activation function, exploring its differentiability, boundedness, stationarity, and smoothness properties in detail. Additionally, we conduct an extensive experimental comparison of the GELU function against a broad range of alternative activation functions, utilizing a residual convolutional network trained on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and STL-10 datasets as the empirical testbed. Our results demonstrate the superior performance of GELU compared to other activation functions, establishing its suitability for a wide range of deep learning applications. This comprehensive study contributes to a more profound understanding of the underlying mathematical properties of GELU and provides valuable insights for practitioners aiming to select activation functions that optimally align with their specific objectives and constraints in deep learning.

In this work, we explore the use of a novel neural network architecture, the Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) as feature extractors for sensor-based (specifically IMU) Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Where conventional networks perform a parameterized weighted sum of the inputs at each node and then feed the result into a statically defined nonlinearity, KANs perform non-linear computations represented by B-SPLINES on the edges leading to each node and then just sum up the inputs at the node. Instead of learning weights, the system learns the spline parameters. In the original work, such networks have been shown to be able to more efficiently and exactly learn sophisticated real valued functions e.g. in regression or PDE solution. We hypothesize that such an ability is also advantageous for computing low-level features for IMU-based HAR. To this end, we have implemented KAN as the feature extraction architecture for IMU-based human activity recognition tasks, including four architecture variations. We present an initial performance investigation of the KAN feature extractor on four public HAR datasets. It shows that the KAN-based feature extractor outperforms CNN-based extractors on all datasets while being more parameter efficient.

Normalising Flows are non-parametric statistical models characterised by their dual capabilities of density estimation and generation. This duality requires an inherently invertible architecture. However, the requirement of invertibility imposes constraints on their expressiveness, necessitating a large number of parameters and innovative architectural designs to achieve good results. Whilst flow-based models predominantly rely on neural-network-based transformations for expressive designs, alternative transformation methods have received limited attention. In this work, we present Ferumal flow, a novel kernelised normalising flow paradigm that integrates kernels into the framework. Our results demonstrate that a kernelised flow can yield competitive or superior results compared to neural network-based flows whilst maintaining parameter efficiency. Kernelised flows excel especially in the low-data regime, enabling flexible non-parametric density estimation in applications with sparse data availability.

Inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, we propose Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) as promising alternatives to Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). While MLPs have fixed activation functions on nodes ("neurons"), KANs have learnable activation functions on edges ("weights"). KANs have no linear weights at all -- every weight parameter is replaced by a univariate function parametrized as a spline. We show that this seemingly simple change makes KANs outperform MLPs in terms of accuracy and interpretability. For accuracy, much smaller KANs can achieve comparable or better accuracy than much larger MLPs in data fitting and PDE solving. Theoretically and empirically, KANs possess faster neural scaling laws than MLPs. For interpretability, KANs can be intuitively visualized and can easily interact with human users. Through two examples in mathematics and physics, KANs are shown to be useful collaborators helping scientists (re)discover mathematical and physical laws. In summary, KANs are promising alternatives for MLPs, opening opportunities for further improving today's deep learning models which rely heavily on MLPs.

Inspired by the long-range modeling ability of ViTs, large-kernel convolutions are widely studied and adopted recently to enlarge the receptive field and improve model performance, like the remarkable work ConvNeXt which employs 7x7 depthwise convolution. Although such depthwise operator only consumes a few FLOPs, it largely harms the model efficiency on powerful computing devices due to the high memory access costs. For example, ConvNeXt-T has similar FLOPs with ResNet-50 but only achieves 60% throughputs when trained on A100 GPUs with full precision. Although reducing the kernel size of ConvNeXt can improve speed, it results in significant performance degradation. It is still unclear how to speed up large-kernel-based CNN models while preserving their performance. To tackle this issue, inspired by Inceptions, we propose to decompose large-kernel depthwise convolution into four parallel branches along channel dimension, i.e. small square kernel, two orthogonal band kernels, and an identity mapping. With this new Inception depthwise convolution, we build a series of networks, namely IncepitonNeXt, which not only enjoy high throughputs but also maintain competitive performance. For instance, InceptionNeXt-T achieves 1.6x higher training throughputs than ConvNeX-T, as well as attains 0.2% top-1 accuracy improvement on ImageNet-1K. We anticipate InceptionNeXt can serve as an economical baseline for future architecture design to reduce carbon footprint. Code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/inceptionnext.

Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices are ubiquitous in data analysis under the form of covariance matrices or correlation matrices. Several O(n)-invariant Riemannian metrics were defined on the SPD cone, in particular the kernel metrics introduced by Hiai and Petz. The class of kernel metrics interpolates between many classical O(n)-invariant metrics and it satisfies key results of stability and completeness. However, it does not contain all the classical O(n)-invariant metrics. Therefore in this work, we investigate super-classes of kernel metrics and we study which key results remain true. We also introduce an additional key result called cometric-stability, a crucial property to implement geodesics with a Hamiltonian formulation. Our method to build intermediate embedded classes between O(n)-invariant metrics and kernel metrics is to give a characterization of the whole class of O(n)-invariant metrics on SPD matrices and to specify requirements on metrics one by one until we reach kernel metrics. As a secondary contribution, we synthesize the literature on the main O(n)-invariant metrics, we provide the complete formula of the sectional curvature of the affine-invariant metric and the formula of the geodesic parallel transport between commuting matrices for the Bures-Wasserstein metric.

Large-kernel convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have recently received extensive research attention, but there are two unresolved and critical issues that demand further investigation. 1) The architectures of existing large-kernel ConvNets largely follow the design principles of conventional ConvNets or transformers, while the architectural design for large-kernel ConvNets remains under-addressed. 2) As transformers have dominated multiple modalities, it remains to be investigated whether ConvNets also have a strong universal perception ability in domains beyond vision. In this paper, we contribute from two aspects. 1) We propose four architectural guidelines for designing large-kernel ConvNets, the core of which is to exploit the essential characteristics of large kernels that distinguish them from small kernels - they can see wide without going deep. Following such guidelines, our proposed large-kernel ConvNet shows leading performance in image recognition. For example, our models achieve an ImageNet accuracy of 88.0%, ADE20K mIoU of 55.6%, and COCO box AP of 56.4%, demonstrating better performance and higher speed than a number of recently proposed powerful competitors. 2) We discover that large kernels are the key to unlocking the exceptional performance of ConvNets in domains where they were originally not proficient. With certain modality-related preprocessing approaches, the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on time-series forecasting and audio recognition tasks even without modality-specific customization to the architecture. Code and all the models at https://github.com/AILab-CVC/UniRepLKNet.

A key property of deep neural networks (DNNs) is their ability to learn new features during training. This intriguing aspect of deep learning stands out most clearly in recently reported Grokking phenomena. While mainly reflected as a sudden increase in test accuracy, Grokking is also believed to be a beyond lazy-learning/Gaussian Process (GP) phenomenon involving feature learning. Here we apply a recent development in the theory of feature learning, the adaptive kernel approach, to two teacher-student models with cubic-polynomial and modular addition teachers. We provide analytical predictions on feature learning and Grokking properties of these models and demonstrate a mapping between Grokking and the theory of phase transitions. We show that after Grokking, the state of the DNN is analogous to the mixed phase following a first-order phase transition. In this mixed phase, the DNN generates useful internal representations of the teacher that are sharply distinct from those before the transition.

We propose the Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU), a high-performing neural network activation function. The GELU activation function is xPhi(x), where Phi(x) the standard Gaussian cumulative distribution function. The GELU nonlinearity weights inputs by their value, rather than gates inputs by their sign as in ReLUs (x1_{x>0}). We perform an empirical evaluation of the GELU nonlinearity against the ReLU and ELU activations and find performance improvements across all considered computer vision, natural language processing, and speech tasks.

We propose Hyper-Dimensional Function Encoding (HDFE). Given samples of a continuous object (e.g. a function), HDFE produces an explicit vector representation of the given object, invariant to the sample distribution and density. Sample distribution and density invariance enables HDFE to consistently encode continuous objects regardless of their sampling, and therefore allows neural networks to receive continuous objects as inputs for machine learning tasks, such as classification and regression. Besides, HDFE does not require any training and is proved to map the object into an organized embedding space, which facilitates the training of the downstream tasks. In addition, the encoding is decodable, which enables neural networks to regress continuous objects by regressing their encodings. Therefore, HDFE serves as an interface for processing continuous objects. We apply HDFE to function-to-function mapping, where vanilla HDFE achieves competitive performance as the state-of-the-art algorithm. We apply HDFE to point cloud surface normal estimation, where a simple replacement from PointNet to HDFE leads to immediate 12% and 15% error reductions in two benchmarks. In addition, by integrating HDFE into the PointNet-based SOTA network, we improve the SOTA baseline by 2.5% and 1.7% in the same benchmarks.

Machine learning based solvers have garnered much attention in physical simulation and scientific computing, with a prominent example, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). However, PINNs often struggle to solve high-frequency and multi-scale PDEs, which can be due to spectral bias during neural network training. To address this problem, we resort to the Gaussian process (GP) framework. To flexibly capture the dominant frequencies, we model the power spectrum of the PDE solution with a student t mixture or Gaussian mixture. We apply the inverse Fourier transform to obtain the covariance function (by Wiener-Khinchin theorem). The covariance derived from the Gaussian mixture spectrum corresponds to the known spectral mixture kernel. Next, we estimate the mixture weights in the log domain, which we show is equivalent to placing a Jeffreys prior. It automatically induces sparsity, prunes excessive frequencies, and adjusts the remaining toward the ground truth. Third, to enable efficient and scalable computation on massive collocation points, which are critical to capture high frequencies, we place the collocation points on a grid, and multiply our covariance function at each input dimension. We use the GP conditional mean to predict the solution and its derivatives so as to fit the boundary condition and the equation itself. As a result, we can derive a Kronecker product structure in the covariance matrix. We use Kronecker product properties and multilinear algebra to promote computational efficiency and scalability, without low-rank approximations. We show the advantage of our method in systematic experiments. The code is released at https://github.com/xuangu-fang/Gaussian-Process-Slover-for-High-Freq-PDE.

We have developed a novel activation function, named the Cauchy Activation Function. This function is derived from the Cauchy Integral Theorem in complex analysis and is specifically tailored for problems requiring high precision. This innovation has led to the creation of a new class of neural networks, which we call (Comple)XNet, or simply XNet. We will demonstrate that XNet is particularly effective for high-dimensional challenges such as image classification and solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Our evaluations show that XNet significantly outperforms established benchmarks like MNIST and CIFAR-10 in computer vision, and offers substantial advantages over Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) in both low-dimensional and high-dimensional PDE scenarios.

Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) are a remarkable innovation consisting of learnable activation functions with the potential to capture more complex relationships from data. Although KANs are useful in finding symbolic representations and continual learning of one-dimensional functions, their effectiveness in diverse machine learning (ML) tasks, such as vision, remains questionable. Presently, KANs are deployed by replacing multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) in deep network architectures, including advanced architectures such as vision Transformers (ViTs). In this paper, we are the first to design a general learnable Kolmogorov-Arnold Attention (KArAt) for vanilla ViTs that can operate on any choice of basis. However, the computing and memory costs of training them motivated us to propose a more modular version, and we designed particular learnable attention, called Fourier-KArAt. Fourier-KArAt and its variants either outperform their ViT counterparts or show comparable performance on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K datasets. We dissect these architectures' performance and generalization capacity by analyzing their loss landscapes, weight distributions, optimizer path, attention visualization, and spectral behavior, and contrast them with vanilla ViTs. The goal of this paper is not to produce parameter- and compute-efficient attention, but to encourage the community to explore KANs in conjunction with more advanced architectures that require a careful understanding of learnable activations. Our open-source code and implementation details are available on: https://subhajitmaity.me/KArAt

Transformers stand as the cornerstone of mordern deep learning. Traditionally, these models rely on multi-layer perceptron (MLP) layers to mix the information between channels. In this paper, we introduce the Kolmogorov-Arnold Transformer (KAT), a novel architecture that replaces MLP layers with Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) layers to enhance the expressiveness and performance of the model. Integrating KANs into transformers, however, is no easy feat, especially when scaled up. Specifically, we identify three key challenges: (C1) Base function. The standard B-spline function used in KANs is not optimized for parallel computing on modern hardware, resulting in slower inference speeds. (C2) Parameter and Computation Inefficiency. KAN requires a unique function for each input-output pair, making the computation extremely large. (C3) Weight initialization. The initialization of weights in KANs is particularly challenging due to their learnable activation functions, which are critical for achieving convergence in deep neural networks. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we propose three key solutions: (S1) Rational basis. We replace B-spline functions with rational functions to improve compatibility with modern GPUs. By implementing this in CUDA, we achieve faster computations. (S2) Group KAN. We share the activation weights through a group of neurons, to reduce the computational load without sacrificing performance. (S3) Variance-preserving initialization. We carefully initialize the activation weights to make sure that the activation variance is maintained across layers. With these designs, KAT scales effectively and readily outperforms traditional MLP-based transformers.

Going beyond stochastic gradient descent (SGD), what new phenomena emerge in wide neural networks trained by adaptive optimizers like Adam? Here we show: The same dichotomy between feature learning and kernel behaviors (as in SGD) holds for general optimizers as well, including Adam -- albeit with a nonlinear notion of "kernel." We derive the corresponding "neural tangent" and "maximal update" limits for any architecture. Two foundational advances underlie the above results: 1) A new Tensor Program language, NEXORT, that can express how adaptive optimizers process gradients into updates. 2) The introduction of bra-ket notation to drastically simplify expressions and calculations in Tensor Programs. This work summarizes and generalizes all previous results in the Tensor Programs series of papers.

We study the problem of teaching multiple learners simultaneously in the nonparametric iterative teaching setting, where the teacher iteratively provides examples to the learner for accelerating the acquisition of a target concept. This problem is motivated by the gap between current single-learner teaching setting and the real-world scenario of human instruction where a teacher typically imparts knowledge to multiple students. Under the new problem formulation, we introduce a novel framework -- Multi-learner Nonparametric Teaching (MINT). In MINT, the teacher aims to instruct multiple learners, with each learner focusing on learning a scalar-valued target model. To achieve this, we frame the problem as teaching a vector-valued target model and extend the target model space from a scalar-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space used in single-learner scenarios to a vector-valued space. Furthermore, we demonstrate that MINT offers significant teaching speed-up over repeated single-learner teaching, particularly when the multiple learners can communicate with each other. Lastly, we conduct extensive experiments to validate the practicality and efficiency of MINT.

We study the problem of constrained efficient global optimization, where both the objective and constraints are expensive black-box functions that can be learned with Gaussian processes. We propose CONFIG (CONstrained efFIcient Global Optimization), a simple and effective algorithm to solve it. Under certain regularity assumptions, we show that our algorithm enjoys the same cumulative regret bound as that in the unconstrained case and similar cumulative constraint violation upper bounds. For commonly used Matern and Squared Exponential kernels, our bounds are sublinear and allow us to derive a convergence rate to the optimal solution of the original constrained problem. In addition, our method naturally provides a scheme to declare infeasibility when the original black-box optimization problem is infeasible. Numerical experiments on sampled instances from the Gaussian process, artificial numerical problems, and a black-box building controller tuning problem all demonstrate the competitive performance of our algorithm. Compared to the other state-of-the-art methods, our algorithm significantly improves the theoretical guarantees, while achieving competitive empirical performance.

From the Bayesian perspective, the category of conditional probabilities (a variant of the Kleisli category of the Giry monad, whose objects are measurable spaces and arrows are Markov kernels) gives a nice framework for conceptualization and analysis of many aspects of machine learning. Using categorical methods, we construct models for parametric and nonparametric Bayesian reasoning on function spaces, thus providing a basis for the supervised learning problem. In particular, stochastic processes are arrows to these function spaces which serve as prior probabilities. The resulting inference maps can often be analytically constructed in this symmetric monoidal weakly closed category. We also show how to view general stochastic processes using functor categories and demonstrate the Kalman filter as an archetype for the hidden Markov model.

Gaussian processes (GPs) are popular nonparametric statistical models for learning unknown functions and quantifying the spatiotemporal uncertainty in data. Recent works have extended GPs to model scalar and vector quantities distributed over non-Euclidean domains, including smooth manifolds appearing in numerous fields such as computer vision, dynamical systems, and neuroscience. However, these approaches assume that the manifold underlying the data is known, limiting their practical utility. We introduce RVGP, a generalisation of GPs for learning vector signals over latent Riemannian manifolds. Our method uses positional encoding with eigenfunctions of the connection Laplacian, associated with the tangent bundle, readily derived from common graph-based approximation of data. We demonstrate that RVGP possesses global regularity over the manifold, which allows it to super-resolve and inpaint vector fields while preserving singularities. Furthermore, we use RVGP to reconstruct high-density neural dynamics derived from low-density EEG recordings in healthy individuals and Alzheimer's patients. We show that vector field singularities are important disease markers and that their reconstruction leads to a comparable classification accuracy of disease states to high-density recordings. Thus, our method overcomes a significant practical limitation in experimental and clinical applications.

When training large flexible models, practitioners often rely on grid search to select hyperparameters that control over-fitting. This grid search has several disadvantages: the search is computationally expensive, requires carving out a validation set that reduces the available data for training, and requires users to specify candidate values. In this paper, we propose an alternative: directly learning regularization hyperparameters on the full training set via the evidence lower bound ("ELBo") objective from variational methods. For deep neural networks with millions of parameters, we recommend a modified ELBo that upweights the influence of the data likelihood relative to the prior. Our proposed technique overcomes all three disadvantages of grid search. In a case study on transfer learning of image classifiers, we show how our method reduces the 88+ hour grid search of past work to under 3 hours while delivering comparable accuracy. We further demonstrate how our approach enables efficient yet accurate approximations of Gaussian processes with learnable length-scale kernels.

To achieve scalable and accurate inference for latent Gaussian processes, we propose a variational approximation based on a family of Gaussian distributions whose covariance matrices have sparse inverse Cholesky (SIC) factors. We combine this variational approximation of the posterior with a similar and efficient SIC-restricted Kullback-Leibler-optimal approximation of the prior. We then focus on a particular SIC ordering and nearest-neighbor-based sparsity pattern resulting in highly accurate prior and posterior approximations. For this setting, our variational approximation can be computed via stochastic gradient descent in polylogarithmic time per iteration. We provide numerical comparisons showing that the proposed double-Kullback-Leibler-optimal Gaussian-process approximation (DKLGP) can sometimes be vastly more accurate for stationary kernels than alternative approaches such as inducing-point and mean-field approximations at similar computational complexity.

Causal effects are usually studied in terms of the means of counterfactual distributions, which may be insufficient in many scenarios. Given a class of densities known up to normalizing constants, we propose to model counterfactual distributions by minimizing kernel Stein discrepancies in a doubly robust manner. This enables the estimation of counterfactuals over large classes of distributions while exploiting the desired double robustness. We present a theoretical analysis of the proposed estimator, providing sufficient conditions for consistency and asymptotic normality, as well as an examination of its empirical performance.

The concept class of low-degree polynomial threshold functions (PTFs) plays a fundamental role in machine learning. In this paper, we study PAC learning of K-sparse degree-d PTFs on R^n, where any such concept depends only on K out of n attributes of the input. Our main contribution is a new algorithm that runs in time ({nd}/{epsilon})^{O(d)} and under the Gaussian marginal distribution, PAC learns the class up to error rate epsilon with O(K^{4d}{epsilon^{2d}} cdot log^{5d} n) samples even when an eta leq O(epsilon^d) fraction of them are corrupted by the nasty noise of Bshouty et al. (2002), possibly the strongest corruption model. Prior to this work, attribute-efficient robust algorithms are established only for the special case of sparse homogeneous halfspaces. Our key ingredients are: 1) a structural result that translates the attribute sparsity to a sparsity pattern of the Chow vector under the basis of Hermite polynomials, and 2) a novel attribute-efficient robust Chow vector estimation algorithm which uses exclusively a restricted Frobenius norm to either certify a good approximation or to validate a sparsity-induced degree-2d polynomial as a filter to detect corrupted samples.

We present Simplex Random Features (SimRFs), a new random feature (RF) mechanism for unbiased approximation of the softmax and Gaussian kernels by geometrical correlation of random projection vectors. We prove that SimRFs provide the smallest possible mean square error (MSE) on unbiased estimates of these kernels among the class of weight-independent geometrically-coupled positive random feature (PRF) mechanisms, substantially outperforming the previously most accurate Orthogonal Random Features at no observable extra cost. We present a more computationally expensive SimRFs+ variant, which we prove is asymptotically optimal in the broader family of weight-dependent geometrical coupling schemes (which permit correlations between random vector directions and norms). In extensive empirical studies, we show consistent gains provided by SimRFs in settings including pointwise kernel estimation, nonparametric classification and scalable Transformers.

We explore the integration of Kolmogorov Networks (KANs) into molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to improve interatomic potentials. We propose that widely used potentials, such as the Lennard-Jones (LJ) potential, the embedded atom model (EAM), and artificial neural network (ANN) potentials, can be interpreted within the KAN framework. Specifically, we demonstrate that the descriptors for ANN potentials, typically constructed using polynomials, can be redefined using KAN's non-linear functions. By employing linear or cubic spline interpolations for these KAN functions, we show that the computational cost of evaluating ANN potentials and their derivatives is reduced.

In this work we take a Category Theoretic perspective on the relationship between probabilistic modeling and function approximation. We begin by defining two extensions of function composition to stochastic process subordination: one based on the co-Kleisli category under the comonad (Omega x -) and one based on the parameterization of a category with a Lawvere theory. We show how these extensions relate to the category Stoch and other Markov Categories. Next, we apply the Para construction to extend stochastic processes to parameterized statistical models and we define a way to compose the likelihood functions of these models. We conclude with a demonstration of how the Maximum Likelihood Estimation procedure defines an identity-on-objects functor from the category of statistical models to the category of Learners. Code to accompany this paper can be found at https://github.com/dshieble/Categorical_Stochastic_Processes_and_Likelihood

Quantum kernels hold great promise for offering computational advantages over classical learners, with the effectiveness of these kernels closely tied to the design of the quantum feature map. However, the challenge of designing effective quantum feature maps for real-world datasets, particularly in the absence of sufficient prior information, remains a significant obstacle. In this study, we present a data-driven approach that automates the design of problem-specific quantum feature maps. Our approach leverages feature-selection techniques to handle high-dimensional data on near-term quantum machines with limited qubits, and incorporates a deep neural predictor to efficiently evaluate the performance of various candidate quantum kernels. Through extensive numerical simulations on different datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposal over prior methods, especially for the capability of eliminating the kernel concentration issue and identifying the feature map with prediction advantages. Our work not only unlocks the potential of quantum kernels for enhancing real-world tasks but also highlights the substantial role of deep learning in advancing quantum machine learning.

We introduce the use of rectified linear units (ReLU) as the classification function in a deep neural network (DNN). Conventionally, ReLU is used as an activation function in DNNs, with Softmax function as their classification function. However, there have been several studies on using a classification function other than Softmax, and this study is an addition to those. We accomplish this by taking the activation of the penultimate layer h_{n - 1} in a neural network, then multiply it by weight parameters theta to get the raw scores o_{i}. Afterwards, we threshold the raw scores o_{i} by 0, i.e. f(o) = max(0, o_{i}), where f(o) is the ReLU function. We provide class predictions y through argmax function, i.e. argmax f(x).

Polynomial neural networks (PNNs) have been recently shown to be particularly effective at image generation and face recognition, where high-frequency information is critical. Previous studies have revealed that neural networks demonstrate a spectral bias towards low-frequency functions, which yields faster learning of low-frequency components during training. Inspired by such studies, we conduct a spectral analysis of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) of PNNs. We find that the Pi-Net family, i.e., a recently proposed parametrization of PNNs, speeds up the learning of the higher frequencies. We verify the theoretical bias through extensive experiments. We expect our analysis to provide novel insights into designing architectures and learning frameworks by incorporating multiplicative interactions via polynomials.

Expanding on neural operators, we propose a novel framework for stochastic process learning across arbitrary domains. In particular, we develop operator flow matching (OFM) for learning stochastic process priors on function spaces. OFM provides the probability density of the values of any collection of points and enables mathematically tractable functional regression at new points with mean and density estimation. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art models in stochastic process learning, functional regression, and prior learning.

Spherical CNNs generalize CNNs to functions on the sphere, by using spherical convolutions as the main linear operation. The most accurate and efficient way to compute spherical convolutions is in the spectral domain (via the convolution theorem), which is still costlier than the usual planar convolutions. For this reason, applications of spherical CNNs have so far been limited to small problems that can be approached with low model capacity. In this work, we show how spherical CNNs can be scaled for much larger problems. To achieve this, we make critical improvements including novel variants of common model components, an implementation of core operations to exploit hardware accelerator characteristics, and application-specific input representations that exploit the properties of our model. Experiments show our larger spherical CNNs reach state-of-the-art on several targets of the QM9 molecular benchmark, which was previously dominated by equivariant graph neural networks, and achieve competitive performance on multiple weather forecasting tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/google-research/spherical-cnn.

We present ConDiff, a novel dataset for scientific machine learning. ConDiff focuses on the parametric diffusion equation with space dependent coefficients, a fundamental problem in many applications of partial differential equations (PDEs). The main novelty of the proposed dataset is that we consider discontinuous coefficients with high contrast. These coefficient functions are sampled from a selected set of distributions. This class of problems is not only of great academic interest, but is also the basis for describing various environmental and industrial problems. In this way, ConDiff shortens the gap with real-world problems while remaining fully synthetic and easy to use. ConDiff consists of a diverse set of diffusion equations with coefficients covering a wide range of contrast levels and heterogeneity with a measurable complexity metric for clearer comparison between different coefficient functions. We baseline ConDiff on standard deep learning models in the field of scientific machine learning. By providing a large number of problem instances, each with its own coefficient function and right-hand side, we hope to encourage the development of novel physics-based deep learning approaches, such as neural operators, ultimately driving progress towards more accurate and efficient solutions of complex PDE problems.

We introduce Functional Diffusion Processes (FDPs), which generalize score-based diffusion models to infinite-dimensional function spaces. FDPs require a new mathematical framework to describe the forward and backward dynamics, and several extensions to derive practical training objectives. These include infinite-dimensional versions of Girsanov theorem, in order to be able to compute an ELBO, and of the sampling theorem, in order to guarantee that functional evaluations in a countable set of points are equivalent to infinite-dimensional functions. We use FDPs to build a new breed of generative models in function spaces, which do not require specialized network architectures, and that can work with any kind of continuous data. Our results on real data show that FDPs achieve high-quality image generation, using a simple MLP architecture with orders of magnitude fewer parameters than existing diffusion models.

Maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) flows suffer from high computational costs in large scale computations. In this paper, we show that MMD flows with Riesz kernels K(x,y) = - |x-y|^r, r in (0,2) have exceptional properties which allow their efficient computation. We prove that the MMD of Riesz kernels, which is also known as energy distance, coincides with the MMD of their sliced version. As a consequence, the computation of gradients of MMDs can be performed in the one-dimensional setting. Here, for r=1, a simple sorting algorithm can be applied to reduce the complexity from O(MN+N^2) to O((M+N)log(M+N)) for two measures with M and N support points. As another interesting follow-up result, the MMD of compactly supported measures can be estimated from above and below by the Wasserstein-1 distance. For the implementations we approximate the gradient of the sliced MMD by using only a finite number P of slices. We show that the resulting error has complexity O(d/P), where d is the data dimension. These results enable us to train generative models by approximating MMD gradient flows by neural networks even for image applications. We demonstrate the efficiency of our model by image generation on MNIST, FashionMNIST and CIFAR10.

Temporal data such as time series can be viewed as discretized measurements of the underlying function. To build a generative model for such data we have to model the stochastic process that governs it. We propose a solution by defining the denoising diffusion model in the function space which also allows us to naturally handle irregularly-sampled observations. The forward process gradually adds noise to functions, preserving their continuity, while the learned reverse process removes the noise and returns functions as new samples. To this end, we define suitable noise sources and introduce novel denoising and score-matching models. We show how our method can be used for multivariate probabilistic forecasting and imputation, and how our model can be interpreted as a neural process.

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have been an important framework in the study of uncertainty quantification. Deterministic variational inference, one of the inference methods, utilizes moment propagation to compute the predictive distributions and objective functions. Unfortunately, deriving the moments requires computationally expensive Taylor expansion in nonlinear functions, such as a rectified linear unit (ReLU) or a sigmoid function. Therefore, a new nonlinear function that realizes faster moment propagation than conventional functions is required. In this paper, we propose a novel nonlinear function named moment propagating-Gaussian error linear unit (MP-GELU) that enables the fast derivation of first and second moments in BNNs. MP-GELU enables the analytical computation of moments by applying nonlinearity to the input statistics, thereby reducing the computationally expensive calculations required for nonlinear functions. In empirical experiments on regression tasks, we observed that the proposed MP-GELU provides higher prediction accuracy and better quality of uncertainty with faster execution than those of ReLU-based BNNs.

Collections of probability distributions arise in a variety of applications ranging from user activity pattern analysis to brain connectomics. In practice these distributions can be defined over diverse domain types including finite intervals, circles, cylinders, spheres, other manifolds, and graphs. This paper introduces an approach for detecting differences between two collections of distributions over such general domains. To this end, we propose the intrinsic slicing construction that yields a novel class of Wasserstein distances on manifolds and graphs. These distances are Hilbert embeddable, allowing us to reduce the distribution collection comparison problem to a more familiar mean testing problem in a Hilbert space. We provide two testing procedures one based on resampling and another on combining p-values from coordinate-wise tests. Our experiments in various synthetic and real data settings show that the resulting tests are powerful and the p-values are well-calibrated.

A wide range of scientific problems, such as those described by continuous-time dynamical systems and partial differential equations (PDEs), are naturally formulated on function spaces. While function spaces are typically infinite-dimensional, deep learning has predominantly advanced through applications in computer vision and natural language processing that focus on mappings between finite-dimensional spaces. Such fundamental disparities in the nature of the data have limited neural networks from achieving a comparable level of success in scientific applications as seen in other fields. Neural operators are a principled way to generalize neural networks to mappings between function spaces, offering a pathway to replicate deep learning's transformative impact on scientific problems. For instance, neural operators can learn solution operators for entire classes of PDEs, e.g., physical systems with different boundary conditions, coefficient functions, and geometries. A key factor in deep learning's success has been the careful engineering of neural architectures through extensive empirical testing. Translating these neural architectures into neural operators allows operator learning to enjoy these same empirical optimizations. However, prior neural operator architectures have often been introduced as standalone models, not directly derived as extensions of existing neural network architectures. In this paper, we identify and distill the key principles for constructing practical implementations of mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces. Using these principles, we propose a recipe for converting several popular neural architectures into neural operators with minimal modifications. This paper aims to guide practitioners through this process and details the steps to make neural operators work in practice. Our code can be found at https://github.com/neuraloperator/NNs-to-NOs

We propose two approaches to extend the notion of knowledge distillation to Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) and Gaussian Process Classification (GPC); data-centric and distribution-centric. The data-centric approach resembles most current distillation techniques for machine learning, and refits a model on deterministic predictions from the teacher, while the distribution-centric approach, re-uses the full probabilistic posterior for the next iteration. By analyzing the properties of these approaches, we show that the data-centric approach for GPR closely relates to known results for self-distillation of kernel ridge regression and that the distribution-centric approach for GPR corresponds to ordinary GPR with a very particular choice of hyperparameters. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the distribution-centric approach for GPC approximately corresponds to data duplication and a particular scaling of the covariance and that the data-centric approach for GPC requires redefining the model from a Binomial likelihood to a continuous Bernoulli likelihood to be well-specified. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed approaches are the first to formulate knowledge distillation specifically for Gaussian Process models.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve remarkable performance in graph machine learning tasks but can be hard to train on large-graph data, where their learning dynamics are not well understood. We investigate the training dynamics of large-graph GNNs using graph neural tangent kernels (GNTKs) and graphons. In the limit of large width, optimization of an overparametrized NN is equivalent to kernel regression on the NTK. Here, we investigate how the GNTK evolves as another independent dimension is varied: the graph size. We use graphons to define limit objects -- graphon NNs for GNNs, and graphon NTKs for GNTKs -- , and prove that, on a sequence of graphs, the GNTKs converge to the graphon NTK. We further prove that the spectrum of the GNTK, which is related to the directions of fastest learning which becomes relevant during early stopping, converges to the spectrum of the graphon NTK. This implies that in the large-graph limit, the GNTK fitted on a graph of moderate size can be used to solve the same task on the large graph, and to infer the learning dynamics of the large-graph GNN. These results are verified empirically on node regression and classification tasks.

While efficient distribution learning is no doubt behind the groundbreaking success of diffusion modeling, its theoretical guarantees are quite limited. In this paper, we provide the first rigorous analysis on approximation and generalization abilities of diffusion modeling for well-known function spaces. The highlight of this paper is that when the true density function belongs to the Besov space and the empirical score matching loss is properly minimized, the generated data distribution achieves the nearly minimax optimal estimation rates in the total variation distance and in the Wasserstein distance of order one. Furthermore, we extend our theory to demonstrate how diffusion models adapt to low-dimensional data distributions. We expect these results advance theoretical understandings of diffusion modeling and its ability to generate verisimilar outputs.

Well-known activation functions like ReLU or Leaky ReLU are non-differentiable at the origin. Over the years, many smooth approximations of ReLU have been proposed using various smoothing techniques. We propose new smooth approximations of a non-differentiable activation function by convolving it with approximate identities. In particular, we present smooth approximations of Leaky ReLU and show that they outperform several well-known activation functions in various datasets and models. We call this function Smooth Activation Unit (SAU). Replacing ReLU by SAU, we get 5.12% improvement with ShuffleNet V2 (2.0x) model on CIFAR100 dataset.

Non-linear activation functions are crucial in Convolutional Neural Networks. However, until now they have not been well described in the frequency domain. In this work, we study the spectral behavior of ReLU, a popular activation function. We use the ReLU's Taylor expansion to derive its frequency domain behavior. We demonstrate that ReLU introduces higher frequency oscillations in the signal and a constant DC component. Furthermore, we investigate the importance of this DC component, where we demonstrate that it helps the model extract meaningful features related to the input frequency content. We accompany our theoretical derivations with experiments and real-world examples. First, we numerically validate our frequency response model. Then we observe ReLU's spectral behavior on two example models and a real-world one. Finally, we experimentally investigate the role of the DC component introduced by ReLU in the CNN's representations. Our results indicate that the DC helps to converge to a weight configuration that is close to the initial random weights.

We introduce a mathematically rigorous framework based on rough path theory to model stochastic spiking neural networks (SSNNs) as stochastic differential equations with event discontinuities (Event SDEs) and driven by c\`adl\`ag rough paths. Our formalism is general enough to allow for potential jumps to be present both in the solution trajectories as well as in the driving noise. We then identify a set of sufficient conditions ensuring the existence of pathwise gradients of solution trajectories and event times with respect to the network's parameters and show how these gradients satisfy a recursive relation. Furthermore, we introduce a general-purpose loss function defined by means of a new class of signature kernels indexed on c\`adl\`ag rough paths and use it to train SSNNs as generative models. We provide an end-to-end autodifferentiable solver for Event SDEs and make its implementation available as part of the diffrax library. Our framework is, to our knowledge, the first enabling gradient-based training of SSNNs with noise affecting both the spike timing and the network's dynamics.

Proximal causal learning is a promising framework for identifying the causal effect under the existence of unmeasured confounders. Within this framework, the doubly robust (DR) estimator was derived and has shown its effectiveness in estimation, especially when the model assumption is violated. However, the current form of the DR estimator is restricted to binary treatments, while the treatment can be continuous in many real-world applications. The primary obstacle to continuous treatments resides in the delta function present in the original DR estimator, making it infeasible in causal effect estimation and introducing a heavy computational burden in nuisance function estimation. To address these challenges, we propose a kernel-based DR estimator that can well handle continuous treatments. Equipped with its smoothness, we show that its oracle form is a consistent approximation of the influence function. Further, we propose a new approach to efficiently solve the nuisance functions. We then provide a comprehensive convergence analysis in terms of the mean square error. We demonstrate the utility of our estimator on synthetic datasets and real-world applications.

Generative models in function spaces, situated at the intersection of generative modeling and operator learning, are attracting increasing attention due to their immense potential in diverse scientific and engineering applications. While functional generative models are theoretically domain- and discretization-agnostic, current implementations heavily rely on the Fourier Neural Operator (FNO), limiting their applicability to regular grids and rectangular domains. To overcome these critical limitations, we introduce the Mesh-Informed Neural Operator (MINO). By leveraging graph neural operators and cross-attention mechanisms, MINO offers a principled, domain- and discretization-agnostic backbone for generative modeling in function spaces. This advancement significantly expands the scope of such models to more diverse applications in generative, inverse, and regression tasks. Furthermore, MINO provides a unified perspective on integrating neural operators with general advanced deep learning architectures. Finally, we introduce a suite of standardized evaluation metrics that enable objective comparison of functional generative models, addressing another critical gap in the field.

Set function learning has emerged as a crucial area in machine learning, addressing the challenge of modeling functions that take sets as inputs. Unlike traditional machine learning that involves fixed-size input vectors where the order of features matters, set function learning demands methods that are invariant to permutations of the input set, presenting a unique and complex problem. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current development in set function learning, covering foundational theories, key methodologies, and diverse applications. We categorize and discuss existing approaches, focusing on deep learning approaches, such as DeepSets and Set Transformer based methods, as well as other notable alternative methods beyond deep learning, offering a complete view of current models. We also introduce various applications and relevant datasets, such as point cloud processing and multi-label classification, highlighting the significant progress achieved by set function learning methods in these domains. Finally, we conclude by summarizing the current state of set function learning approaches and identifying promising future research directions, aiming to guide and inspire further advancements in this promising field.

Recent advancements in both representation learning and function learning have demonstrated substantial promise across diverse domains of artificial intelligence. However, the effective integration of these paradigms poses a significant challenge, particularly in cases where users must manually decide whether to apply a representation learning or function learning model based on dataset characteristics. To address this issue, we introduce MLP-KAN, a unified method designed to eliminate the need for manual model selection. By integrating Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) for representation learning and Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for function learning within a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, MLP-KAN dynamically adapts to the specific characteristics of the task at hand, ensuring optimal performance. Embedded within a transformer-based framework, our work achieves remarkable results on four widely-used datasets across diverse domains. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates its superior versatility, delivering competitive performance across both deep representation and function learning tasks. These findings highlight the potential of MLP-KAN to simplify the model selection process, offering a comprehensive, adaptable solution across various domains. Our code and weights are available at https://github.com/DLYuanGod/MLP-KAN.

We revisit large kernel design in modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Inspired by recent advances in vision transformers (ViTs), in this paper, we demonstrate that using a few large convolutional kernels instead of a stack of small kernels could be a more powerful paradigm. We suggested five guidelines, e.g., applying re-parameterized large depth-wise convolutions, to design efficient high-performance large-kernel CNNs. Following the guidelines, we propose RepLKNet, a pure CNN architecture whose kernel size is as large as 31x31, in contrast to commonly used 3x3. RepLKNet greatly closes the performance gap between CNNs and ViTs, e.g., achieving comparable or superior results than Swin Transformer on ImageNet and a few typical downstream tasks, with lower latency. RepLKNet also shows nice scalability to big data and large models, obtaining 87.8% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet and 56.0% mIoU on ADE20K, which is very competitive among the state-of-the-arts with similar model sizes. Our study further reveals that, in contrast to small-kernel CNNs, large-kernel CNNs have much larger effective receptive fields and higher shape bias rather than texture bias. Code & models at https://github.com/megvii-research/RepLKNet.

Although Kolmogorov-Arnold based interpretable networks (KAN) have strong theoretical expressiveness, they face significant parameter explosion and high-frequency feature capture challenges in high-dimensional tasks. To address this issue, we propose the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Fourier Network (KAF), which effectively integrates trainable Random Fourier Features (RFF) and a novel hybrid GELU-Fourier activation mechanism to balance parameter efficiency and spectral representation capabilities. Our key technical contributions include: (1) merging KAN's dual-matrix structure through matrix association properties to substantially reduce parameters; (2) introducing learnable RFF initialization strategies to eliminate spectral distortion in high-dimensional approximation tasks; (3) implementing an adaptive hybrid activation function that progressively enhances frequency representation during the training process. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our KAF across various domains including vision, NLP, audio processing, and differential equation-solving tasks, effectively combining theoretical interpretability with practical utility and computational efficiency.

We propose a penalized nonparametric approach to estimating the quantile regression process (QRP) in a nonseparable model using rectifier quadratic unit (ReQU) activated deep neural networks and introduce a novel penalty function to enforce non-crossing of quantile regression curves. We establish the non-asymptotic excess risk bounds for the estimated QRP and derive the mean integrated squared error for the estimated QRP under mild smoothness and regularity conditions. To establish these non-asymptotic risk and estimation error bounds, we also develop a new error bound for approximating C^s smooth functions with s >0 and their derivatives using ReQU activated neural networks. This is a new approximation result for ReQU networks and is of independent interest and may be useful in other problems. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive with or outperforms two existing methods, including methods using reproducing kernels and random forests, for nonparametric quantile regression.

In observational studies, balancing covariates in different treatment groups is essential to estimate treatment effects. One of the most commonly used methods for such purposes is weighting. The performance of this class of methods usually depends on strong regularity conditions for the underlying model, which might not hold in practice. In this paper, we investigate weighting methods from a functional estimation perspective and argue that the weights needed for covariate balancing could differ from those needed for treatment effects estimation under low regularity conditions. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a new framework of weighting that directly targets the treatment effects estimation. Unlike existing methods, the resulting estimator for a treatment effect under this new framework is a simple kernel-based U-statistic after applying a data-driven transformation to the observed covariates. We characterize the theoretical properties of the new estimators of treatment effects under a nonparametric setting and show that they are able to work robustly under low regularity conditions. The new framework is also applied to several numerical examples to demonstrate its practical merits.

This paper proposes the paradigm of large convolutional kernels in designing modern Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets). We establish that employing a few large kernels, instead of stacking multiple smaller ones, can be a superior design strategy. Our work introduces a set of architecture design guidelines for large-kernel ConvNets that optimize their efficiency and performance. We propose the UniRepLKNet architecture, which offers systematical architecture design principles specifically crafted for large-kernel ConvNets, emphasizing their unique ability to capture extensive spatial information without deep layer stacking. This results in a model that not only surpasses its predecessors with an ImageNet accuracy of 88.0%, an ADE20K mIoU of 55.6%, and a COCO box AP of 56.4% but also demonstrates impressive scalability and performance on various modalities such as time-series forecasting, audio, point cloud, and video recognition. These results indicate the universal modeling abilities of large-kernel ConvNets with faster inference speed compared with vision transformers. Our findings reveal that large-kernel ConvNets possess larger effective receptive fields and a higher shape bias, moving away from the texture bias typical of smaller-kernel CNNs. All codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/AILab-CVC/UniRepLKNet promoting further research and development in the community.

We study robustness to test-time adversarial attacks in the regression setting with ell_p losses and arbitrary perturbation sets. We address the question of which function classes are PAC learnable in this setting. We show that classes of finite fat-shattering dimension are learnable in both realizable and agnostic settings. Moreover, for convex function classes, they are even properly learnable. In contrast, some non-convex function classes provably require improper learning algorithms. Our main technique is based on a construction of an adversarially robust sample compression scheme of a size determined by the fat-shattering dimension. Along the way, we introduce a novel agnostic sample compression scheme for real-valued functions, which may be of independent interest.

A model involving Gaussian processes (GPs) is introduced to simultaneously handle multi-task learning, clustering, and prediction for multiple functional data. This procedure acts as a model-based clustering method for functional data as well as a learning step for subsequent predictions for new tasks. The model is instantiated as a mixture of multi-task GPs with common mean processes. A variational EM algorithm is derived for dealing with the optimisation of the hyper-parameters along with the hyper-posteriors' estimation of latent variables and processes. We establish explicit formulas for integrating the mean processes and the latent clustering variables within a predictive distribution, accounting for uncertainty on both aspects. This distribution is defined as a mixture of cluster-specific GP predictions, which enhances the performances when dealing with group-structured data. The model handles irregular grid of observations and offers different hypotheses on the covariance structure for sharing additional information across tasks. The performances on both clustering and prediction tasks are assessed through various simulated scenarios and real datasets. The overall algorithm, called MagmaClust, is publicly available as an R package.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are built upon the classical McCulloch-Pitts neuron model, which is essentially a linear model, where the nonlinearity is provided by a separate activation function. Several researchers have proposed enhanced neuron models, including quadratic neurons, generalized operational neurons, generative neurons, and super neurons, with stronger nonlinearity than that provided by the pointwise activation function. There has also been a proposal to use Pade approximation as a generalized activation function. In this paper, we introduce a brand new neuron model called Pade neurons (Paons), inspired by the Pade approximants, which is the best mathematical approximation of a transcendental function as a ratio of polynomials with different orders. We show that Paons are a super set of all other proposed neuron models. Hence, the basic neuron in any known CNN model can be replaced by Paons. In this paper, we extend the well-known ResNet to PadeNet (built by Paons) to demonstrate the concept. Our experiments on the single-image super-resolution task show that PadeNets can obtain better results than competing architectures.

Activation functions are fundamental in deep neural networks and directly impact gradient flow, optimization stability, and generalization. Although ReLU remains standard because of its simplicity, it suffers from vanishing gradients and lacks adaptability. Alternatives like Swish and GELU introduce smooth transitions, but fail to dynamically adjust to input statistics. We propose VeLU, a Variance-enhanced Learning Unit as an activation function that dynamically scales based on input variance by integrating ArcTan-Sin transformations and Wasserstein-2 regularization, effectively mitigating covariate shifts and stabilizing optimization. Extensive experiments on ViT_B16, VGG19, ResNet50, DenseNet121, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB3 confirm VeLU's superiority over ReLU, ReLU6, Swish, and GELU on six vision benchmarks. The codes of VeLU are publicly available on GitHub.

Time Series Forecasting has been an active area of research due to its many applications ranging from network usage prediction, resource allocation, anomaly detection, and predictive maintenance. Numerous publications published in the last five years have proposed diverse sets of objective loss functions to address cases such as biased data, long-term forecasting, multicollinear features, etc. In this paper, we have summarized 14 well-known regression loss functions commonly used for time series forecasting and listed out the circumstances where their application can aid in faster and better model convergence. We have also demonstrated how certain categories of loss functions perform well across all data sets and can be considered as a baseline objective function in circumstances where the distribution of the data is unknown. Our code is available at GitHub: https://github.com/aryan-jadon/Regression-Loss-Functions-in-Time-Series-Forecasting-Tensorflow.

The classical development of neural networks has primarily focused on learning mappings between finite dimensional Euclidean spaces or finite sets. We propose a generalization of neural networks to learn operators, termed neural operators, that map between infinite dimensional function spaces. We formulate the neural operator as a composition of linear integral operators and nonlinear activation functions. We prove a universal approximation theorem for our proposed neural operator, showing that it can approximate any given nonlinear continuous operator. The proposed neural operators are also discretization-invariant, i.e., they share the same model parameters among different discretization of the underlying function spaces. Furthermore, we introduce four classes of efficient parameterization, viz., graph neural operators, multi-pole graph neural operators, low-rank neural operators, and Fourier neural operators. An important application for neural operators is learning surrogate maps for the solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs). We consider standard PDEs such as the Burgers, Darcy subsurface flow, and the Navier-Stokes equations, and show that the proposed neural operators have superior performance compared to existing machine learning based methodologies, while being several orders of magnitude faster than conventional PDE solvers.