Backpropagation
Improving the Backpropagation Algorithm with Consequentialism Weight Updates over Mini-Batches
Paeedeh, Naeem, Ghiasi-Shirazi, Kamaledin
Least mean squares (LMS) is a particular case of the backpropagation (BP) algorithm applied to single-layer neural networks with the mean squared error (MSE) loss. One drawback of the LMS is that the instantaneous weight update is proportional to the square of the norm of the input vector. Normalized least mean squares (NLMS) algorithm amends this drawback by dividing the weight changes by the square of the norm of the input vector. The affine projection algorithm (APA) improved the NLMS algorithm to weight update over a batch of recently seen samples. However, the application of NLMS and APA had been limited to single-layer networks and adaptive filters. In this paper, we consider a virtual target for each neuron of a multi-layer neural network and show that the BP algorithm is equivalent to training the weights of each layer using these virtual targets and the LMS algorithm. We also introduce a consequentialism interpretation of the NLMS and the APA algorithms that justifies their use in multi-layer neural networks. Given any optimization algorithm based on the BP over mini-batches, we propose a novel consequentialism method for updating the weights.Consequently, our proposed weight update can be applied both to plain stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and to momentum methods like RMSProp, Adam, and NAG. These ideas helped us to update the weights more carefully in such a way that minimization of the loss for one sample of the mini-batch does not interfere with other samples in that mini-batch. Our experiments show the usefulness of the proposed method in optimizing deep neural network architectures.
Backpropagation with Callbacks: Foundations for Efficient and Expressive Differentiable Programming
Wang, Fei, Decker, James, Wu, Xilun, Essertel, Gregory, Rompf, Tiark
Training of deep learning models depends on gradient descent and end-to-end differentiation. Under the slogan of differentiable programming, there is an increasing demand for efficient automatic gradient computation for emerging network architectures that incorporate dynamic control flow, especially in NLP. In this paper we propose an implementation of backpropagation using functions with callbacks, where the forward pass is executed as a sequence of function calls, and the backward pass as a corresponding sequence of function returns. A key realization is that this technique of chaining callbacks is well known in the programming languages community as continuation-passing style (CPS). Any program can be converted to this form using standard techniques, and hence, any program can be mechanically converted to compute gradients.
Dendritic cortical microcircuits approximate the backpropagation algorithm
Sacramento, João, Costa, Rui Ponte, Bengio, Yoshua, Senn, Walter
Deep learning has seen remarkable developments over the last years, many of them inspired by neuroscience. However, the main learning mechanism behind these advances – error backpropagation – appears to be at odds with neurobiology. Here, we introduce a multilayer neuronal network model with simplified dendritic compartments in which error-driven synaptic plasticity adapts the network towards a global desired output. In contrast to previous work our model does not require separate phases and synaptic learning is driven by local dendritic prediction errors continuously in time. Such errors originate at apical dendrites and occur due to a mismatch between predictive input from lateral interneurons and activity from actual top-down feedback.
Hybrid Macro/Micro Level Backpropagation for Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks
Jin, Yingyezhe, Zhang, Wenrui, Li, Peng
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are positioned to enable spatio-temporal information processing and ultra-low power event-driven neuromorphic hardware. However, SNNs are yet to reach the same performances of conventional deep artificial neural networks (ANNs), a long-standing challenge due to complex dynamics and non-differentiable spike events encountered in training. The existing SNN error backpropagation (BP) methods are limited in terms of scalability, lack of proper handling of spiking discontinuities, and/or mismatch between the rate-coded loss function and computed gradient. We present a hybrid macro/micro level backpropagation (HM2-BP) algorithm for training multi-layer SNNs. The temporal effects are precisely captured by the proposed spike-train level post-synaptic potential (S-PSP) at the microscopic level.
On Blackbox Backpropagation and Jacobian Sensing
Choromanski, Krzysztof M., Sindhwani, Vikas
From a small number of calls to a given "blackbox" on random input perturbations, we show how to efficiently recover its unknown Jacobian, or estimate the left action of its Jacobian on a given vector. Our methods are based on a novel combination of compressed sensing and graph coloring techniques, and provably exploit structural prior knowledge about the Jacobian such as sparsity and symmetry while being noise robust. We demonstrate efficient backpropagation through noisy blackbox layers in a deep neural net, improved data-efficiency in the task of linearizing the dynamics of a rigid body system, and the generic ability to handle a rich class of input-output dependency structures in Jacobian estimation problems. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.
Learning Multiagent Communication with Backpropagation
Sukhbaatar, Sainbayar, szlam, arthur, Fergus, Rob
Many tasks in AI require the collaboration of multiple agents. Typically, the communication protocol between agents is manually specified and not altered during training. In this paper we explore a simple neural model, called CommNet, that uses continuous communication for fully cooperative tasks. The model consists of multiple agents and the communication between them is learned alongside their policy. We apply this model to a diverse set of tasks, demonstrating the ability of the agents to learn to communicate amongst themselves, yielding improved performance over non-communicative agents and baselines.
The Reversible Residual Network: Backpropagation Without Storing Activations
Gomez, Aidan N., Ren, Mengye, Urtasun, Raquel, Grosse, Roger B.
Residual Networks (ResNets) have demonstrated significant improvement over traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on image classification, increasing in performance as networks grow both deeper and wider. However, memory consumption becomes a bottleneck as one needs to store all the intermediate activations for calculating gradients using backpropagation. In this work, we present the Reversible Residual Network (RevNet), a variant of ResNets where each layer's activations can be reconstructed exactly from the next layer's. Therefore, the activations for most layers need not be stored in memory during backprop. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RevNets on CIFAR and ImageNet, establishing nearly identical performance to equally-sized ResNets, with activation storage requirements independent of depth. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.
Fast Second Order Stochastic Backpropagation for Variational Inference
Fan, Kai, Wang, Ziteng, Beck, Jeff, Kwok, James, Heller, Katherine A.
We propose a second-order (Hessian or Hessian-free) based optimization method for variational inference inspired by Gaussian backpropagation, and argue that quasi-Newton optimization can be developed as well. This is accomplished by generalizing the gradient computation in stochastic backpropagation via a reparametrization trick with lower complexity. As an illustrative example, we apply this approach to the problems of Bayesian logistic regression and variational auto-encoder (VAE). Additionally, we compute bounds on the estimator variance of intractable expectations for the family of Lipschitz continuous function. Our method is practical, scalable and model free.
Backpropagation for Energy-Efficient Neuromorphic Computing
Esser, Steve K., Appuswamy, Rathinakumar, Merolla, Paul, Arthur, John V., Modha, Dharmendra S.
Solving real world problems with embedded neural networks requires both training algorithms that achieve high performance and compatible hardware that runs in real time while remaining energy efficient. For the former, deep learning using backpropagation has recently achieved a string of successes across many domains and datasets. For the latter, neuromorphic chips that run spiking neural networks have recently achieved unprecedented energy efficiency. To bring these two advances together, we must first resolve the incompatibility between backpropagation, which uses continuous-output neurons and synaptic weights, and neuromorphic designs, which employ spiking neurons and discrete synapses. Our approach is to treat spikes and discrete synapses as continuous probabilities, which allows training the network using standard backpropagation.