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### Neural Plasticity Networks

Neural plasticity is an important functionality of human brain, in which number of neurons and synapses can shrink or expand in response to stimuli throughout the span of life. We model this dynamic learning process as an $L_0$-norm regularized binary optimization problem, in which each unit of a neural network (e.g., weight, neuron or channel, etc.) is attached with a stochastic binary gate, whose parameters determine the level of activity of a unit in the network. At the beginning, only a small portion of binary gates (therefore the corresponding neurons) are activated, while the remaining neurons are in a hibernation mode. As the learning proceeds, some neurons might be activated or deactivated if doing so can be justified by the cost-benefit tradeoff measured by the $L_0$-norm regularized objective. As the training gets mature, the probability of transition between activation and deactivation will diminish until a final hardening stage. We demonstrate that all of these learning dynamics can be modulated by a single parameter $k$ seamlessly. Our neural plasticity network (NPN) can prune or expand a network depending on the initial capacity of network provided by the user; it also unifies dropout (when $k=0$), traditional training of DNNs (when $k=\infty$) and interpolates between these two. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first learning framework that unifies network sparsification and network expansion in an end-to-end training pipeline. Extensive experiments on synthetic dataset and multiple image classification benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of NPN. We show that both network sparsification and network expansion can yield compact models of similar architectures and of similar predictive accuracies that are close to or sometimes even higher than baseline networks. We plan to release our code to facilitate the research in this area.

### The Expressive Power of Neural Networks: A View from the Width

The expressive power of neural networks is important for understanding deep learning. Most existing works consider this problem from the view of the depth of a network. In this paper, we study how width affects the expressiveness of neural networks. Classical results state that depth-bounded (e.g. We show a universal approximation theorem for width-bounded ReLU networks: width-(n 4) ReLU networks, where n is the input dimension, are universal approximators.

### Paraphrasing Complex Network: Network Compression via Factor Transfer

Many researchers have sought ways of model compression to reduce the size of a deep neural network (DNN) with minimal performance degradation in order to use DNNs in embedded systems. Among the model compression methods, a method called knowledge transfer is to train a student network with a stronger teacher network. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge transfer method which uses convolutional operations to paraphrase teacher's knowledge and to translate it for the student. This is done by two convolutional modules, which are called a paraphraser and a translator. The paraphraser is trained in an unsupervised manner to extract the teacher factors which are defined as paraphrased information of the teacher network.

### Capsule Networks: An Improvement to Convolutional Networks

Siraj Raval covers the latest happenings on the latest research on neural networks, including a potential replacement to Convolutional Neural Networks.

### Heres's Why Network Discovery Tools Are So Important In 2019

It has been 12 years since Princeton researchers Mark Newman and Albert-László Barabási wrote about the changes of modern computing networks. Their book "The Structure and Dynamics of Networks" focused on the significant changes that corporate intranets faced. Things have changed even more in recent years, as modern networks have become much more dynamic. The sudden emergence of dynamic networks has been a game changer for most of the corporate world. It makes their systems more responsive, but it also creates more competition.