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CRONOS: Enhancing Deep Learning with Scalable GPU Accelerated Convex Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

This significantly improves upon prior work, which has been restricted to downsam-pled versions of MNIST and CIFAR-10. Taking CRONOS as a primitive, we then develop a new algorithm called CRONOS-AM, which combines CRONOS with alternating minimization, to obtain an algorithm capable of training multi-layer networks with arbitrary architectures.



CRONOS: Enhancing Deep Learning with Scalable GPU Accelerated Convex Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce the CRONOS algorithm for convex optimization of two-layer neural networks. CRONOS is the first algorithm capable of scaling to high-dimensional datasets such as ImageNet, which are ubiquitous in modern deep learning. This significantly improves upon prior work, which has been restricted to downsampled versions of MNIST and CIFAR-10.Taking CRONOS as a primitive, we then develop a new algorithm called CRONOS-AM, which combines CRONOS with alternating minimization, to obtain an algorithm capable of training multi-layer networks with arbitrary architectures.Our theoretical analysis proves that CRONOS converges to the global minimum of the convex reformulation under mild assumptions. In addition, we validate the efficacy of CRONOS and CRONOS-AM through extensive large-scale numerical experiments with GPU acceleration in JAX.Our results show that CRONOS-AM can obtain comparable or better validation accuracy than predominant tuned deep learning optimizers on vision and language tasks with benchmark datasets such as ImageNet and IMDb.To the best of our knowledge, CRONOS is the first algorithm which utilizes the convex reformulation to enhance performance on large-scale learning tasks.


Preference-based Pure Exploration

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the preference-based pure exploration problem for bandits with vector-valued rewards and a set of preferences imposed over them. Specifically, we aim to identify the most preferred policy over a set of arms according to the preferences induced on the reward vectors by an ordering cone $C$. First, to quantify the impact of preferences, we derive a novel lower bound on the sample complexity for identifying the most preferred arm with confidence level $1-\delta$. Our lower bound shows that how the geometry of the preferences and reward vectors changes the hardness of this problem. We further explicate this geometry for Gaussian distributions of rewards, and provide a convex reformulation of the lower bound solvable with linear programming. Then, we leverage this convex reformulation of the lower bound to design the Track and Stop with Preferences (TSwP) algorithm that identifies the most preferred policy. Finally, we derive a new concentration result for vector-valued rewards, and show that TSwP achieves a matching sample complexity upper bound.


Fast Epigraphical Projection-based Incremental Algorithms for Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Support Vector Machine

Neural Information Processing Systems

Wasserstein \textbf{D}istributionally \textbf{R}obust \textbf{O}ptimization (DRO) is concerned with finding decisions that perform well on data that are drawn from the worst probability distribution within a Wasserstein ball centered at a certain nominal distribution. In recent years, it has been shown that various DRO formulations of learning models admit tractable convex reformulations. However, most existing works propose to solve these convex reformulations by general-purpose solvers, which are not well-suited for tackling large-scale problems. In this paper, we focus on a family of Wasserstein distributionally robust support vector machine (DRSVM) problems and propose two novel epigraphical projection-based incremental algorithms to solve them. The updates in each iteration of these algorithms can be computed in a highly efficient manner. Moreover, we show that the DRSVM problems considered in this paper satisfy a Hölderian growth condition with explicitly determined growth exponents. Consequently, we are able to establish the convergence rates of the proposed incremental algorithms. Our numerical results indicate that the proposed methods are orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art, and the performance gap grows considerably as the problem size increases.


Fixing the NTK: From Neural Network Linearizations to Exact Convex Programs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recently, theoretical analyses of deep neural networks have broadly focused on two directions: 1) Providing insight into neural network training by SGD in the limit of infinite hidden-layer width and infinitesimally small learning rate (also known as gradient flow) via the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), and 2) Globally optimizing the regularized training objective via cone-constrained convex reformulations of ReLU networks. The latter research direction also yielded an alternative formulation of the ReLU network, called a gated ReLU network, that is globally optimizable via efficient unconstrained convex programs. In this work, we interpret the convex program for this gated ReLU network as a Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) model with a weighted data masking feature map and establish a connection to the NTK. Specifically, we show that for a particular choice of mask weights that do not depend on the learning targets, this kernel is equivalent to the NTK of the gated ReLU network on the training data. A consequence of this lack of dependence on the targets is that the NTK cannot perform better than the optimal MKL kernel on the training set. By using iterative reweighting, we improve the weights induced by the NTK to obtain the optimal MKL kernel which is equivalent to the solution of the exact convex reformulation of the gated ReLU network. We also provide several numerical simulations corroborating our theory. Additionally, we provide an analysis of the prediction error of the resulting optimal kernel via consistency results for the group lasso.




CRONOS: Enhancing Deep Learning with Scalable GPU Accelerated Convex Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

This significantly improves upon prior work, which has been restricted to downsam-pled versions of MNIST and CIFAR-10. Taking CRONOS as a primitive, we then develop a new algorithm called CRONOS-AM, which combines CRONOS with alternating minimization, to obtain an algorithm capable of training multi-layer networks with arbitrary architectures.


2794f6a20ee0685f4006210f40799acd-AuthorFeedback.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

We thank all the reviewers for their constructive comments. We will take these suggestions in later version. Y es, we agree with you that when two finite networks are sampled from a common continuous CNN, their standard We adopt widely used statistics in hypothesis test as metrics to measure such difference. Moreover, we'd like to point out that the standard statistics mean and variance are not enough to differentiate two The proposed method just does a change of variable where the new variables hide the non-convexity of the system. The reviewer might have missed some results in our appendix.