In this paper, we contend that the objective of representation learning is to compress and transform the distribution of the data, say sets of tokens, towards a mixture of low-dimensional Gaussian distributions supported on incoherent subspaces. The quality of the final representation can be measured by a unified objective function called sparse rate reduction. From this perspective, popular deep networks such as transformers can be naturally viewed as realizing iterative schemes to optimize this objective incrementally. Particularly, we show that the standard transformer block can be derived from alternating optimization on complementary parts of this objective: the multi-head self-attention operator can be viewed as a gradient descent step to compress the token sets by minimizing their lossy coding rate, and the subsequent multi-layer perceptron can be viewed as attempting to sparsify the representation of the tokens. This leads to a family of white-box transformer-like deep network architectures which are mathematically fully interpretable. Despite their simplicity, experiments show that these networks indeed learn to optimize the designed objective: they compress and sparsify representations of large-scale real-world vision datasets such as ImageNet, and achieve performance very close to thoroughly engineered transformers such as ViT.

Deep neural networks have long been criticized for being black-box. To unveil the inner workings of modern neural architectures, a recent work proposed an information-theoretic objective function called Sparse Rate Reduction (SRR) and interpreted its unrolled optimization as a Transformer-like model called Coding Rate Reduction Transformer (CRATE). However, the focus of the study was primarily on the basic implementation, and whether this objective is optimized in practice and its causal relationship to generalization remain elusive. Going beyond this study, we derive different implementations by analyzing layer-wise behaviors of CRATE, both theoretically and empirically. To reveal the predictive power of SRR on generalization, we collect a set of model variants induced by varied implementations and hyperparameters and evaluate SRR as a complexity measure based on its correlation with generalization. Surprisingly, we find out that SRR has a positive correlation coefficient and outperforms other baseline measures, such as path-norm and sharpness-based ones. Furthermore, we show that generalization can be improved using SRR as regularization on benchmark image classification datasets. We hope this paper can shed light on leveraging SRR to design principled models and study their generalization ability.

CRATE, a white-box transformer architecture designed to learn compressed and sparse representations, offers an intriguing alternative to standard vision transformers (ViTs) due to its inherent mathematical interpretability. Despite extensive investigations into the scaling behaviors of language and vision transformers, the scalability of CRATE remains an open question which this paper aims to address. Specifically, we propose CRATE-$\alpha$, featuring strategic yet minimal modifications to the sparse coding block in the CRATE architecture design, and a light training recipe designed to improve the scalability of CRATE.Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that CRATE-$\alpha$ can effectively scale with larger model sizes and datasets. For example, our CRATE-$\alpha$-B substantially outperforms the prior best CRATE-B model accuracy on ImageNet classification by 3.7%, achieving an accuracy of 83.2%.

The most extensive model described to date is the base model size encompasses 77.6M parameters

In Section 2.2 we show, using an idealized model for the token distribution, that if one iteratively

In this paper, we propose ProRAC (Progression-based Reasoning about Actions and Change), a neuro-symbolic framework that leverages LLMs to tackle RAC problems. ProRAC extracts fundamental RAC elements including actions and questions from the problem, progressively executes each action to derive the final state, and then evaluates the query against the progressed state to arrive at an answer. We evaluate ProRAC on several RAC benchmarks, and the results demonstrate that our approach achieves strong performance across different benchmarks, domains, LLM backbones, and types of RAC tasks.

Although Rust ensures memory safety by default, it also permits the use of unsafe code, which can introduce memory safety vulnerabilities if misused. Unfortunately, existing tools for detecting memory bugs in Rust typically exhibit limited detection capabilities, inadequately handle Rust-specific types, or rely heavily on manual intervention. To address these limitations, we present deepSURF, a tool that integrates static analysis with Large Language Model (LLM)-guided fuzzing harness generation to effectively identify memory safety vulnerabilities in Rust libraries, specifically targeting unsafe code. deepSURF introduces a novel approach for handling generics by substituting them with custom types and generating tailored implementations for the required traits, enabling the fuzzer to simulate user-defined behaviors within the fuzzed library. Additionally, deepSURF employs LLMs to augment fuzzing harnesses dynamically, facilitating exploration of complex API interactions and significantly increasing the likelihood of exposing memory safety vulnerabilities. We evaluated deepSURF on 63 real-world Rust crates, successfully rediscovering 30 known memory safety bugs and uncovering 12 previously-unknown vulnerabilities (out of which 11 have been assigned RustSec IDs and 3 have been patched), demonstrating clear improvements over state-of-the-art tools.