error function
StatQAT: Statistical Quantizer Optimization for Deep Networks
Aktukmak, Mehmet, Huang, Daniel, Ding, Ke
Quantization is essential for reducing the computational cost and memory usage of deep neural networks, enabling efficient inference on low-precision hardware. Despite the growing adoption of uniform and floating-point quantization schemes, selecting optimal quantization parameters remains a key challenge, particularly for diverse data distributions encountered during training and inference. This work presents a novel statistical error analysis framework for uniform and floating-point quantization, providing theoretical insight into error behavior across quantization configurations. Building on this analysis, we propose iterative quantizers designed for arbitrary data distributions and analytic quantizers tailored for Gaussian-like weight distributions. These methods enable efficient, low-error quantization suitable for both activations and weights. We incorporate our quantizers into quantization-aware training and evaluate them across integer and floating-point formats. Experiments demonstrate improved accuracy and stability, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach for training low-precision neural networks.
Safe Policy Improvement by Minimizing Robust Baseline Regret
Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Marek Petrik, Yinlam Chow
An important problem in sequential decision-making under uncertainty is to use limited data to compute a safe policy, which is guaranteed to outperform a given baseline strategy. In this paper, we develop and analyze a new model-based approach that computes a safe policy, given an inaccurate model of the system's dynamics and guarantees on the accuracy of this model. The new robust method uses this model to directly minimize the (negative) regret w.r.t. the baseline policy. Contrary to existing approaches, minimizing the regret allows one to improve the baseline policy in states with accurate dynamics and to seamlessly fall back to the baseline policy, otherwise. We show that our formulation is NP-hard and propose a simple approximate algorithm. Our empirical results on several domains further show that even the simple approximate algorithm can outperform standard approaches.
Mean-field theory of graph neural networks in graph partitioning
Tatsuro Kawamoto, Masashi Tsubaki, Tomoyuki Obuchi
A theoretical performance analysis of the graph neural network (GNN) is presented. For classification tasks, the neural network approach has the advantage in terms of flexibility that it can be employed in a data-driven manner, whereas Bayesian inference requires the assumption of a specific model. A fundamental question is then whether GNN has a high accuracy in addition to this flexibility.
AccurateLayerwiseInterpretableCompetence Estimation
Our contributions are twofold: First, we establish a statistically rigorous definition of competence that generalizesthecommon notion ofclassifier confidence; second, wepresent theALICE (Accurate Layerwise Interpretable Competence Estimation) Score, a pointwise competence estimator foranyclassifier.
Mean-field theory of graph neural networks in graph partitioning
Tatsuro Kawamoto, Masashi Tsubaki, Tomoyuki Obuchi
A theoretical performance analysis of the graph neural network (GNN) is presented. For classification tasks, the neural network approach has the advantage in terms of flexibility that it can be employed in a data-driven manner, whereas Bayesian inference requires the assumption of a specific model. A fundamental question is then whether GNN has a high accuracy in addition to this flexibility. Moreover, whether the achieved performance is predominately a result of the backpropagation or the architecture itself is a matter of considerable interest. To gain a better insight into these questions, a mean-field theory of a minimal GNN architecture is developed for the graph partitioning problem. This demonstrates a good agreement with numerical experiments.
Shift is Good: Mismatched Data Mixing Improves Test Performance
Medvedev, Marko, Lyu, Kaifeng, Li, Zhiyuan, Srebro, Nathan
We consider training and testing on mixture distributions with different training and test proportions. We show that in many settings, and in some sense generically, distribution shift can be beneficial, and test performance can improve due to mismatched training proportions, even if the components are unrelated and with no transfer between components. In a variety of scenarios, we identify the optimal training proportions and the extent to which such distribution shift can be beneficial. We show how the same analysis applies also to a compositional setting with differing distribution of component "skills'' at training and test.