10 accepted papers
Teams that have trained large Transformer-based models have reported training instabilities at large scale that did not appear when training with the same hyperparameters at smaller scales. Although the causes of such instabilities are of scientific interest, the amount of resources required to repr…
One of the distinguishing characteristics of modern deep learning systems is their use of neural network architectures with enormous numbers of parameters, often in the millions and sometimes even in the billions. While this paradigm has inspired significant research on the properties of large netwo…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a pillar of modern machine learning, serving as the go-to optimization algorithm for a diverse array of problems. While the empirical success of SGD is often attributed to its computational efficiency and favorable generalization behavior, neither effect is well…
Modern deep learning models have achieved great success in predictive accuracy for many data modalities. However, their application to many real-world tasks is restricted by poor uncertainty estimates, such as overconfidence on out-of-distribution (OOD) data and ungraceful failing under distribution…
A significant obstacle in the development of robust machine learning models is \emph{covariate shift}, a form of distribution shift that occurs when the input distributions of the training and test sets differ while the conditional label distributions remain the same. Despite the prevalence of covar…
We perform a careful, thorough, and large scale empirical study of the correspondence between wide neural networks and kernel methods. By doing so, we resolve a variety of open questions related to the study of infinitely wide neural networks. Our experimental results include: kernel methods outperf…
Modern deep learning models employ considerably more parameters than required to fit the training data. Whereas conventional statistical wisdom suggests such models should drastically overfit, in practice these models generalize remarkably well. An emerging paradigm for describing this unexpected be…
Modern neural networks are often regarded as complex black-box functions whose behavior is difficult to understand owing to their nonlinear dependence on the data and the nonconvexity in their loss landscapes. In this work, we show that these common perceptions can be completely false in the early p…
Classical learning theory suggests that the optimal generalization performance of a machine learning model should occur at an intermediate model complexity, with simpler models exhibiting high bias and more complex models exhibiting high variance of the predictive function. However, such a simple tr…
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) generate data based on minimizing a divergence between two distributions. The choice of that divergence is therefore critical. We argue that the divergence must take into account the hypothesis set and the loss function used in a subsequent learning task, where…