10 accepted papers
The regularity or implicit bias in neural network optimization has been typically studied via the parameter norms or the landscape curvature, often overlooking the trajectory leading to these parameters. However, properties of the trajectory --- particularly its directionality --- capture critical a…
Graph neural networks based on iterative one-hop message passing have been shown to struggle in harnessing the information from distant nodes effectively. Conversely, graph transformers allow each node to attend to all other nodes directly, but lack graph inductive bias and have to rely on ad-hoc po…
A simple design recipe for deep Transformers is to compose identical building blocks. But standard transformer blocks are far from simple, interweaving attention and MLP sub-blocks with skip connections \& normalisation layers in precise arrangements. This complexity leads to brittle architectures,…
Outlier Features (OFs) are neurons whose activation magnitudes significantly exceed the average over a neural network's (NN) width. They are well known to emerge during standard transformer training and have the undesirable effect of hindering quantisation in afflicted models. Despite their practica…
Skip connections and normalisation layers form two standard architectural components that are ubiquitous for the training of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), but whose precise roles are poorly understood. Recent approaches such as Deep Kernel Shaping have made progress towards reducing our reliance on t…
In deep learning theory, the covariance matrix of the representations serves as a proxy to examine the network’s trainability. Motivated by the success of Transform- ers, we study the covariance matrix of a modified Softmax-based attention model with skip connections in the proportional limit of inf…
Avoiding feature collapse, when a Neural Network (NN) encoder maps all inputs to a constant vector, is a shared implicit desideratum of various methodological advances in self-supervised learning (SSL). To that end, whitened features have been proposed as an explicit objective to ensure uncollapsed…
Trained Neural Networks (NNs) can be viewed as data-dependent kernel machines, with predictions determined by the inner product of last-layer representations across inputs, referred to as the feature kernel. We explore the relevance of the feature kernel for Knowledge Distillation (KD), using a mech…
Deep ResNet architectures have achieved state of the art performance on many tasks. While they solve the problem of gradient vanishing, they might suffer from gradient exploding as the depth becomes large (Yang et al. 2017). Moreover, recent results have shown that ResNet might lose expressivity as…
We explore the link between deep ensembles and Gaussian processes (GPs) through the lens of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK): a recent development in understanding the training dynamics of wide neural networks (NNs). Previous work has shown that even in the infinite width limit, when NNs become GPs,…