12 accepted papers
In this paper, we leverage existing statistical methods to better understand feature learning from data. We tackle this by modifying the model-free variable selection method, Feature Ordering by Conditional Independence (FOCI), which is introduced in Azadkia & Chatterjee (2021). While FOCI is based…
Machine learning models can capture and amplify biases present in data, leading to disparate test performance across social groups. To better understand, evaluate, and mitigate these biases, a deeper theoretical understanding of how model design choices and data distribution properties contribute to…
Text toxicity detection systems exhibit significant biases, producing disproportionate rates of false positives on samples mentioning demographic groups. But what about toxicity detection in speech? To investigate the extent to which text-based biases are mitigated by speech-based systems, we produc…
Graph neural network (GNN) link prediction is increasingly deployed in citation, collaboration, and online social networks to recommend academic literature, collaborators, and friends. While prior research has investigated the dyadic fairness of GNN link prediction, the within-group (e.g., queer wom…
Convolutional architectures have proven extremely successful for vision tasks. Their hard inductive biases enable sample-efficient learning, but come at the cost of a potentially lower performance ceiling. Vision Transformers (ViTs) rely on more flexible self-attention layers, and have recently outp…
One of the central features of modern machine learning models, including deep neural networks, is their generalization ability on structured data in the over-parametrized regime. In this work, we consider an analytically solvable setup to investigate how properties of data impact learning in classi…
A recent line of research has highlighted the existence of a ``double descent'' phenomenon in deep learning, whereby increasing the number of training examples N causes the generalization error of neural networks to peak when N is of the same order as the number of parameters P. In earlier works, a…
The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the classical central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made for mathematical convenience, since it enables SGD to be analyzed…
Despite the phenomenal success of deep neural networks in a broad range of learning tasks, there is a lack of theory to understand the way they work. In particular, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are known to perform much better than Fully-Connected Networks (FCNs) on spatially structured data…
We analyze numerically the training dynamics of deep neural networks (DNN) by using methods developed in statistical physics of glassy systems. The two main issues we address are the complexity of the loss-landscape and of the dynamics within it, and to what extent DNNs share similarities with glass…
We study the properties of common loss surfaces through their Hessian matrix. In particular, in the context of deep learning, we empirically show that the spectrum of the Hessian is composed of two parts: (1) the bulk centered near zero, (2) and outliers away from the bulk. We present numerical evid…
This paper proposes a new optimization algorithm called Entropy-SGD for training deep neural networks that is motivated by the local geometry of the energy landscape. Local extrema with low generalization error have a large proportion of almost-zero eigenvalues in the Hessian with very few positive…