← Search

Stanley Osher

18 accepted papers

2026

Implicit Models: Expressive Power Scales with Test-Time Compute

ICLR 2026poster

Implicit models, an emerging model class, compute outputs by iterating a single parameter block to a fixed point. This architecture realizes an infinite-depth, weight-tied network that trains with constant memory, significantly reducing memory needs for the same level of performance compared to expl…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Optimal Control for Transformer Architectures: Enhancing Generalization, Robustness and Efficiency

NeurIPS 2025poster

We study Transformers through the perspective of optimal control theory, using tools from continuous-time formulations to derive actionable insights into training and architecture design. This framework improves the performance of existing Transformer models while providing desirable theoretical gua…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

A Primal-Dual Framework for Transformers and Neural Networks

ICLR 2023top-25%

Self-attention is key to the remarkable success of transformers in sequence modeling tasks including many applications in natural language processing and computer vision. Like neural network layers, these attention mechanisms are often developed by heuristics and experience. To provide a principled…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2023

Neural Collapse in Deep Linear Networks: From Balanced to Imbalanced Data

ICML 2023poster

Modern deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance on tasks from image classification to natural language processing. Surprisingly, these complex systems with massive amounts of parameters exhibit the same structural properties in their last-layer features and classifiers across canoni…

2023

Revisiting Over-smoothing and Over-squashing Using Ollivier-Ricci Curvature

ICML 2023poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) had been demonstrated to be inherently susceptible to the problems of over-smoothing and over-squashing. These issues prohibit the ability of GNNs to model complex graph interactions by limiting their effectiveness in taking into account distant information. Our study re…

2022

FourierFormer: Transformer Meets Generalized Fourier Integral Theorem

NeurIPS 2022accept

Multi-head attention empowers the recent success of transformers, the state-of-the-art models that have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling and beyond. These attention mechanisms compute the pairwise dot products between the queries and keys, which results from the use of unnormalized G…

Cited by 41SourcePDFScholar
2022

GRAND++: Graph Neural Diffusion with A Source Term

ICLR 2022poster

We propose GRAph Neural Diffusion with a source term (GRAND++) for graph deep learning with a limited number of labeled nodes, i.e., low-labeling rate. GRAND++ is a class of continuous-depth graph deep learning architectures whose theoretical underpinning is the diffusion process on graphs with a so…

Cited by 96SourcePDFScholar
2022

Improving Neural Ordinary Differential Equations with Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient Method

NeurIPS 2022accept

We propose the Nesterov neural ordinary differential equations (NesterovNODEs), whose layers solve the second-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs) limit of Nesterov's accelerated gradient (NAG) method, and a generalization called GNesterovNODEs. Taking the advantage of the convergence rate $…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2022

Improving Transformer with an Admixture of Attention Heads

NeurIPS 2022accept

Transformers with multi-head self-attention have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling and beyond. However, they suffer from high computational and memory complexities for computing the attention matrix at each head. Recently, it has been shown that those attention matrices lie on a low-d…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar
2022

Improving Transformers with Probabilistic Attention Keys

ICML 2022spotlight

Multi-head attention is a driving force behind state-of-the-art transformers, which achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision tasks. It has been observed that for many applications, those attention heads learn redundant embedding, and mo…

2022

JFB: Jacobian-Free Backpropagation for Implicit Networks

AAAI 2022technical

A promising trend in deep learning replaces traditional feedforward networks with implicit networks. Unlike traditional networks, implicit networks solve a fixed point equation to compute inferences. Solving for the fixed point varies in complexity, depending on provided data and an error tolerance.…

2021

FMMformer: Efficient and Flexible Transformer via Decomposed Near-field and Far-field Attention

NeurIPS 2021poster

We propose FMMformers, a class of efficient and flexible transformers inspired by the celebrated fast multipole method (FMM) for accelerating interacting particle simulation. FMM decomposes particle-particle interaction into near-field and far-field components and then performs direct and coarse-gra…

Cited by 33SourcePDFScholar
2021

Heavy Ball Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

NeurIPS 2021poster

We propose heavy ball neural ordinary differential equations (HBNODEs), leveraging the continuous limit of the classical momentum accelerated gradient descent, to improve neural ODEs (NODEs) training and inference. HBNODEs have two properties that imply practical advantages over NODEs: (i) The adjoi…

2020

MomentumRNN: Integrating Momentum into Recurrent Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2020poster

Designing deep neural networks is an art that often involves an expensive search over candidate architectures. To overcome this for recurrent neural nets (RNNs), we establish a connection between the hidden state dynamics in an RNN and gradient descent (GD). We then integrate momentum into this fram…

2019

ResNets Ensemble via the Feynman-Kac Formalism to Improve Natural and Robust Accuracies

NeurIPS 2019poster

We unify the theory of optimal control of transport equations with the practice of training and testing of ResNets. Based on this unified viewpoint, we propose a simple yet effective ResNets ensemble algorithm to boost the accuracy of the robustly trained model on both clean and adversarial images.…

2019

Understanding Straight-Through Estimator in Training Activation Quantized Neural Nets

ICLR 2019poster

Training activation quantized neural networks involves minimizing a piecewise constant training loss whose gradient vanishes almost everywhere, which is undesirable for the standard back-propagation or chain rule. An empirical way around this issue is to use a straight-through estimator (STE) (Bengi…

Cited by 382SourcePDFScholar
2018

Deep Neural Nets with Interpolating Function as Output Activation

NeurIPS 2018poster

We replace the output layer of deep neural nets, typically the softmax function, by a novel interpolating function. And we propose end-to-end training and testing algorithms for this new architecture. Compared to classical neural nets with softmax function as output activation, the surrogate with in…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar