skip to main content


Title: Learning One-hidden-layer Neural Networks under General Input Distributions
Significant advances have been made recently on training neural networks, where the main challenge is in solving an optimization problem with abundant critical points. However, existing approaches to address this issue crucially rely on a restrictive assumption: the training data is drawn from a Gaussian distribution. In this paper, we provide a novel unified framework to design loss functions with desirable landscape properties for a wide range of general input distributions. On these loss functions, remarkably, stochastic gradient descent theoretically recovers the true parameters with global initializations and empirically outperforms the existing approaches. Our loss function design bridges the notion of score functions with the topic of neural network optimization. Central to our approach is the task of estimating the score function from samples, which is of basic and independent interest to theoretical statistics. Traditional estimation methods (example: kernel based) fail right at the outset; we bring statistical methods of local likelihood to design a novel estimator of score functions, that provably adapts to the local geometry of the unknown density.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1929955
NSF-PAR ID:
10105883
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of Machine Learning Research
Volume:
89
ISSN:
2640-3498
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Deep neural networks have been shown to be effective adaptive beamformers for ultrasound imaging. However, when training with traditional L p norm loss functions, model selection is difficult because lower loss values are not always associated with higher image quality. This ultimately limits the maximum achievable image quality with this approach and raises concerns about the optimization objective. In an effort to align the optimization objective with the image quality metrics of interest, we implemented a novel ultrasound-specific loss function based on the spatial lag-one coherence and signal-to-noise ratio of the delayed channel data in the short-time Fourier domain. We employed the R-Adam optimizer with look ahead and cyclical learning rate to make the training more robust to initialization and local minima, leading to better model performance and more reliable convergence. With our custom loss function and optimization scheme, we achieved higher contrast-to-noise-ratio, higher speckle signal-to-noise-ratio, and more accurate contrast ratio reconstruction than with previous deep learning and delay-and-sum beamforming approaches. 
    more » « less
  2. Abstract

    In the last decade, much work in atmospheric science has focused on spatial verification (SV) methods for gridded prediction, which overcome serious disadvantages of pixelwise verification. However, neural networks (NN) in atmospheric science are almost always trained to optimize pixelwise loss functions, even when ultimately assessed with SV methods. This establishes a disconnect between model verification during versus after training. To address this issue, we develop spatially enhanced loss functions (SELF) and demonstrate their use for a real-world problem: predicting the occurrence of thunderstorms (henceforth, “convection”) with NNs. In each SELF we use either a neighborhood filter, which highlights convection at scales larger than a threshold, or a spectral filter (employing Fourier or wavelet decomposition), which is more flexible and highlights convection at scales between two thresholds. We use these filters to spatially enhance common verification scores, such as the Brier score. We train each NN with a different SELF and compare their performance at many scales of convection, from discrete storm cells to tropical cyclones. Among our many findings are that (i) for a low or high risk threshold, the ideal SELF focuses on small or large scales, respectively; (ii) models trained with a pixelwise loss function perform surprisingly well; and (iii) nevertheless, models trained with a spectral filter produce much better-calibrated probabilities than a pixelwise model. We provide a general guide to using SELFs, including technical challenges and the final Python code, as well as demonstrating their use for the convection problem. To our knowledge this is the most in-depth guide to SELFs in the geosciences.

    Significance Statement

    Gridded predictions, in which a quantity is predicted at every pixel in space, should be verified with spatially aware methods rather than pixel by pixel. Neural networks (NN), which are often used for gridded prediction, are trained to minimize an error value called the loss function. NN loss functions in atmospheric science are almost always pixelwise, which causes the predictions to miss rare events and contain unrealistic spatial patterns. We use spatial filters to enhance NN loss functions, and we test our novel spatially enhanced loss functions (SELF) on thunderstorm prediction. We find that different SELFs work better for different scales (i.e., different-sized thunderstorm complexes) and that spectral filters, one of the two filter types, produce unexpectedly well calibrated thunderstorm probabilities.

     
    more » « less
  3. Beam search optimization (Wiseman and Rush, 2016) resolves many issues in neural machine translation. However, this method lacks principled stopping criteria and does not learn how to stop during training, and the model naturally prefers longer hypotheses during the testing time in practice since they use the raw score instead of the probability-based score. We propose a novel ranking method which enables an optimal beam search stop- ping criteria. We further introduce a structured prediction loss function which penalizes suboptimal finished candidates produced by beam search during training. Experiments of neural machine translation on both synthetic data and real languages (German→English and Chinese→English) demonstrate our pro- posed methods lead to better length and BLEU score. 
    more » « less
  4. null (Ed.)
    Modern digital manufacturing processes, such as additive manufacturing, are cyber-physical in nature and utilize complex, process-specific simulations for both design and manufacturing. Although computational simulations can be used to optimize these complex processes, they can take hours or days--an unreasonable cost for engineering teams leveraging iterative design processes. Hence, more rapid computational methods are necessary in areas where computation time presents a limiting factor. When existing data from historical examples is plentiful and reliable, supervised machine learning can be used to create surrogate models that can be evaluated orders of magnitude more rapidly than comparable finite element approaches. However, for applications that necessitate computationally- intensive simulations, even generating the training data necessary to train a supervised machine learning model can pose a significant barrier. Unsupervised methods, such as physics- informed neural networks, offer a shortcut in cases where training data is scarce or prohibitive. These novel neural networks are trained without the use of potentially expensive labels. Instead, physical principles are encoded directly into the loss function. This method substantially reduces the time required to develop a training dataset, while still achieving the evaluation speed that is typical of supervised machine learning surrogate models. We propose a new method for stochastically training and testing a convolutional physics-informed neural network using the transient 3D heat equation- to model temperature throughout a solid object over time. We demonstrate this approach by applying it to a transient thermal analysis model of the powder bed fusion manufacturing process. 
    more » « less
  5. Abstract Motivation

    Reconstructing the full-length expressed transcripts (a.k.a. the transcript assembly problem) from the short sequencing reads produced by RNA-seq protocol plays a central role in identifying novel genes and transcripts as well as in studying gene expressions and gene functions. A crucial step in transcript assembly is to accurately determine the splicing junctions and boundaries of the expressed transcripts from the reads alignment. In contrast to the splicing junctions that can be efficiently detected from spliced reads, the problem of identifying boundaries remains open and challenging, due to the fact that the signal related to boundaries is noisy and weak.

    Results

    We present DeepBound, an effective approach to identify boundaries of expressed transcripts from RNA-seq reads alignment. In its core DeepBound employs deep convolutional neural fields to learn the hidden distributions and patterns of boundaries. To accurately model the transition probabilities and to solve the label-imbalance problem, we novelly incorporate the AUC (area under the curve) score into the optimizing objective function. To address the issue that deep probabilistic graphical models requires large number of labeled training samples, we propose to use simulated RNA-seq datasets to train our model. Through extensive experimental studies on both simulation datasets of two species and biological datasets, we show that DeepBound consistently and significantly outperforms the two existing methods.

    Availability and implementation

    DeepBound is freely available at https://github.com/realbigws/DeepBound.

     
    more » « less