Systematic construction of continuous-time neural networks for linear dynamical systems

Discovering a suitable neural network architecture for modeling complex dynamical systems poses a formidable challenge, often involving extensive trial and error and navigation through a high-dimensional hyper-parameter space. In this paper, we discuss a systematic approach to constructing neural architectures for modeling a subclass of dynamical systems, namely, Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) systems. We use a variant of continuous-time neural networks in which the output of each neuron evolves continuously as a solution of a first-order or second-order Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE). Instead of deriving the network architecture and parameters from data, we propose a gradient-free algorithm to compute sparse architecture and network parameters directly from the given LTI system, leveraging its properties. We bring forth a novel neural architecture paradigm featuring horizontal hidden layers and provide insights into why employing conventional neural architectures with vertical hidden layers may not be favorable. We also provide an upper bound on the numerical errors of our neural networks. Finally, we demonstrate the high accuracy of our constructed networks on three numerical examples.

Sampling weights of deep neural networks

We introduce a probability distribution, combined with an efficient sampling algorithm, for weights and biases of fully-connected neural networks. In a supervised learning context, no iterative optimization or gradient computations of internal network parameters are needed to obtain a trained network. The sampling is based on the idea of random feature models. However, instead of a data-agnostic distribution, e.g., a normal distribution, we use both the input and the output training data of the supervised learning problem to sample both shallow and deep networks. We prove that the sampled networks we construct are universal approximators. We also show that our sampling scheme is invariant to rigid body transformations and scaling of the input data. This implies many popular pre-processing techniques are no longer required. For Barron functions, we show that the $L^2$-approximation error of sampled shallow networks decreases with the square root of the number of neurons. In numerical experiments, we demonstrate that sampled networks achieve comparable accuracy as iteratively trained ones, but can be constructed orders of magnitude faster. Our test cases involve a classification benchmark from OpenML, sampling of neural operators to represent maps in function spaces, and transfer learning using well-known architectures.