Building Optimal Neural Architectures using Interpretable Knowledge

Neural Architecture Search is a costly practice. The fact that a search space can span a vast number of design choices with each architecture evaluation taking nontrivial overhead makes it hard for an algorithm to sufficiently explore candidate networks. In this paper, we propose AutoBuild, a scheme which learns to align the latent embeddings of operations and architecture modules with the ground-truth performance of the architectures they appear in. By doing so, AutoBuild is capable of assigning interpretable importance scores to architecture modules, such as individual operation features and larger macro operation sequences such that high-performance neural networks can be constructed without any need for search. Through experiments performed on state-of-the-art image classification, segmentation, and Stable Diffusion models, we show that by mining a relatively small set of evaluated architectures, AutoBuild can learn to build high-quality architectures directly or help to reduce search space to focus on relevant areas, finding better architectures that outperform both the original labeled ones and ones found by search baselines. Code available at https://github.com/Ascend-Research/AutoBuild

GOAt: Explaining Graph Neural Networks via Graph Output Attribution

Understanding the decision-making process of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is crucial to their interpretability. Most existing methods for explaining GNNs typically rely on training auxiliary models, resulting in the explanations remain black-boxed. This paper introduces Graph Output Attribution (GOAt), a novel method to attribute graph outputs to input graph features, creating GNN explanations that are faithful, discriminative, as well as stable across similar samples. By expanding the GNN as a sum of scalar products involving node features, edge features and activation patterns, we propose an efficient analytical method to compute contribution of each node or edge feature to each scalar product and aggregate the contributions from all scalar products in the expansion form to derive the importance of each node and edge. Through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data, we show that our method not only outperforms various state-ofthe-art GNN explainers in terms of the commonly used fidelity metric, but also exhibits stronger discriminability, and stability by a remarkable margin.

Ternary Singular Value Decomposition as a Better Parameterized Form in Linear Mapping

We present a simple yet novel parameterized form of linear mapping to achieves remarkable network compression performance: a pseudo SVD called Ternary SVD (TSVD). Unlike vanilla SVD, TSVD limits the $U$ and $V$ matrices in SVD to ternary matrices form in $\{\pm 1, 0\}$. This means that instead of using the expensive multiplication instructions, TSVD only requires addition instructions when computing $U(\cdot)$ and $V(\cdot)$. We provide direct and training transition algorithms for TSVD like Post Training Quantization and Quantization Aware Training respectively. Additionally, we analyze the convergence of the direct transition algorithms in theory. In experiments, we demonstrate that TSVD can achieve state-of-the-art network compression performance in various types of networks and tasks, including current baseline models such as ConvNext, Swim, BERT, and large language model like OPT.