Max and Coincidence Neurons in Neural Networks

Network design has been a central topic in machine learning. Large amounts of effort have been devoted towards creating efficient architectures through manual exploration as well as automated neural architecture search. However, todays architectures have yet to consider the diversity of neurons and the existence of neurons with specific processing functions. In this work, we optimize networks containing models of the max and coincidence neurons using neural architecture search, and analyze the structure, operations, and neurons of optimized networks to develop a signal-processing ResNet. The developed network achieves an average of 2% improvement in accuracy and a 25% improvement in network size across a variety of datasets, demonstrating the importance of neuronal functions in creating compact, efficient networks.

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks with Unitary Weights

While normalizations aim to fix the exploding and vanishing gradient problem in deep neural networks, they have drawbacks in speed or accuracy because of their dependency on the data set statistics. This work is a comprehensive study of a novel method based on unitary synaptic weights derived from Lie Group to construct intrinsically stable neural systems. Here we show that unitary convolutional neural networks deliver up to 32% faster inference speeds while maintaining competitive prediction accuracy. Unlike prior arts restricted to square synaptic weights, we expand the unitary networks to weights of any size and dimension.