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Michael A. Powell

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Polarity is all you need to learn and transfer faster

Mar 29, 2023
Qingyang Wang, Michael A. Powell, Ali Geisa, Eric Bridgeford, Joshua T. Vogelstein

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Natural intelligences (NIs) thrive in a dynamic world - they learn quickly, sometimes with only a few samples. In contrast, Artificial intelligences (AIs) typically learn with prohibitive amount of training samples and computational power. What design principle difference between NI and AI could contribute to such a discrepancy? Here, we propose an angle from weight polarity: development processes initialize NIs with advantageous polarity configurations; as NIs grow and learn, synapse magnitudes update yet polarities are largely kept unchanged. We demonstrate with simulation and image classification tasks that if weight polarities are adequately set $\textit{a priori}$, then networks learn with less time and data. We also explicitly illustrate situations in which $\textit{a priori}$ setting the weight polarities is disadvantageous for networks. Our work illustrates the value of weight polarities from the perspective of statistical and computational efficiency during learning.

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Why Do Networks Need Negative Weights?

Aug 05, 2022
Qingyang Wang, Michael A. Powell, Ali Geisa, Eric Bridgeford, Joshua T. Vogelstein

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Why do networks have negative weights at all? The answer is: to learn more functions. We mathematically prove that deep neural networks with all non-negative weights are not universal approximators. This fundamental result is assumed by much of the deep learning literature without previously proving the result and demonstrating its necessity.

* Submitted 
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