The structure of the token space for large language models

Large language models encode the correlational structure present in natural language by fitting segments of utterances (tokens) into a high dimensional ambient latent space upon which the models then operate. We assert that in order to develop a foundational, first-principles understanding of the behavior and limitations of large language models, it is crucial to understand the topological and geometric structure of this token subspace. In this article, we present estimators for the dimension and Ricci scalar curvature of the token subspace, and apply it to three open source large language models of moderate size: GPT2, LLEMMA7B, and MISTRAL7B. In all three models, using these measurements, we find that the token subspace is not a manifold, but is instead a stratified manifold, where on each of the individual strata, the Ricci curvature is significantly negative. We additionally find that the dimension and curvature correlate with generative fluency of the models, which suggest that these findings have implications for model behavior.

DLKoopman: A deep learning software package for Koopman theory

We present DLKoopman -- a software package for Koopman theory that uses deep learning to learn an encoding of a nonlinear dynamical system into a linear space, while simultaneously learning the linear dynamics. While several previous efforts have either restricted the ability to learn encodings, or been bespoke efforts designed for specific systems, DLKoopman is a generalized tool that can be applied to data-driven learning and optimization of any dynamical system. It can either be trained on data from individual states (snapshots) of a system and used to predict its unknown states, or trained on data from trajectories of a system and used to predict unknown trajectories for new initial states. DLKoopman is available on the Python Package Index (PyPI) as 'dlkoopman', and includes extensive documentation and tutorials. Additional contributions of the package include a novel metric called Average Normalized Absolute Error for evaluating performance, and a ready-to-use hyperparameter search module for improving performance.

LAGOON: An Analysis Tool for Open Source Communities

This paper presents LAGOON -- an open source platform for understanding the complex ecosystems of Open Source Software (OSS) communities. The platform currently utilizes spatiotemporal graphs to store and investigate the artifacts produced by these communities, and help analysts identify bad actors who might compromise an OSS project's security. LAGOON provides ingest of artifacts from several common sources, including source code repositories, issue trackers, mailing lists and scraping content from project websites. Ingestion utilizes a modular architecture, which supports incremental updates from data sources and provides a generic identity fusion process that can recognize the same community members across disparate accounts. A user interface is provided for visualization and exploration of an OSS project's complete sociotechnical graph. Scripts are provided for applying machine learning to identify patterns within the data. While current focus is on the identification of bad actors in the Python community, the platform's reusability makes it easily extensible with new data and analyses, paving the way for LAGOON to become a comprehensive means of assessing various OSS-based projects and their communities.

Deep-n-Cheap: An Automated Search Framework for Low Complexity Deep Learning

We present Deep-n-Cheap -- an open-source AutoML framework to search for deep learning models. This search includes both architecture and training hyperparameters, and supports convolutional neural networks and multi-layer perceptrons. Our framework is targeted for deployment on both benchmark and custom datasets, and as a result, offers a greater degree of search space customizability as compared to a more limited search over only pre-existing models from literature. We also introduce the technique of 'search transfer', which demonstrates the generalization capabilities of the models found by our framework to multiple datasets. Deep-n-Cheap includes a user-customizable complexity penalty which trades off performance with training time or number of parameters. Specifically, our framework results in models offering performance comparable to state-of-the-art while taking 1-2 orders of magnitude less time to train than models from other AutoML and model search frameworks. Additionally, this work investigates and develops various insights regarding the search process. In particular, we show the superiority of a greedy strategy and justify our choice of Bayesian optimization as the primary search methodology over random / grid search.

Pre-Defined Sparse Neural Networks with Hardware Acceleration

Neural networks have proven to be extremely powerful tools for modern artificial intelligence applications, but computational and storage complexity remain limiting factors. This paper presents two compatible contributions towards reducing the time, energy, computational, and storage complexities associated with multilayer perceptrons. Pre-defined sparsity is proposed to reduce the complexity during both training and inference, regardless of the implementation platform. Our results show that storage and computational complexity can be reduced by factors greater than 5X without significant performance loss. The second contribution is an architecture for hardware acceleration that is compatible with pre-defined sparsity. This architecture supports both training and inference modes and is flexible in the sense that it is not tied to a specific number of neurons. For example, this flexibility implies that various sized neural networks can be supported on various sized Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)s.

A Highly Parallel FPGA Implementation of Sparse Neural Network Training

We demonstrate an FPGA implementation of a parallel and reconfigurable architecture for sparse neural networks, capable of on-chip training and inference. The network connectivity uses pre-determined, structured sparsity to significantly reduce complexity by lowering memory and computational requirements. The architecture uses a notion of edge-processing, leading to efficient pipelining and parallelization. Moreover, the device can be reconfigured to trade off resource utilization with training time to fit networks and datasets of varying sizes. The combined effects of complexity reduction and easy reconfigurability enable significantly greater exploration of network hyperparameters and structures on-chip. As proof of concept, we show implementation results on an Artix-7 FPGA.

Morse Code Datasets for Machine Learning

We present an algorithm to generate synthetic datasets of tunable difficulty on classification of Morse code symbols for supervised machine learning problems, in particular, neural networks. The datasets are spatially one-dimensional and have a small number of input features, leading to high density of input information content. This makes them particularly challenging when implementing network complexity reduction methods. We explore how network performance is affected by deliberately adding various forms of noise and expanding the feature set and dataset size. Finally, we establish several metrics to indicate the difficulty of a dataset, and evaluate their merits. The algorithm and datasets are open-source.

Interleaver Design for Deep Neural Networks

We propose a class of interleavers for a novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture that uses algorithmically pre-determined, structured sparsity to significantly lower memory and computational requirements, and speed up training. The interleavers guarantee clash-free memory accesses to eliminate idle operational cycles, optimize spread and dispersion to improve network performance, and are designed to ease the complexity of memory address computations in hardware. We present a design algorithm with mathematical proofs for these properties. We also explore interleaver variations and analyze the behavior of neural networks as a function of interleaver metrics.

Characterizing Sparse Connectivity Patterns in Neural Networks

We propose a novel way of reducing the number of parameters in the storage-hungry fully connected layers of a neural network by using pre-defined sparsity, where the majority of connections are absent prior to starting training. Our results indicate that convolutional neural networks can operate without any loss of accuracy at less than half percent classification layer connection density, or less than 5 percent overall network connection density. We also investigate the effects of pre-defining the sparsity of networks with only fully connected layers. Based on our sparsifying technique, we introduce the `scatter' metric to characterize the quality of a particular connection pattern. As proof of concept, we show results on CIFAR, MNIST and a new dataset on classifying Morse code symbols, which highlights some interesting trends and limits of sparse connection patterns.

Pricing Football Players using Neural Networks

We designed a multilayer perceptron neural network to predict the price of a football (soccer) player using data on more than 15,000 players from the football simulation video game FIFA 2017. The network was optimized by experimenting with different activation functions, number of neurons and layers, learning rate and its decay, Nesterov momentum based stochastic gradient descent, L2 regularization, and early stopping. Simultaneous exploration of various aspects of neural network training is performed and their trade-offs are investigated. Our final model achieves a top-5 accuracy of 87.2% among 119 pricing categories, and places any footballer within 6.32% of his actual price on average.