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While end-to-end training of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) yields state of the art performance in an increasing array of applications, it does not provide insight into, or control over, the features being extracted. We report here on a…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-07-11 Metehan Cekic , Can Bakiskan , Upamanyu Madhow

Random pruning is arguably the most naive way to attain sparsity in neural networks, but has been deemed uncompetitive by either post-training pruning or sparse training. In this paper, we focus on sparse training and highlight a perhaps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Shiwei Liu , Tianlong Chen , Xiaohan Chen , Li Shen , Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Zhangyang Wang , Mykola Pechenizkiy

The analysis of neural network training beyond their linearization regime remains an outstanding open question, even in the simplest setup of a single hidden-layer. The limit of infinitely wide networks provides an appealing route forward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Jaume de Dios , Joan Bruna

Sparse computation offers a compelling solution for the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) in low-resource scenarios by dynamically skipping the computation of inactive neurons. While traditional approaches focus on ReLU-based LLMs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Zhengyan Zhang , Yixin Song , Guanghui Yu , Xu Han , Yankai Lin , Chaojun Xiao , Chenyang Song , Zhiyuan Liu , Zeyu Mi , Maosong Sun

We study training one-hidden-layer ReLU networks in the neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime, where the networks' biases are initialized to some constant rather than zero. We prove that under such initialization, the neural network will have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Hongru Yang , Ziyu Jiang , Ruizhe Zhang , Yingbin Liang , Zhangyang Wang

Leveraging sparsity is crucial for optimizing large language model inference. however, modern LLMs employing SiLU as their activation function exhibit minimal activation sparsity. Recent research has proposed replacing SiLU with ReLU to…

Performance · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Jiho Shin , Hoeseok Yang , Youngmin Yi

The weight initialization and the activation function of deep neural networks have a crucial impact on the performance of the training procedure. An inappropriate selection can lead to the loss of information of the input during forward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-09 Soufiane Hayou , Arnaud Doucet , Judith Rousseau

Mean field theory has been successfully used to analyze deep neural networks (DNN) in the infinite size limit. Given the finite size of realistic DNN, we utilize the large deviation theory and path integral analysis to study the deviation…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2020-02-21 Bo Li , David Saad

The observation that activation sparsity emerges in MLP blocks of standardly trained Transformers offers an opportunity to drastically reduce computation costs without sacrificing performance. To theoretically explain this phenomenon,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ze Peng , Jian Zhang , Lei Qi , Yang Gao , Yinghuan Shi

Activation sparsity improves compute efficiency and resource utilization in sparsity-aware neural network accelerators. As the predominant operation in DNNs is multiply-accumulate (MAC) of activations with weights to compute inner products,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Amirreza Yousefzadeh , Manolis Sifalakis

Overfitting is one of the most common problems when training deep neural networks on comparatively small datasets. Here, we demonstrate that neural network activation sparsity is a reliable indicator for overfitting which we utilize to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-24 Karim Huesmann , Soeren Klemm , Lars Linsen , Benjamin Risse

Activation functions critically influence trainability and expressivity, and recent work has therefore explored a broad range of nonlinearities. However, widely used Gaussian i.i.d. initializations are designed to preserve activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Hyunwoo Lee , Hayoung Choi , Hyunju Kim

Activation sparsity is an intriguing property of deep neural networks that has been extensively studied in ReLU-based models, due to its advantages for efficiency, robustness, and interpretability. However, methods relying on exact zero…

A traditional approach to initialization in deep neural networks (DNNs) is to sample the network weights randomly for preserving the variance of pre-activations. On the other hand, several studies show that during the training process, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Yuanhan Hu

We introduce stochastic activations. This novel strategy randomly selects between several non-linear functions in the feed-forward layer of a large language model. In particular, we choose between SILU or RELU depending on a Bernoulli draw.…

Artificial neural networks open up unprecedented machine learning capabilities at the cost of ever growing computational requirements. Sparsifying the parameters, often achieved through weight pruning, has been identified as a powerful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Rishav Mukherji , Mark Schöne , Khaleelulla Khan Nazeer , Christian Mayr , Anand Subramoney

Recently, sparse training methods have started to be established as a de facto approach for training and inference efficiency in artificial neural networks. Yet, this efficiency is just in theory. In practice, everyone uses a binary mask to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-13 Selima Curci , Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Mykola Pechenizkiyi

We investigate filter level sparsity that emerges in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which employ Batch Normalization and ReLU activation, and are trained with adaptive gradient descent techniques and L2 regularization or weight decay.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-08 Dushyant Mehta , Kwang In Kim , Christian Theobalt

Sparsification of neural networks is one of the effective complexity reduction methods to improve efficiency and generalizability. We consider the problem of learning a one hidden layer convolutional neural network with ReLU activation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-26 Thu Dinh , Jack Xin

It is well-known that randomly initialized, push-forward, fully-connected neural networks weakly converge to isotropic Gaussian processes, in the limit where the width of all layers goes to infinity. In this paper, we propose to use the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Simmaco Di Lillo , Domenico Marinucci , Michele Salvi , Stefano Vigogna