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Related papers: Learning Neural Networks with Sparse Activations

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Sparseness is a useful regularizer for learning in a wide range of applications, in particular in neural networks. This paper proposes a model targeted at classification tasks, where sparse activity and sparse connectivity are used to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-19 Markus Thom , Günther Palm

The demand for efficient processing of deep neural networks (DNNs) on embedded devices is a significant challenge limiting their deployment. Exploiting sparsity in the network's feature maps is one of the ways to reduce its inference…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Matteo Grimaldi , Darshan C. Ganji , Ivan Lazarevich , Sudhakar Sah

At typical context lengths, the feed-forward MLP block accounts for a large share of a transformer's compute budget, motivating sparse alternatives to dense MLP blocks. We study sparse, tree-structured feed-forward layers as drop-in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Reza Sedghi , Robin Schiewer , Anand Subramoney , David Kappel

Sparse activation, which selectively activates only an input-dependent set of neurons in inference, is a useful technique to reduce the computing cost of Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining or adaptation efforts. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Jifeng Song , Kai Huang , Xiangyu Yin , Boyuan Yang , Wei Gao

Coded recurrent neural networks with three levels of sparsity are introduced. The first level is related to the size of messages, much smaller than the number of available neurons. The second one is provided by a particular coding rule,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-02-22 Vincent Gripon , Claude Berrou

Through the success of deep learning in various domains, artificial neural networks are currently among the most used artificial intelligence methods. Taking inspiration from the network properties of biological neural networks (e.g.…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-06-21 Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Elena Mocanu , Peter Stone , Phuong H. Nguyen , Madeleine Gibescu , Antonio Liotta

Dedicated neural network (NN) architectures have been designed to handle specific data types (such as CNN for images or RNN for text), which ranks them among state-of-the-art methods for dealing with these data. Unfortunately, no…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-03 Patrick Lutz , Ludovic Arnould , Claire Boyer , Erwan Scornet

Deep neural networks have emerged as powerful tools for learning operators defined over infinite-dimensional function spaces. However, existing theories frequently encounter difficulties related to dimensionality and limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jianfei Li , Shuo Huang , Han Feng , Ding-Xuan Zhou , Gitta Kutyniok

Traditional multi-task learning (MTL) methods use dense networks that use the same set of shared weights across several different tasks. This often creates interference where two or more tasks compete to pull model parameters in different…

Continual learning is a problem for artificial neural networks that their biological counterparts are adept at solving. Building on work using Sparse Distributed Memory (SDM) to connect a core neural circuit with the powerful Transformer…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Trenton Bricken , Xander Davies , Deepak Singh , Dmitry Krotov , Gabriel Kreiman

Improvements in the performance of deep neural networks have often come through the design of larger and more complex networks. As a result, fast memory is a significant limiting factor in our ability to improve network performance. One…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-25 Simon Alford , Ryan Robinett , Lauren Milechin , Jeremy Kepner

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 prove the first guarantees of sparse recovery for ReLU neural networks, where the sparse network weights constitute the signal to be recovered. Specifically, we study structural properties of the sparse network weights for two-layer,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Sara Fridovich-Keil , Mert Pilanci

Although sparse neural networks have been studied extensively, the focus has been primarily on accuracy. In this work, we focus instead on network structure, and analyze three popular algorithms. We first measure performance when structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Maxwell Van Gelder , Mitchell Wortsman , Kiana Ehsani

We investigate the robustness of sparse artificial neural networks trained with adaptive topology. We focus on a simple yet effective architecture consisting of three sparse layers with 99% sparsity followed by a dense layer, applied to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Bendegúz Sulyok , Gergely Palla , Filippo Radicchi , Santo Fortunato

The learned weights of a neural network are often considered devoid of scrutable internal structure. To discern structure in these weights, we introduce a measurable notion of modularity for multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), and investigate…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-02-09 Daniel Filan , Shlomi Hod , Cody Wild , Andrew Critch , Stuart Russell

Deep artificial neural networks achieve surprising generalization abilities that remain poorly understood. In this paper, we present a new approach to analyzing generalization for deep feed-forward ReLU networks that takes advantage of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Ramchandran Muthukumar , Jeremias Sulam

In class incremental learning, neural networks typically suffer from catastrophic forgetting. We show that an MLP featuring a sparse activation function and an adaptive learning rate optimizer can compete with established regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Santtu Keskinen

A fundamental task for artificial intelligence is learning. Deep Neural Networks have proven to cope perfectly with all learning paradigms, i.e. supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. Nevertheless, traditional deep learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Elena Mocanu , Tiago Pinto , Selima Curci , Phuong H. Nguyen , Madeleine Gibescu , Damien Ernst , Zita A. Vale

Sparsity has become popular in machine learning, because it can save computational resources, facilitate interpretations, and prevent overfitting. In this paper, we discuss sparsity in the framework of neural networks. In particular, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Mohamed Hebiri , Johannes Lederer