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Pierre-Antoine Manzagol

Alumni

Publications

Information matrices and generalization
Valentin Thomas
Fabian Pedregosa
Nicolas Roux
This work revisits the use of information criteria to characterize the generalization of deep learning models. In particular, we empirically… (see more) demonstrate the effectiveness of the Takeuchi information criterion (TIC), an extension of the Akaike information criterion (AIC) for misspecified models, in estimating the generalization gap, shedding light on why quantities such as the number of parameters cannot quantify generalization. The TIC depends on both the Hessian of the loss H and the covariance of the gradients C. By exploring the similarities and differences between these two matrices as well as the Fisher information matrix F, we study the interplay between noise and curvature in deep models. We also address the question of whether C is a reasonable approximation to F, as is commonly assumed.
Reducing the variance in online optimization by transporting past gradients
Most stochastic optimization methods use gradients once before discarding them. While variance reduction methods have shown that reusing pas… (see more)t gradients can be beneficial when there is a finite number of datapoints, they do not easily extend to the online setting. One issue is the staleness due to using past gradients. We propose to correct this staleness using the idea of implicit gradient transport (IGT) which transforms gradients computed at previous iterates into gradients evaluated at the current iterate without using the Hessian explicitly. In addition to reducing the variance and bias of our updates over time, IGT can be used as a drop-in replacement for the gradient estimate in a number of well-understood methods such as heavy ball or Adam. We show experimentally that it achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of architectures and benchmarks. Additionally, the IGT gradient estimator yields the optimal asymptotic convergence rate for online stochastic optimization in the restricted setting where the Hessians of all component functions are equal.
Online variance-reducing optimization
Negative eigenvalues of the Hessian in deep neural networks
The loss function of deep networks is known to be non-convex but the precise nature of this nonconvexity is still an active area of research… (see more). In this work, we study the loss landscape of deep networks through the eigendecompositions of their Hessian matrix. In particular, we examine how important the negative eigenvalues are and the benefits one can observe in handling them appropriately.
Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions
Rami Al-Rfou
Amjad Almahairi
Christof Angermueller
Frédéric Bastien
Justin Bayer
Anatoly Belikov
Alexander Belopolsky
Josh Bleecher Snyder
Pierre-Luc Carrier
Paul Christiano
Myriam Côté
Yann N. Dauphin
Julien Demouth
Sander Dieleman
Ziye Fan
Mathieu Germain
Matt Graham
Balázs Hidasi
Arjun Jain
Kai Jia
Mikhail Korobov
Vivek Kulkarni
Pascal Lamblin
Eric Larsen
Sean Lee
Simon Lefrancois
Jesse A. Livezey
Cory Lorenz
Jeremiah Lowin
Qianli Ma
Robert T. McGibbon
Mehdi Mirza
Alberto Orlandi
Christopher Pal
Colin Raffel
Daniel Renshaw
Matthew Rocklin
Adriana Romero
Markus Roth
Peter Sadowski
John Salvatier
Jan Schlüter
John Schulman
Gabriel Schwartz
Iulian Vlad Serban
Samira Shabanian
Sigurd Spieckermann
S. Ramana Subramanyam
Gijs van Tulder
Sebastian Urban
Dustin J. Webb
Matthew Willson
Lijun Xue
Theano is a Python library that allows to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficie… (see more)ntly. Since its introduction, it has been one of the most used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers - especially in the machine learning community - and has shown steady performance improvements. Theano is being actively and continuously developed since 2008, multiple frameworks have been built on top of it and it has been used to produce many state-of-the-art machine learning models. The present article is structured as follows. Section I provides an overview of the Theano software and its community. Section II presents the principal features of Theano and how to use them, and compares them with other similar projects. Section III focuses on recently-introduced functionalities and improvements. Section IV compares the performance of Theano against Torch7 and TensorFlow on several machine learning models. Section V discusses current limitations of Theano and potential ways of improving it.