[Colloquium] 3/9 Young Researcher Seminar Series: Roy Frostig, Stanford

[Mary Marre]

When:     Wednesday, March 9th at 11am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

Who:       Roy Frostig, Stanford

Title:       Initialization and Dual Expressivity of Neural Networks

Abstract:
Neural network learning is seeing wide empirical success as an applied
machine learning tool, yet we have only a nascent theoretical understanding
of its recent advances, and of the design choices made in achieving them.
In turn, the tools in use are often without guarantees and without useful
formalisms to guide their development.

In this talk, I will present recent work that establishes a duality between
neural networks and a certain notion of compositional kernels. The
connection clarifies the effective modeling capacity of networks due to
their architecture. We show that the data representation induced by
networks under a common random initialization scheme is rich enough to
express all functions in their dual kernel space. Indeed, in this space,
easily learnable functions (i.e. those of low norm) are expressive
according to a succinct graph structure underlying the network
architecture. An immediate upshot is that, although the network training
objective is hard to optimize in the worst case, the initial weights form a
good starting point from a modeling perspective (i.e. in inducing features).

The talk is based on a paper (arXiv:1602.05897) from work joint with Amit
Daniely and Yoram Singer.


Host: Nathan Srebro, nati at ttic.edu


*************************



The TTIC Young Researcher Seminar Series (
http://www.ttic.edu/young-researcher.php) features talks by Ph.D. students
and postdocs whose research is of broad interest to the computer science
community. The series provides an opportunity for early-career researchers
to present recent work to and meet with students and faculty at TTIC and
nearby universities.


The seminars are typically held on Wednesdays at 11:00am in TTIC Room 526.

For additional information, please contact Matthew Walter (mwalter at ttic.edu
).



Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 504*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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