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Jacek Tabor

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23 papers
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23

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

EPIC: Explanation of Pretrained Image Classification Networks via Prototypes

  • Piotr Borycki
  • Magdalena Trędowicz
  • Szymon Janusz
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Przemysław Spurek
  • Arkadiusz Lewicki
  • Łukasz Struski

Explainable AI (XAI) methods generally fall into two categories. Post-hoc approaches generate explanations for pre-trained models and are compatible with various neural network architectures. These methods often use feature importance visualizations, such as saliency maps, to indicate which input regions influenced the model’s prediction. Unfortunately, they typically offer a coarse understanding of the model’s decision-making process. In contrast, ante-hoc (inherently explainable) methods rely on specially designed model architectures trained from scratch. A notable subclass of these methods provides explanations through prototypes, representative patches extracted from the training data. However, prototype-based approaches require dedicated architectures, involve specialized training procedures, and perform well only on specific datasets. In this work, we propose EPIC (Explanation of Pretrained Image Classification), a novel approach that bridges the gap between these two paradigms. Like post-hoc methods, EPIC operates on pre-trained models without architectural modifications. Simultaneously, it delivers intuitive, prototype-based explanations inspired by ante-hoc techniques. To the best of our knowledge, EPIC is the first post-hoc method capable of fully replicating the core explanatory power of inherently interpretable models. We evaluate EPIC on benchmark datasets commonly used in prototype-based explanations, such as CUB-200-2011 and Stanford Cars, alongside large-scale datasets like ImageNet, typically employed by post-hoc methods. EPIC uses prototypes to explain model decisions, providing a flexible and easy-to-understand tool for creating clear, high-quality explanations.

ECAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Classifier-Free Guidance with Adaptive Scaling

  • Dawid Malarz
  • Artur Kasymov
  • Maciej Zieba
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Przemyslaw Spurek

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is an essential mechanism in contemporary text-driven diffusion models. In practice, in controlling the impact of guidance we can see the trade-off between the quality of the generated images and correspondence to the prompt. When we use strong guidance, generated images fit the conditioned text perfectly but at the cost of their quality. Dually, we can use small guidance to generate high-quality results, but the generated images do not suit our prompt. In this paper, we present β-CFG (β-adaptive scaling in Classifier-Free Guidance), which controls the impact of guidance during generation to solve the above trade-off. First, β-CFG stabilizes the effects of guiding by gradient-based adaptive normalization. Second, β-CFG uses the family of single-modal (β-distribution), time-dependent curves to dynamically adapt the trade-off between prompt matching and the quality of samples during the diffusion denoising process. Our model obtained better FID scores, maintaining the text-to-image CLIP similarity scores at a level similar to that of the reference CFG.

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

FreSh: Frequency Shifting for Accelerated Neural Representation Learning

  • Adam Kania
  • Marko Mihajlovic
  • Sergey Prokudin
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Przemyslaw Spurek

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently gained attention as a powerful approach for continuously representing signals such as images, videos, and 3D shapes using multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). However, MLPs are known to exhibit a low-frequency bias, limiting their ability to capture high-frequency details accurately. This limitation is typically addressed by incorporating high-frequency input embeddings or specialized activation layers. In this work, we demonstrate that these embeddings and activations are often configured with hyperparameters that perform well on average but are suboptimal for specific input signals under consideration, necessitating a costly grid search to identify optimal settings. Our key observation is that the initial frequency spectrum of an untrained model's output correlates strongly with the model's eventual performance on a given target signal. Leveraging this insight, we propose frequency shifting (or FreSh), a method that selects embedding hyperparameters to align the frequency spectrum of the model’s initial output with that of the target signal. We show that this simple initialization technique improves performance across various neural representation methods and tasks, achieving results comparable to extensive hyperparameter sweeps but with only marginal computational overhead compared to training a single model with default hyperparameters.

AAAI Conference 2025 Short Paper

Hypernetwork Approach to Bayesian MAML (Student Abstract)

  • Piotr Borycki
  • Piotr Kubacki
  • Marcin Przewięźlikowski
  • Tomasz Kuśmierczyk
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Przemysław Spurek

The main goal of Few-Shot learning algorithms is to enable learning from small amounts of data. One of the most popular and elegant Few-Shot learning approaches is Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML). In this paper, we propose a novel framework for Bayesian MAML called BH-MAML, which employs Hypernetworks for weight updates. It learns the universal weights point-wise, but a probabilistic structure is added when adapted for specific tasks. In such a framework, we can use simple Gaussian distributions or more complicated posteriors induced by Continuous Normalizing Flows.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

LapSum - One Method to Differentiate Them All: Ranking, Sorting and Top-k Selection

  • Lukasz Struski
  • Michal B. Bednarczyk
  • Igor T. Podolak
  • Jacek Tabor

We present a novel technique for constructing differentiable order-type operations, including soft ranking, soft top-k selection, and soft permutations. Our approach leverages an efficient closed-form formula for the inverse of the function LapSum, defined as the sum of Laplace distributions. This formulation ensures low computational and memory complexity in selecting the highest activations, enabling losses and gradients to be computed in $O(n \log n)$ time. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques for high-dimensional vectors and large $k$ values. Furthermore, we provide efficient implementations for both CPU and CUDA environments, underscoring the practicality and scalability of our method for large-scale ranking and differentiable ordering problems.

ECAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

LoRA-XS: Low-Rank Adaptation with Extremely Small Number of Parameters

  • Klaudia Balazy
  • Mohammadreza Banaei
  • Karl Aberer
  • Jacek Tabor

The growth of large language models underscores the need for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Despite its popularity, LoRA encounters storage and computational challenges when deploying multiple task- or user-specific modules. To address this, we introduce LoRA-XS, a novel fine-tuning method backed by a theoretical derivation. LoRA-XS drastically reduces trainable parameters by incorporating a small, trainable weight matrix between frozen low-rank matrices derived from the Singular Value Decomposition of pre-trained weights. This design enables LoRA-XS to reduce storage requirements by over 100x in 7B models compared to LoRA. Additionally, unlike other methods, LoRA-XS imposes no lower bound on trainable parameters – it can scale from a single parameter per module to arbitrarily large values, adapting to any storage or computational constraint. Evaluations on GLUE, GSM8K, MATH, and commonsense reasoning benchmarks across different model scales reveal that LoRA-XS consistently outperforms or matches LoRA and VeRA in accuracy, offering unmatched parameter efficiency. Our ablation studies highlight the significance of singular vectors in transformer weights, establishing LoRA-XS as a powerful, storage-efficient solution for scaling and personalizing large language models.

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

LucidPPN: Unambiguous Prototypical Parts Network for User-centric Interpretable Computer Vision

  • Mateusz Pach
  • Koryna Lewandowska
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Bartosz Michal Zielinski
  • Dawid Damian Rymarczyk

Prototypical parts networks combine the power of deep learning with the explainability of case-based reasoning to make accurate, interpretable decisions. They follow the this looks like that reasoning, representing each prototypical part with patches from training images. However, a single image patch comprises multiple visual features, such as color, shape, and texture, making it difficult for users to identify which feature is important to the model. To reduce this ambiguity, we introduce the Lucid Prototypical Parts Network (LucidPPN), a novel prototypical parts network that separates color prototypes from other visual features. Our method employs two reasoning branches: one for non-color visual features, processing grayscale images, and another focusing solely on color information. This separation allows us to clarify whether the model's decisions are based on color, shape, or texture. Additionally, LucidPPN identifies prototypical parts corresponding to semantic parts of classified objects, making comparisons between data classes more intuitive, e.g., when two bird species might differ primarily in belly color. Our experiments demonstrate that the two branches are complementary and together achieve results comparable to baseline methods. More importantly, LucidPPN generates less ambiguous prototypical parts, enhancing user understanding.

ECAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

PrAViC: Probabilistic Adaptation Framework for Real-Time Video Classification

  • Magdalena Tredowicz
  • Marcin Mazur
  • Szymon Janusz
  • Arkadiusz Lewicki
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Lukasz Struski

Video processing is generally divided into two main categories: processing of the entire video, which typically yields optimal classification outcomes, and real-time processing, where the objective is to make a decision as promptly as possible. Although the models dedicated to the processing of entire videos are typically well-defined and clearly presented in the literature, this is not the case for online processing, where a plethora of hand-devised methods exist. To address this issue, we present PrAViC, a novel, unified, and theoretically-based adaptation framework for tackling the online classification problem in video data. The initial phase of our study is to establish a mathematical background for the classification of sequential data, with the potential to make a decision at an early stage. This allows us to construct a natural function that encourages the model to return a result much faster. The subsequent phase is to present a straightforward and readily implementable method for adapting offline models to the online setting using recurrent operations. Finally, PrAViC is evaluated by comparing it with existing state-of-the-art offline and online models and datasets. This enables the network to significantly reduce the time required to reach classification decisions while maintaining, or even enhancing, accuracy.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

SEMU: Singular Value Decomposition for Efficient Machine Unlearning

  • Marcin Sendera
  • Lukasz Struski
  • Kamil Ksiazek
  • Kryspin Musiol
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Dawid Damian Rymarczyk

While the capabilities of generative foundational models have advanced rapidly in recent years, methods to prevent harmful and unsafe behaviors remain underdeveloped. Among the pressing challenges in AI safety, machine unlearning (MU) has become increasingly critical to meet upcoming safety regulations. Most existing MU approaches focus on altering the most significant parameters of the model. However, these methods often require fine-tuning substantial portions of the model, resulting in high computational costs and training instabilities, which are typically mitigated by access to the original training dataset. In this work, we address these limitations by leveraging Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to create a compact, low-dimensional projection that enables the selective forgetting of specific data points. We propose Singular Value Decomposition for Efficient Machine Unlearning (SEMU), a novel approach designed to optimize MU in two key aspects. First, SEMU minimizes the number of model parameters that need to be modified, effectively removing unwanted knowledge while making only minimal changes to the model’s weights. Second, SEMU eliminates the dependency on the original training dataset, preserving the model’s previously acquired knowledge without additional data requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEMU achieves competitive performance while significantly improving efficiency in terms of both data usage and the number of modified parameters.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

ZEUS: Zero-shot Embeddings for Unsupervised Separation of Tabular Data

  • Patryk Marszałek
  • Tomasz Kuśmierczyk
  • Witold Wydmański
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Marek Śmieja

Clustering tabular data remains a significant open challenge in data analysis and machine learning. Unlike for image data, similarity between tabular records often varies across datasets, making the definition of clusters highly dataset-dependent. Furthermore, the absence of supervised signals complicates hyperparameter tuning in deep learning clustering methods, frequently resulting in unstable performance. To address these issues and minimize the need for per-dataset tuning, we adopt an emerging approach in deep learning: zero-shot learning. We propose ZEUS, a self-contained model capable of clustering new datasets without any additional training or fine-tuning. It operates by decomposing complex datasets into meaningful components that can then be clustered effectively. Thanks to pre-training on synthetic datasets generated from a latent-variable prior, it generalizes across various datasets without requiring user intervention. To the best of our knowledge, ZEUS is the first zero-shot method capable of generating embeddings for tabular data in a fully unsupervised manner. Experimental results demonstrate that it performs on par with or better than traditional clustering algorithms and recent deep learning-based methods, while being significantly faster and more user-friendly.

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Interpretability Benchmark for Evaluating Spatial Misalignment of Prototypical Parts Explanations

  • Mikołaj Sacha
  • Bartosz Jura
  • Dawid Rymarczyk
  • Łukasz Struski
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Bartosz Zieliński

Prototypical parts-based networks are becoming increasingly popular due to their faithful self-explanations. However, their similarity maps are calculated in the penultimate network layer. Therefore, the receptive field of the prototype activation region often depends on parts of the image outside this region, which can lead to misleading interpretations. We name this undesired behavior a spatial explanation misalignment and introduce an interpretability benchmark with a set of dedicated metrics for quantifying this phenomenon. In addition, we propose a method for misalignment compensation and apply it to existing state-of-the-art models. We show the expressiveness of our benchmark and the effectiveness of the proposed compensation methodology through extensive empirical studies.

ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Sparser, Better, Deeper, Stronger: Improving Static Sparse Training with Exact Orthogonal Initialization

  • Aleksandra Nowak 0001
  • Lukasz Gniecki
  • Filip Szatkowski
  • Jacek Tabor

Static sparse training aims to train sparse models from scratch, achieving remarkable results in recent years. A key design choice is given by the sparse initialization, which determines the trainable sub-network through a binary mask. Existing methods mainly select such mask based on a predefined dense initialization. Such an approach may not efficiently leverage the mask’s potential impact on the optimization. An alternative direction, inspired by research into dynamical isometry, is to introduce orthogonality in the sparse subnetwork, which helps in stabilizing the gradient signal. In this work, we propose Exact Orthogonal Initialization (EOI), a novel sparse orthogonal initialization scheme based on composing random Givens rotations. Contrary to other existing approaches, our method provides exact (not approximated) orthogonality and enables the creation of layers with arbitrary densities. We demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of EOI through experiments, consistently outperforming common sparse initialization techniques. Our method enables training highly sparse 1000-layer MLP and CNN networks without residual connections or normalization techniques, emphasizing the crucial role of weight initialization in static sparse training alongside sparse mask selection.

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Fantastic Weights and How to Find Them: Where to Prune in Dynamic Sparse Training

  • Aleksandra Nowak
  • Bram Grooten
  • Decebal Constantin Mocanu
  • Jacek Tabor

Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) is a rapidly evolving area of research that seeks to optimize the sparse initialization of a neural network by adapting its topology during training. It has been shown that under specific conditions, DST is able to outperform dense models. The key components of this framework are the pruning and growing criteria, which are repeatedly applied during the training process to adjust the network’s sparse connectivity. While the growing criterion's impact on DST performance is relatively well studied, the influence of the pruning criterion remains overlooked. To address this issue, we design and perform an extensive empirical analysis of various pruning criteria to better understand their impact on the dynamics of DST solutions. Surprisingly, we find that most of the studied methods yield similar results. The differences become more significant in the low-density regime, where the best performance is predominantly given by the simplest technique: magnitude-based pruning.

ECAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

ProMIL: Probabilistic Multiple Instance Learning for Medical Imaging

  • Lukasz Struski
  • Dawid Damian Rymarczyk
  • Arkadiusz Lewicki
  • Robert Sabiniewicz
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Bartosz Michal Zielinski

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a weakly-supervised problem in which one label is assigned to the whole bag of instances. An important class of MIL models is instance-based, where we first classify instances and then aggregate those predictions to obtain a bag label. The most common MIL model is when we consider a bag as positive if at least one of its instances has a positive label. However, this reasoning does not hold in many real-life scenarios, where the positive bag label is often a consequence of a certain percentage of positive instances. To address this issue, we introduce a dedicated instance-based method called ProMIL, based on deep neural networks and Bernstein polynomial estimation. An important advantage of ProMIL is that it can automatically detect the optimal percentage level for decision-making. We show that ProMIL outperforms standard instance-based MIL in real-world medical applications. We make the code available.

ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Continual Learning with Guarantees via Weight Interval Constraints

  • Maciej Wolczyk
  • Karol J. Piczak
  • Bartosz Wójcik
  • Lukasz Pustelnik
  • Pawel Morawiecki
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Tomasz Trzcinski
  • Przemyslaw Spurek

We introduce a new training paradigm that enforces interval constraints on neural network parameter space to control forgetting. Contemporary Continual Learning (CL) methods focus on training neural networks efficiently from a stream of data, while reducing the negative impact of catastrophic forgetting, yet they do not provide any firm guarantees that network performance will not deteriorate uncontrollably over time. In this work, we show how to put bounds on forgetting by reformulating continual learning of a model as a continual contraction of its parameter space. To that end, we propose Hyperrectangle Training, a new training methodology where each task is represented by a hyperrectangle in the parameter space, fully contained in the hyperrectangles of the previous tasks. This formulation reduces the NP-hard CL problem back to polynomial time while providing full resilience against forgetting. We validate our claim by developing InterContiNet (Interval Continual Learning) algorithm which leverages interval arithmetic to effectively model parameter regions as hyperrectangles. Through experimental results, we show that our approach performs well in a continual learning setup without storing data from previous tasks.

IROS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

HyperPocket: Generative Point Cloud Completion

  • Przemyslaw Spurek
  • Artur Kasymov
  • Marcin Mazur
  • Diana Janik
  • Slawomir Konrad Tadeja
  • Lukasz Struski
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Tomasz Trzcinski

Scanning real-life scenes with modern registration devices typically give incomplete point cloud representations, mostly due to the limitations of the scanning process and 3D occlusions. Therefore, completing such partial representations remains a fundamental challenge of many computer vision applications. Most of the existing approaches aim to solve this problem by learning to reconstruct individual 3D objects in a synthetic setup of an uncluttered environment, which is far from a real-life scenario. In this work, we reformulate the problem of point cloud completion into an objects hallucination task. Thus, we introduce a novel autoencoder-based architecture called HyperPocket that disentangles latent representations and, as a result, enables the generation of multiple variants of the completed 3D point clouds. Furthermore, we split point cloud processing into two disjoint data streams and leverage a hypernetwork paradigm to fill the spaces, dubbed pockets, that are left by the missing object parts. As a result, the generated point clouds are smooth, plausible, and geometrically consistent with the scene. Moreover, our method offers competitive performances to the other state-of-the-art models, enabling a plethora of novel applications.

ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

LIDL: Local Intrinsic Dimension Estimation Using Approximate Likelihood

  • Piotr Tempczyk
  • Rafal Michaluk
  • Lukasz Garncarek
  • Przemyslaw Spurek
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Adam Golinski

Most of the existing methods for estimating the local intrinsic dimension of a data distribution do not scale well to high dimensional data. Many of them rely on a non-parametric nearest neighbours approach which suffers from the curse of dimensionality. We attempt to address that challenge by proposing a novel approach to the problem: Local Intrinsic Dimension estimation using approximate Likelihood (LIDL). Our method relies on an arbitrary density estimation method as its subroutine, and hence tries to sidestep the dimensionality challenge by making use of the recent progress in parametric neural methods for likelihood estimation. We carefully investigate the empirical properties of the proposed method, compare them with our theoretical predictions, show that LIDL yields competitive results on the standard benchmarks for this problem, and that it scales to thousands of dimensions. What is more, we anticipate this approach to improve further with the continuing advances in the density estimation literature.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Non-Gaussian Gaussian Processes for Few-Shot Regression

  • Marcin Sendera
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Aleksandra Nowak
  • Andrzej Bedychaj
  • Massimiliano Patacchiola
  • Tomasz Trzcinski
  • Przemysław Spurek
  • Maciej Zieba

Gaussian Processes (GPs) have been widely used in machine learning to model distributions over functions, with applications including multi-modal regression, time-series prediction, and few-shot learning. GPs are particularly useful in the last application since they rely on Normal distributions and enable closed-form computation of the posterior probability function. Unfortunately, because the resulting posterior is not flexible enough to capture complex distributions, GPs assume high similarity between subsequent tasks - a requirement rarely met in real-world conditions. In this work, we address this limitation by leveraging the flexibility of Normalizing Flows to modulate the posterior predictive distribution of the GP. This makes the GP posterior locally non-Gaussian, therefore we name our method Non-Gaussian Gaussian Processes (NGGPs). More precisely, we propose an invertible ODE-based mapping that operates on each component of the random variable vectors and shares the parameters across all of them. We empirically tested the flexibility of NGGPs on various few-shot learning regression datasets, showing that the mapping can incorporate context embedding information to model different noise levels for periodic functions. As a result, our method shares the structure of the problem between subsequent tasks, but the contextualization allows for adaptation to dissimilarities. NGGPs outperform the competing state-of-the-art approaches on a diversified set of benchmarks and applications.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Zero Time Waste: Recycling Predictions in Early Exit Neural Networks

  • Maciej Wołczyk
  • Bartosz Wójcik
  • Klaudia Bałazy
  • Igor T Podolak
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Marek Śmieja
  • Tomasz Trzcinski

The problem of reducing processing time of large deep learning models is a fundamental challenge in many real-world applications. Early exit methods strive towards this goal by attaching additional Internal Classifiers (ICs) to intermediate layers of a neural network. ICs can quickly return predictions for easy examples and, as a result, reduce the average inference time of the whole model. However, if a particular IC does not decide to return an answer early, its predictions are discarded, with its computations effectively being wasted. To solve this issue, we introduce Zero Time Waste (ZTW), a novel approach in which each IC reuses predictions returned by its predecessors by (1) adding direct connections between ICs and (2) combining previous outputs in an ensemble-like manner. We conduct extensive experiments across various datasets and architectures to demonstrate that ZTW achieves a significantly better accuracy vs. inference time trade-off than other recently proposed early exit methods.

JMLR Journal 2020 Journal Article

Cramer-Wold Auto-Encoder

  • Szymon Knop
  • Przemysław Spurek
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Igor Podolak
  • Marcin Mazur
  • Stanisław Jastrzębski

The computation of the distance to the true distribution is a key component of most state-of-the-art generative models. Inspired by prior works on the Sliced-Wasserstein Auto-Encoders (SWAE) and the Wasserstein Auto-Encoders with MMD-based penalty (WAE-MMD), we propose a new generative model - a Cramer-Wold Auto-Encoder (CWAE). A fundamental component of CWAE is the characteristic kernel, the construction of which is one of the goals of this paper, from here on referred to as the Cramer-Wold kernel. Its main distinguishing feature is that it has a closed-form of the kernel product of radial Gaussians. Consequently, CWAE model has a~closed-form for the distance between the posterior and the normal prior, which simplifies the optimization procedure by removing the need to sample in order to compute the loss function. At the same time, CWAE performance often improves upon WAE-MMD and SWAE on standard benchmarks. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2020. ( edit, beta )

ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Hypernetwork approach to generating point clouds

  • Przemyslaw Spurek
  • Sebastian Winczowski
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Maciej Zamorski
  • Maciej Zieba
  • Tomasz Trzcinski

In this work, we propose a novel method for generating 3D point clouds that leverage properties of hyper networks. Contrary to the existing methods that learn only the representation of a 3D object, our approach simultaneously finds a representation of the object and its 3D surfaces. The main idea of our HyperCloud method is to build a hyper network that returns weights of a particular neural network (target network) trained to map points from a uniform unit ball distribution into a 3D shape. As a consequence, a particular 3D shape can be generated using point-by-point sampling from the assumed prior distribution and transforming sampled points with the target network. Since the hyper network is based on an auto-encoder architecture trained to reconstruct realistic 3D shapes, the target network weights can be considered a parametrisation of the surface of a 3D shape, and not a standard representation of point cloud usually returned by competitive approaches. The proposed architecture allows to find mesh-based representation of 3D objects in a generative manner, while providing point clouds en pair in quality with the state-of-the-art methods.

ICLR Conference 2020 Conference Paper

The Break-Even Point on Optimization Trajectories of Deep Neural Networks

  • Stanislaw Jastrzebski
  • Maciej Szymczak
  • Stanislav Fort
  • Devansh Arpit
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Kyunghyun Cho
  • Krzysztof J. Geras

The early phase of training of deep neural networks is critical for their final performance. In this work, we study how the hyperparameters of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) used in the early phase of training affect the rest of the optimization trajectory. We argue for the existence of the "``break-even" point on this trajectory, beyond which the curvature of the loss surface and noise in the gradient are implicitly regularized by SGD. In particular, we demonstrate on multiple classification tasks that using a large learning rate in the initial phase of training reduces the variance of the gradient, and improves the conditioning of the covariance of gradients. These effects are beneficial from the optimization perspective and become visible after the break-even point. Complementing prior work, we also show that using a low learning rate results in bad conditioning of the loss surface even for a neural network with batch normalization layers. In short, our work shows that key properties of the loss surface are strongly influenced by SGD in the early phase of training. We argue that studying the impact of the identified effects on generalization is a promising future direction.

NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Processing of missing data by neural networks

  • Marek Śmieja
  • Łukasz Struski
  • Jacek Tabor
  • Bartosz Zieliński
  • Przemysław Spurek

We propose a general, theoretically justified mechanism for processing missing data by neural networks. Our idea is to replace typical neuron's response in the first hidden layer by its expected value. This approach can be applied for various types of networks at minimal cost in their modification. Moreover, in contrast to recent approaches, it does not require complete data for training. Experimental results performed on different types of architectures show that our method gives better results than typical imputation strategies and other methods dedicated for incomplete data.

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