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Stéphane Mallat

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

9 papers
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Possible papers

9

JMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

A Rainbow in Deep Network Black Boxes

  • Florentin Guth
  • Brice Ménard
  • Gaspar Rochette
  • Stéphane Mallat

A central question in deep learning is to understand the functions learned by deep networks. What is their approximation class? Do the learned weights and representations depend on initialization? Previous empirical work has evidenced that kernels defined by network activations are similar across initializations. For shallow networks, this has been theoretically studied with random feature models, but an extension to deep networks has remained elusive. Here, we provide a deep extension of such random feature models, which we call the rainbow model. We prove that rainbow networks define deterministic (hierarchical) kernels in the infinite-width limit. The resulting functions thus belong to a data-dependent RKHS which does not depend on the weight randomness. We also verify numerically our modeling assumptions on deep CNNs trained on image classification tasks, and show that the trained networks approximately satisfy the rainbow hypothesis. In particular, rainbow networks sampled from the corresponding random feature model achieve similar performance as the trained networks. Our results highlight the central role played by the covariances of network weights at each layer, which are observed to be low-rank as a result of feature learning. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2024. ( edit, beta )

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Generalization in diffusion models arises from geometry-adaptive harmonic representations

  • Zahra Kadkhodaie
  • Florentin Guth
  • Eero P. Simoncelli
  • Stéphane Mallat

Deep neural networks (DNNs) trained for image denoising are able to generate high-quality samples with score-based reverse diffusion algorithms. These impressive capabilities seem to imply an escape from the curse of dimensionality, but recent reports of memorization of the training set raise the question of whether these networks are learning the "true" continuous density of the data. Here, we show that two DNNs trained on non-overlapping subsets of a dataset learn nearly the same score function, and thus the same density, when the number of training images is large enough. In this regime of strong generalization, diffusion-generated images are distinct from the training set, and are of high visual quality, suggesting that the inductive biases of the DNNs are well-aligned with the data density. We analyze the learned denoising functions and show that the inductive biases give rise to a shrinkage operation in a basis adapted to the underlying image. Examination of these bases reveals oscillating harmonic structures along contours and in homogeneous regions. We demonstrate that trained denoisers are inductively biased towards these geometry-adaptive harmonic bases since they arise not only when the network is trained on photographic images, but also when it is trained on image classes supported on low-dimensional manifolds for which the harmonic basis is suboptimal. Finally, we show that when trained on regular image classes for which the optimal basis is known to be geometry-adaptive and harmonic, the denoising performance of the networks is near-optimal.

ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Conditionally Strongly Log-Concave Generative Models

  • Florentin Guth
  • Etienne Lempereur
  • Joan Bruna
  • Stéphane Mallat

There is a growing gap between the impressive results of deep image generative models and classical algorithms that offer theoretical guarantees. The former suffer from mode collapse or memorization issues, limiting their application to scientific data. The latter require restrictive assumptions such as log-concavity to escape the curse of dimensionality. We partially bridge this gap by introducing conditionally strongly log-concave (CSLC) models, which factorize the data distribution into a product of conditional probability distributions that are strongly log-concave. This factorization is obtained with orthogonal projectors adapted to the data distribution. It leads to efficient parameter estimation and sampling algorithms, with theoretical guarantees, although the data distribution is not globally log-concave. We show that several challenging multiscale processes are conditionally log-concave using wavelet packet orthogonal projectors. Numerical results are shown for physical fields such as the $\varphi^4$ model and weak lensing convergence maps with higher resolution than in previous works.

ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Learning multi-scale local conditional probability models of images

  • Zahra Kadkhodaie
  • Florentin Guth
  • Stéphane Mallat
  • Eero P. Simoncelli

Deep neural networks can learn powerful prior probability models for images, as evidenced by the high-quality generations obtained with recent score-based diffusion methods. But the means by which these networks capture complex global statistical structure, apparently without suffering from the curse of dimensionality, remain a mystery. To study this, we incorporate diffusion methods into a multi-scale decomposition, reducing dimensionality by assuming a stationary local Markov model for wavelet coefficients conditioned on coarser-scale coefficients. We instantiate this model using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with local receptive fields, which enforce both the stationarity and Markov properties. Global structures are captured using a CNN with receptive fields covering the entire (but small) low-pass image. We test this model on a dataset of face images, which are highly non-stationary and contain large-scale geometric structures. Remarkably, denoising, super-resolution, and image synthesis results all demonstrate that these structures can be captured with significantly smaller conditioning neighborhoods than required by a Markov model implemented in the pixel domain. Our results show that score estimation for large complex images can be reduced to low-dimensional Markov conditional models across scales, alleviating the curse of dimensionality.

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Generalized rectifier wavelet covariance models for texture synthesis

  • Antoine Brochard
  • Sixin Zhang
  • Stéphane Mallat

State-of-the-art maximum entropy models for texture synthesis are built from statistics relying on image representations defined by convolutional neural networks (CNN). Such representations capture rich structures in texture images, outperforming wavelet-based representations in this regard. However, conversely to neural networks, wavelets offer meaningful representations, as they are known to detect structures at multiple scales (e.g. edges) in images. In this work, we propose a family of statistics built upon non-linear wavelet based representations, that can be viewed as a particular instance of a one-layer CNN, using a generalized rectifier non-linearity. These statistics significantly improve the visual quality of previous classical wavelet-based models, and allow one to produce syntheses of similar quality to state-of-the-art models, on both gray-scale and color textures. We further provide insights on memorization effects in these models.

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Phase Collapse in Neural Networks

  • Florentin Guth
  • John Zarka
  • Stéphane Mallat

Deep convolutional classifiers linearly separate image classes and improve accuracy as depth increases. They progressively reduce the spatial dimension whereas the number of channels grows with depth. Spatial variability is therefore transformed into variability along channels. A fundamental challenge is to understand the role of non-linearities together with convolutional filters in this transformation. ReLUs with biases are often interpreted as thresholding operators that improve discrimination through sparsity. This paper demonstrates that it is a different mechanism called \emph{phase collapse} which eliminates spatial variability while linearly separating classes. We show that collapsing the phases of complex wavelet coefficients is sufficient to reach the classification accuracy of ResNets of similar depths. However, replacing the phase collapses with thresholding operators that enforce sparsity considerably degrades the performance. We explain these numerical results by showing that the iteration of phase collapses progressively improves separation of classes, as opposed to thresholding non-linearities.

ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Separation and Concentration in Deep Networks

  • John Zarka
  • Florentin Guth
  • Stéphane Mallat

Numerical experiments demonstrate that deep neural network classifiers progressively separate class distributions around their mean, achieving linear separability on the training set, and increasing the Fisher discriminant ratio. We explain this mechanism with two types of operators. We prove that a rectifier without biases applied to sign-invariant tight frames can separate class means and increase Fisher ratios. On the opposite, a soft-thresholding on tight frames can reduce within-class variabilities while preserving class means. Variance reduction bounds are proved for Gaussian mixture models. For image classification, we show that separation of class means can be achieved with rectified wavelet tight frames that are not learned. It defines a scattering transform. Learning $1 \times 1$ convolutional tight frames along scattering channels and applying a soft-thresholding reduces within-class variabilities. The resulting scattering network reaches the classification accuracy of ResNet-18 on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, with fewer layers and no learned biases.

ICLR Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Deep Network Classification by Scattering and Homotopy Dictionary Learning

  • John Zarka
  • Louis Thiry
  • Tomás Angles
  • Stéphane Mallat

We introduce a sparse scattering deep convolutional neural network, which provides a simple model to analyze properties of deep representation learning for classification. Learning a single dictionary matrix with a classifier yields a higher classification accuracy than AlexNet over the ImageNet 2012 dataset. The network first applies a scattering transform that linearizes variabilities due to geometric transformations such as translations and small deformations. A sparse $\ell^1$ dictionary coding reduces intra-class variability while preserving class separation through projections over unions of linear spaces. It is implemented in a deep convolutional network with a homotopy algorithm having an exponential convergence. A convergence proof is given in a general framework that includes ALISTA. Classification results are analyzed on ImageNet.

JMLR Journal 2020 Journal Article

Kymatio: Scattering Transforms in Python

  • Mathieu Andreux
  • Tomás Angles
  • Georgios Exarchakis
  • Roberto Leonarduzzi
  • Gaspar Rochette
  • Louis Thiry
  • John Zarka
  • Stéphane Mallat

The wavelet scattering transform is an invariant and stable signal representation suitable for many signal processing and machine learning applications. We present the Kymatio software package, an easy-to-use, high-performance Python implementation of the scattering transform in 1D, 2D, and 3D that is compatible with modern deep learning frameworks, including PyTorch and TensorFlow/Keras. The transforms are implemented on both CPUs and GPUs, the latter offering a significant speedup over the former. The package also has a small memory footprint. Source code, documentation, and examples are available under a BSD license at https://www.kymat.io. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2020. ( edit, beta )

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