Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32 (NeurIPS 2019)
Tianjun Zhang, Zhewei Yao, Amir Gholami, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Kurt Keutzer, Michael W. Mahoney, George Biros
It has been observed that residual networks can be viewed as the explicit Euler discretization of an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE). This observation motivated the introduction of so-called Neural ODEs, in which other discretization schemes and/or adaptive time stepping techniques can be used to improve the performance of residual networks. Here, we propose \OURS, which extends this approach by introducing a framework that allows ODE-based evolution for both the weights and the activations, in a coupled formulation. Such an approach provides more modeling flexibility, and it can help with generalization performance. We present the formulation of \OURS, derive optimality conditions, and implement the coupled framework in PyTorch. We present empirical results using several different configurations of \OURS, testing them on the CIFAR-10 dataset. We report results showing that our coupled ODE-based framework is indeed trainable, and that it achieves higher accuracy, compared to the baseline ResNet network and the recently-proposed Neural ODE approach.