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Poster
Heavy Ball Neural Ordinary Differential Equations
Hedi Xia · Vai Suliafu · Hangjie Ji · Tan Nguyen · Andrea Bertozzi · Stanley Osher · Bao Wang

Tue Dec 07 04:30 PM -- 06:00 PM (PST) @

We propose heavy ball neural ordinary differential equations (HBNODEs), leveraging the continuous limit of the classical momentum accelerated gradient descent, to improve neural ODEs (NODEs) training and inference. HBNODEs have two properties that imply practical advantages over NODEs: (i) The adjoint state of an HBNODE also satisfies an HBNODE, accelerating both forward and backward ODE solvers, thus significantly reducing the number of function evaluations (NFEs) and improving the utility of the trained models. (ii) The spectrum of HBNODEs is well structured, enabling effective learning of long-term dependencies from complex sequential data. We verify the advantages of HBNODEs over NODEs on benchmark tasks, including image classification, learning complex dynamics, and sequential modeling. Our method requires remarkably fewer forward and backward NFEs, is more accurate, and learns long-term dependencies more effectively than the other ODE-based neural network models. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/hedixia/HeavyBallNODE}.

Author Information

Hedi Xia (University of California, Los Angeles)
Vai Suliafu (University of Utah)
Hangjie Ji (North Carolina State University)
Tan Nguyen (UCLA)

I am currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, working with Dr. Stanley J. Osher. I have obtained my Ph.D. in Machine Learning from Rice University, where I was advised by Dr. Richard G. Baraniuk. My research is focused on the intersection of Deep Learning, Probabilistic Modeling, Optimization, and ODEs/PDEs. I gave an invited talk in the Deep Learning Theory Workshop at NeurIPS 2018 and organized the 1st Workshop on Integration of Deep Neural Models and Differential Equations at ICLR 2020. I also had two awesome long internships with Amazon AI and NVIDIA Research, during which he worked with Dr. Anima Anandkumar. I am the recipient of the prestigious Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship (CIFellows) from the Computing Research Association (CRA), the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and the IGERT Neuroengineering Traineeship. I received his MSEE and BSEE from Rice in May 2018 and May 2014, respectively.

Andrea Bertozzi (UCLA)
Stanley Osher (UCLA)
Bao Wang (University of Utah)

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