Making neural networks more trustworthy and sustainable

Seminar Start Date
Seminar End Date
Seminar Location
Jacobs School of Engineering 2nd Floor, #2512 Henry Booker Conference Room, 9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla, San Diego, California 92093
Seminar Speaker
Michael Unser
headshot of Michael Unser
Abstract

The use of deep neural networks (DNNs) is currently transforming many areas of science and engineering. Although DNN-based techniques outperform traditional algorithms in most signal processing tasks, they can exhibit weaknesses such as reduced robustness and a tendency to produce hallucinations. These issues are linked to the DNN's Lipschitz constant, which typically worsens exponentially with the addition of layers. In this work, we present a framework for the design of stable networks with maximal expressivity. Our scheme involves a combination of learnable 1-Lip activations and a few energy-preserving convolution layers. We train these activations using a second-order total variation penalty, leading to adaptive linear spline solutions and a corresponding representer theorem for Lip-1 deep splines.  We illustrate our method with the task of image reconstruction, and demonstrate state-of-the-art results.

Seminar Speaker Bio
Michael Unser is Full Professor at the EPFL and the academic director of EPFL's Center for Imaging, Lausanne, Switzerland. His primary areas of investigation are biomedical imaging and applied functional analysis. He is internationally recognized for his research contributions to sampling theory, wavelets, the use of splines for image processing, and computational bioimaging. He has published over 400 journal papers on those topics. Prof. Unser is a fellow of the IEEE (1999), an EURASIP fellow (2009), and a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. He is the recipient of several international prizes including five IEEE-SPS Best Paper Awards, two Technical Achievement Awards from the IEEE (2008 SPS and EMBS 2010), the Technical Achievement Award from EURASIP (2018), and the IEEE-EMBS Career Achievement Award (2020). He was awarded three ERC AdG grants: FUNSP (2011-2016), GlobalBioIm (2016-2021), and FunLearn (2021-2026) in succession, with the ERC funding scheme being the most competitive one in Europe.