Fine-Tuned Language Model (FitLaM)
Transfer learning has revolutionized computer vision, but existing approaches in NLP still require task-specific modifications and training from scratch. We propose Fine-tuned Language Models (FitLaM), an effective transfer learning method that can be applied to any task in NLP, and introduce techniques that are key for fine-tuning a state-of-the-art language model. Our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on five text classification tasks, reducing the error by 18-24% on the majority of datasets. We open-source our pretrained models and code to enable adoption by the community. …

MixHop
Existing popular methods for semi-supervised learning with Graph Neural Networks (such as the Graph Convolutional Network) provably cannot learn a general class of neighborhood mixing relationships. To address this weakness, we propose a new model, MixHop, that can learn these relationships, including difference operators, by repeatedly mixing feature representations of neighbors at various distances. MixHop requires no additional memory or computational complexity, and outperforms on challenging baselines. In addition, we propose sparsity regularization that allows us to visualize how the network prioritizes neighborhood information across different graph datasets. Our analysis of the learned architectures reveals that neighborhood mixing varies per datasets. …

Equilibrated Recurrent Neural Network (ERNN)
We propose a novel {\it Equilibrated Recurrent Neural Network} (ERNN) to combat the issues of inaccuracy and instability in conventional RNNs. Drawing upon the concept of autapse in neuroscience, we propose augmenting an RNN with a time-delayed self-feedback loop. Our sole purpose is to modify the dynamics of each internal RNN state and, at any time, enforce it to evolve close to the equilibrium point associated with the input signal at that time. We show that such self-feedback helps stabilize the hidden state transitions leading to fast convergence during training while efficiently learning discriminative latent features that result in state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets at test-time. We propose a novel inexact Newton method to solve fixed-point conditions given model parameters for generating the latent features at each hidden state. We prove that our inexact Newton method converges locally with linear rate (under mild conditions). We leverage this result for efficient training of ERNNs based on backpropagation. …

Soft-Guided Adaptively-Dropped Neural Network (SGAD)
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been proven to have many redundancies. Hence, many efforts have been made to compress DNNs. However, the existing model compression methods treat all the input samples equally while ignoring the fact that the difficulties of various input samples being correctly classified are different. To address this problem, DNNs with adaptive dropping mechanism are well explored in this work. To inform the DNNs how difficult the input samples can be classified, a guideline that contains the information of input samples is introduced to improve the performance. Based on the developed guideline and adaptive dropping mechanism, an innovative soft-guided adaptively-dropped (SGAD) neural network is proposed in this paper. Compared with the 32 layers residual neural networks, the presented SGAD can reduce the FLOPs by 77% with less than 1% drop in accuracy on CIFAR-10. …