ADDED: This post is controversial. For details see the comments below or the post Please stop publishing ideas/insights/research about AI (which is also controversial).
Abstract:
Inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, we propose Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) as promising alternatives to Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). While MLPs have fixed activation functions on nodes (“neurons”), KANs have learnable activation functions on edges (“weights”). KANs have no linear weights at all—every weight parameter is replaced by a univariate function parametrized as a spline. We show that this seemingly simple change makes KANs outperform MLPs in terms of accuracy and interpretability. For accuracy, much smaller KANs can achieve comparable or better accuracy than much larger MLPs in data fitting and PDE solving. Theoretically and empirically, KANs possess faster neural scaling laws than MLPs. For interpretability, KANs can be intuitively visualized and can easily interact with human users. Through two examples in mathematics and physics, KANs are shown to be useful collaborators helping scientists (re)discover mathematical and physical laws. In summary, KANs are promising alternatives for MLPs, opening opportunities for further improving today’s deep learning models which rely heavily on MLPs.
I reviewed this paper. It is a good paper, but more hype than substance. Or at least I think so. TLDR;
I make 4 major critques of the paper
1. MLPs (Multi-Layer Perceptrons) have learnable activation functions as well. This depends on the what you call an activation function.
2. The content of the paper does not justify the name, Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs). The theorem Kolmogorov-Arnold Theorem is basically unused in the paper. It should have been called spline activation function deep neural networks.
3. KANs are MLPs with spline-basis as the activation function. You can reinterpret, the proposed KAN as MLPs with spline-basis as the activation functions.
4. KANs do not beat the curse of dimensionality. Well if they did, MLPs will do it too.
https://vikasdhiman.info/reviews/KAN_a_review.html
Is this a massive exfohazard? Should this have been published?
To the extent that Tegmark is concerned about exfohazards (he doesn’t seem to be very concerned AFAICT (?)), he would probably say that more powerful and yet more interpretable architectures are net positive.
Very Unlikely
Yes
What do they mean by this? Isn’t that contradicted by this recommendation to use the an ordinary architecture if you want fast training:
It seems like they mean faster per parameter, which is an… unclear claim given that each parameter or step, here, appears to represent more computation (there’s no mention of flops) than a parameter/step in a matmul|relu would? Maybe you could buff that out with specialized hardware, but they don’t discuss hardware.
I’m not sure this answers the question. What are the parameters, anyway, are they just single floats? If they’re not, pretty misleading.
clearly, they mean 10^2 vs 10^4. Same with the “10−7 vs 10−5 MSE”. Must be some copy-paste/formatting issue.
I’m guessing they mean that the performance curve seems to reach much lower loss before it begins to trail off, while MLPs lose momentum much sooner. So even if MLPs are faster per unit of performance at small parameter counts and data, there’s no way they will be at scale, to the extent that it’s almost not worth comparing in terms of compute? (which would be an inherently rough measure anyway because, as I touched on, the relative compute will change as soon as specialized spline hardware starts to be built. Due to specialization for matmul|relu the relative performance comparison today is probably absurdly unfair to any new architecture.)
Wow, this is super fascinating.
A juicy tidbit:
I mostly stopped hearing about catastrophic forgetting when Really Large Language Models became The Thing, so I figured that it’s solvable by scale (likely conditional on some aspects of the training setup, idk, self-supervised predictive loss function?). Anthropic’s work on Sleeper Agents seems like a very strong piece of evidence that it is the case.
Still, if they’re right that KANs don’t have this problem at much smaller sizes than MLP-based NNs, that’s very interesting. Nevertheless, I think talking about catastrophic forgetting as a “serious problem in modern ML” seems significantly misleading
Pretraining, specifically: https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/meta-learning/continual-learning/index#scialom-et-al-2022-section
The intuition is that after pretraining, models can map new data into very efficient low-dimensional latents and have tons of free space / unused parameters. So you can easily prune them, but also easily specialize them with LoRA (because the sparsity is automatic, just learned) or just regular online SGD.
But yeah, it’s not a real problem anymore, and the continual learning research community is still in denial about this and confining itself to artificially tiny networks to keep the game going.
I’m not so sure. You might be right, but I suspect that catastrophic forgetting may still be playing an important role in limiting the peak capabilities of an LLM of given size. Would it be possible to continue Llama3 8B’s training much much longer and have it eventually outcompete Llama3 405B stopped at its normal training endpoint?
I think probably not? And I suspect that if not, that part (but not all) of the reason would be catastrophic forgetting. Another part would be limited expressivity of smaller models, another thing which the KANs seem to help with.
I know this sounds fantastic but can someone please dumb down what KANs are for me, why they’re so revolutionary (in practice, not in theory) that all the big labs would wanna switch to them?
Or is it the case that having MLPs is still a better thing for GPUs and in practice that will not change?
And how are KANs different from what SAEs attempt to do
MLP or KAN doesn’t make much difference for the GPUs as it is lots of matrix multiplications anyway. It might make some difference in how the data is routed to all the GPU cores as the structure (width, depth) of the matrixes might be different, but I don’t know the details of that.
So, after reading the KAN paper, and thinking about it in the context of this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gTZ2SxesbHckJ3CkF/transformers-represent-belief-state-geometry-in-their
My vague intuition is that the same experiment done with a KAN would result in a clearer fractal which wiggled less once training loss had plateaued. Is that also other people’s intuition?