Phase Transitions in Rate Distortion Theory and Deep Learning

Author(s)
Philipp Grohs, Andreas Klotz, Felix Voigtlaender
Abstract

Rate distortion theory is concerned with optimally encoding signals from a given signal class S using a budget of R bits, as R ->infinity. We say that S can be compressed at rate s if we can achieve an error of at most O(R-s) for encoding the given signal class; the supremal compression rate is denoted by s* (S). Given a fixed coding scheme, there usually are some elements of S that are compressed at a higher rate than s * (S) by the given coding scheme; in this paper, we study the size of this set of signals. We showthat for certain "nice" signal classes S, a phase transition occurs: We construct a probability measure P on S such that for every coding scheme C and any s > s * (S), the set of signals encoded with error O(R-s) by C forms a P-null-set. In particular, our results apply to all unit balls in Besov and Sobolev spaces that embed compactly into L-2(Omega) for a bounded Lipschitz domain O. As an application, we show that several existing sharpness results concerning function approximation using deep neural networks are in fact generically sharp. In addition, we provide quantitative and non-asymptotic bounds on the probability that a random f is an element of S can be encoded to within accuracy e using R bits. This result is subsequently applied to the problem of approximately representing f is an element of S to within accuracy e by a (quantized) neural network with at most W nonzeroweights. We showthat for any s > s * (S) there are constants c, C such that, no matter what kind of "learning" procedure is used to produce such a network, the probability of success is bounded from above by min {1, 2(C .W) inverted left perpendicularlog(2)(1+W)inverted right perpendicular2-c.epsilon(-1/s)}.

Organisation(s)
Department of Mathematics, Research Network Data Science
External organisation(s)
Technische Universität München
Journal
Foundations of Computational Mathematics
Volume
23
Pages
329-392
No. of pages
64
ISSN
1615-3375
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10208-021-09546-4
Publication date
08-2020
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
101032 Functional analysis
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Computational Mathematics, Analysis, Applied Mathematics, Computational Theory and Mathematics
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/5d9924fe-c0c2-4adf-9680-41b0aaccd129