Thao Nguyen

Thao N. N. Nguyen, Bharadwaj Veeravalli, Xuanyao Fong

Long training time hinders the potential of the deep, large-scale Spiking Neural Network (SNN) with the on-chip learning capability to be realized on the embedded systems hardware. Our work proposes a novel connection pruning approach that can be applied during the on-chip Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP)-based learning to optimize the learning time and the network connectivity of the deep SNN. We applied our approach to a deep SNN with the Time To First Spike (TTFS) coding and has successfully achieved 2.1x speed-up and 64% energy savings in the on-chip learning and reduced the network connectivity by 92.83%, without incurring any accuracy loss. Moreover, the connectivity reduction results in 2.83x speed-up and 78.24% energy savings in the inference. Evaluation of our proposed approach on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform revealed 0.56% power overhead was needed to implement the pruning algorithm.

Pang Wei Koh, Thao Nguyen, Yew Siang Tang et al.

We seek to learn models that we can interact with using high-level concepts: if the model did not think there was a bone spur in the x-ray, would it still predict severe arthritis? State-of-the-art models today do not typically support the manipulation of concepts like "the existence of bone spurs", as they are trained end-to-end to go directly from raw input (e.g., pixels) to output (e.g., arthritis severity). We revisit the classic idea of first predicting concepts that are provided at training time, and then using these concepts to predict the label. By construction, we can intervene on these concept bottleneck models by editing their predicted concept values and propagating these changes to the final prediction. On x-ray grading and bird identification, concept bottleneck models achieve competitive accuracy with standard end-to-end models, while enabling interpretation in terms of high-level clinical concepts ("bone spurs") or bird attributes ("wing color"). These models also allow for richer human-model interaction: accuracy improves significantly if we can correct model mistakes on concepts at test time.

Edward Chou, Thao Nguyen, Josh Beal et al.

We introduce an end-to-end private deep learning framework, applied to the task of predicting 30-day readmission from electronic health records. By using differential privacy during training and homomorphic encryption during inference, we demonstrate that our proposed pipeline could maintain high performance while providing robust privacy guarantees against information leak from data transmission or attacks against the model. We also explore several techniques to address the privacy-utility trade-off in deploying neural networks with privacy mechanisms, improving the accuracy of differentially-private training and the computation cost of encrypted operations using ideas from both machine learning and cryptography.