Henry Jin

Alvin Wan, Lisa Dunlap, Daniel Ho et al.

Machine learning applications such as finance and medicine demand accurate and justifiable predictions, barring most deep learning methods from use. In response, previous work combines decision trees with deep learning, yielding models that (1) sacrifice interpretability for accuracy or (2) sacrifice accuracy for interpretability. We forgo this dilemma by jointly improving accuracy and interpretability using Neural-Backed Decision Trees (NBDTs). NBDTs replace a neural network's final linear layer with a differentiable sequence of decisions and a surrogate loss. This forces the model to learn high-level concepts and lessens reliance on highly-uncertain decisions, yielding (1) accuracy: NBDTs match or outperform modern neural networks on CIFAR, ImageNet and better generalize to unseen classes by up to 16%. Furthermore, our surrogate loss improves the original model's accuracy by up to 2%. NBDTs also afford (2) interpretability: improving human trustby clearly identifying model mistakes and assisting in dataset debugging. Code and pretrained NBDTs are at https://github.com/alvinwan/neural-backed-decision-trees.

Henry Jin, Marios Mattheakis, Pavlos Protopapas

Eigenvalue problems are critical to several fields of science and engineering. We expand on the method of using unsupervised neural networks for discovering eigenfunctions and eigenvalues for differential eigenvalue problems. The obtained solutions are given in an analytical and differentiable form that identically satisfies the desired boundary conditions. The network optimization is data-free and depends solely on the predictions of the neural network. We introduce two physics-informed loss functions. The first, called ortho-loss, motivates the network to discover pair-wise orthogonal eigenfunctions. The second loss term, called norm-loss, requests the discovery of normalized eigenfunctions and is used to avoid trivial solutions. We find that embedding even or odd symmetries to the neural network architecture further improves the convergence for relevant problems. Lastly, a patience condition can be used to automatically recognize eigenfunction solutions. This proposed unsupervised learning method is used to solve the finite well, multiple finite wells, and hydrogen atom eigenvalue quantum problems.

Henry Jin, Marios Mattheakis, Pavlos Protopapas

Eigenvalue problems are critical to several fields of science and engineering. We present a novel unsupervised neural network for discovering eigenfunctions and eigenvalues for differential eigenvalue problems with solutions that identically satisfy the boundary conditions. A scanning mechanism is embedded allowing the method to find an arbitrary number of solutions. The network optimization is data-free and depends solely on the predictions. The unsupervised method is used to solve the quantum infinite well and quantum oscillator eigenvalue problems.