Fast Heavy Inner Product Identification Between Weights and Inputs in Neural Network Training

Abstract: In this paper, we consider a heavy inner product identification problem, which generalizes the Light Bulb problem~(\cite{prr89}): Given two sets $A \subset {-1,+1}^d$ and $B \subset {-1,+1}^d$ with $|A|=|B| = n$, if there are exact $k$ pairs whose inner product passes a certain threshold, i.e., ${(a_1, b_1), \cdots, (a_k, b_k)} \subset A \times B$ such that $\forall i \in [k], \langle a_i,b_i \rangle \geq \rho \cdot d$, for a threshold $\rho \in (0,1)$, the goal is to identify those $k$ heavy inner products. We provide an algorithm that runs in $O(n^{2 \omega / 3+ o(1)})$ time to find the $k$ inner product pairs that surpass $\rho \cdot d$ threshold with high probability, where $\omega$ is the current matrix multiplication exponent. By solving this problem, our method speed up the training of neural networks with ReLU activation function.