Theoretical Explanation of Activation Sparsity through Flat Minima and Adversarial Robustness

A recent empirical observation of activation sparsity in MLP layers offers an opportunity to drastically reduce computation costs for free. Despite several works attributing it to training dynamics, the theoretical explanation of activation sparsity's emergence is restricted to shallow networks, small training steps well as modified training, even though the sparsity has been found in deep models trained by vanilla protocols for large steps. To fill the three gaps, we propose the notion of gradient sparsity as the source of activation sparsity and a theoretical explanation based on it that explains gradient sparsity and then activation sparsity as necessary steps to adversarial robustness w.r.t. hidden features and parameters, which is approximately the flatness of minima for well-learned models. The theory applies to standardly trained LayerNorm-ed pure MLPs, and further to Transformers or other architectures if noises are added to weights during training. To eliminate other sources of flatness when arguing sparsities' necessity, we discover the phenomenon of spectral concentration, i.e., the ratio between the largest and the smallest non-zero singular values of weight matrices is small. We utilize random matrix theory (RMT) as a powerful theoretical tool to analyze stochastic gradient noises and discuss the emergence of spectral concentration. With these insights, we propose two plug-and-play modules for both training from scratch and sparsity finetuning, as well as one radical modification that only applies to from-scratch training. Another under-testing module for both sparsity and flatness is also immediate from our theories. Validational experiments are conducted to verify our explanation. Experiments for productivity demonstrate modifications' improvement in sparsity, indicating further theoretical cost reduction in both training and inference.