Automatically Differentiable Nonlinear Tensor Networks (ADNTNs) for Exponential Compression of Deep Neural Networks

We study Automatically Differentiable Nonlinear Tensor Networks (ADNTNs), a family of structured weight generators whose compact core tensors are trained end-to-end by reverse-mode automatic differentiation (AD). The approach can be viewed as a natural extension of low-rank adaptation and tensor factorisation: instead of using one low-rank matrix update, an ADNTN builds a large weight tensor through a hierarchy of small cores, nonlinear activations, and optional lateral mixing tensors. The paper focuses on three architectures: Tree Tensor Networks (TTNs), augmented TTNs (aTTNs) with boundary disentanglers, and Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalisation Ansatze (MERA). The formulation supports nonlinear activations, task-aware objectives, batching, and hardware-aware execution schedules. At the same time, the paper keeps a clear distinction between \emph{differentiating} a contraction program and making contraction free: AD does not remove the cost of large intermediates, poor contraction orders, or exact contraction of general loopy tensor networks. Extensive simulations on AlexNet and VGG-16 layers show per-layer compression ratios from roughly $2000\times$ to $77000\times$ in the studied settings, with accuracy often matching the dense baseline and, in several VGG-16 cases, improving it. These results are encouraging rather than final: they suggest that ADNTNs are a promising, mathematically structured, and hardware-aware route toward much smaller neural networks, provided that optimisation, contraction schedules, and deployment kernels are designed together.