# DAVIDSTUTZ

Check out the latest superpixel benchmark — Superpixel Benchmark (2016) — and let me know your opinion! @david_stutz
14thJANUARY2017

I. Goodfellow, Y. Bengio, A. Courville. Deep Learning. Chapter 7, MIT Press, 2016.

In chapter 7, Goodfellow et al. discuss several regularization techniques for deep learning in detail, and give valuable interpretations and relationships between them. They also revisit the goal of regularization. In particular, they characterize regularization as an approach to trade increased bias for reduced variance. The ultimate goal is to take a model where variance dominates the error (e.g. overfitted models) and reduce the variance in the hope to only slightly increase the bias. In the following, some regularization techniques are discussed, focussing on the practical insights provided by Goodfellow et al. instead of describing the techniques in detail.

Norm regularization ($L_2$ and $L_1$ regularization). Usually only the weights are regularized, not the biases. Therefore, it might also be interesting to regularize the weights in different layers differently strong. Two useful interpretations of $L_2$ regularization are the following:

• $L_2$ regularization shrinks the weights during training. However, Goodfellow et al. also show that components of the weights that correspond to directions that do not contribute to reducing the cost are decayed away faster than more useful directions. This is the result of the analysis of the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix (assuming a local, quadratic and convex approximation of the cost function).
• Using $L_2$ regularization, the training set is perceived to have higher variance. As a result, weight components corresponding to features that have low covariance with the target output compared to the perceived variance shrink faster.

Data augmentation. Goodfellow et al. briefly discuss the importance and influence of data augmentation to increase the size of the training set. Unfortunately, they give little concrete examples or references on this topic. They mostly focus on adding noise to either the input units or the hidden units. In a separate section on noise robustness, they also discuss the possibility to add noise to the weights in order to make the final model more robust to noise. Later this topic is also related to adversarial training, where training samples are constructed to "fool" the network while being similar to existing training samples. Here, as well, they do not give many concrete examples.

Early stopping. Beneath discussing the interpretation of early stopping as regularizer, Goodfellow et al. also focus on the problem utilizing early stopping while still being able to train on the full training set (as early stopping requires a part of the training set as validation set). The first approach discussed involves retraining the model on the full training set and training for approximately as many iterations as before when training with early stopping. The second approach fine-tunes the model on the full training set and stops when the training error reaches the training error when training was stopped using early stopping.

Dropout. Goodfellow et al. discuss the two important interpretations: dropout as bagging, and dropout as regularizer. In the first case, the most valuable insight provided is how to get the advantage of training with dropout at testing time, i.e. how to approximate the ensemble prediction.

What is your opinion on the summarized work? Or do you know related work that is of interest? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below or using the following platforms: