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We give a formal and complete characterization of the explicit regularizer induced by dropout in deep linear networks with squared loss. We show that (a) the explicit regularizer is composed of an $ell_2$-path regularizer and other terms that are also re-scaling invariant, (b) the convex envelope of the induced regularizer is the squared nuclear norm of the network map, and (c) for a sufficiently large dropout rate, we characterize the global optima of the dropout objective. We validate our theoretical findings with empirical results.
We describe novel subgradient methods for a broad class of matrix optimization problems involving nuclear norm regularization. Unlike existing approaches, our method executes very cheap iterations by combining low-rank stochastic subgradients with efficient incremental SVD updates, made possible by highly optimized and parallelizable dense linear algebra operations on small matrices. Our practical algorithms always maintain a low-rank factorization of iterates that can be conveniently held in memory and efficiently multiplied to generate predictions in matrix completion settings. Empirical comparisons confirm that our approach is highly competitive with several recently proposed state-of-the-art solvers for such problems.
Dropout and its extensions (eg. DropBlock and DropConnect) are popular heuristics for training neural networks, which have been shown to improve generalization performance in practice. However, a theoretical understanding of their optimization and regularization properties remains elusive. Recent work shows that in the case of single hidden-layer linear networks, Dropout is a stochastic gradient descent method for minimizing a regularized loss, and that the regularizer induces solutions that are low-rank and balanced. In this work we show that for single hidden-layer linear networks, DropBlock induces spectral k-support norm regularization, and promotes solutions that are low-rank and have factors with equal norm. We also show that the global minimizer for DropBlock can be computed in closed form, and that DropConnect is equivalent to Dropout. We then show that some of these results can be extended to a general class of Dropout-strategies, and, with some assumptions, to deep non-linear networks when Dropout is applied to the last layer. We verify our theoretical claims and assumptions experimentally with commonly used network architectures.
Algorithmic approaches endow deep learning systems with implicit bias that helps them generalize even in over-parametrized settings. In this paper, we focus on understanding such a bias induced in learning through dropout, a popular technique to avoid overfitting in deep learning. For single hidden-layer linear neural networks, we show that dropout tends to make the norm of incoming/outgoing weight vectors of all the hidden nodes equal. In addition, we provide a complete characterization of the optimization landscape induced by dropout.
The nuclear norm and Schatten-$p$ quasi-norm of a matrix are popular rank proxies in low-rank matrix recovery. Unfortunately, computing the nuclear norm or Schatten-$p$ quasi-norm of a tensor is NP-hard, which is a pity for low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) and tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA). In this paper, we propose a new class of rank regularizers based on the Euclidean norms of the CP component vectors of a tensor and show that these regularizers are monotonic transformations of tensor Schatten-$p$ quasi-norm. This connection enables us to minimize the Schatten-$p$ quasi-norm in LRTC and TRPCA implicitly. The methods do not use the singular value decomposition and hence scale to big tensors. Moreover, the methods are not sensitive to the choice of initial rank and provide an arbitrarily sharper rank proxy for low-rank tensor recovery compared to nuclear norm. We provide theoretical guarantees in terms of recovery error for LRTC and TRPCA, which show relatively smaller $p$ of Schatten-$p$ quasi-norm leads to tighter error bounds. Experiments using LRTC and TRPCA on synthetic data and natural images verify the effectiveness and superiority of our methods compared to baseline methods.
This work investigates the geometry of a nonconvex reformulation of minimizing a general convex loss function $f(X)$ regularized by the matrix nuclear norm $|X|_*$. Nuclear-norm regularized matrix inverse problems are at the heart of many applications in machine learning, signal processing, and control. The statistical performance of nuclear norm regularization has been studied extensively in literature using convex analysis techniques. Despite its optimal performance, the resulting optimization has high computational complexity when solved using standard or even tailored fast convex solvers. To develop faster and more scalable algorithms, we follow the proposal of Burer-Monteiro to factor the matrix variable $X$ into the product of two smaller rectangular matrices $X=UV^T$ and also replace the nuclear norm $|X|_*$ with $(|U|_F^2+|V|_F^2)/2$. In spite of the nonconvexity of the factored formulation, we prove that when the convex loss function $f(X)$ is $(2r,4r)$-restricted well-conditioned, each critical point of the factored problem either corresponds to the optimal solution $X^star$ of the original convex optimization or is a strict saddle point where the Hessian matrix has a strictly negative eigenvalue. Such a geometric structure of the factored formulation allows many local search algorithms to converge to the global optimum with random initializations.