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Deep ReLU networks trained with the square loss have been observed to perform well in classification tasks. We provide here a theoretical justification based on analysis of the associated gradient flow. We show that convergence to a solution with the absolute minimum norm is expected when normalization techniques such as Batch Normalization (BN) or Weight Normalization (WN) are used together with Weight Decay (WD). The main property of the minimizers that bounds their expected error is the norm: we prove that among all the close-to-interpolating solutions, the ones associated with smaller Frobenius norms of the unnormalized weight matrices have better margin and better bounds on the expected classification error. With BN but in the absence of WD, the dynamical system is singular. Implicit dynamical regularization -- that is zero-initial conditions biasing the dynamics towards high margin solutions -- is also possible in the no-BN and no-WD case. The theory yields several predictions, including the role of BN and weight decay, aspects of Papyan, Han and Donohos Neural Collapse and the constraints induced by BN on the network weights.
We consider the problem of uncertainty estimation in the context of (non-Bayesian) deep neural classification. In this context, all known methods are based on extracting uncertainty signals from a trained network optimized to solve the classification problem at hand. We demonstrate that such techniques tend to introduce biased estimates for instances whose predictions are supposed to be highly confident. We argue that this deficiency is an artifact of the dynamics of training with SGD-like optimizers, and it has some properties similar to overfitting. Based on this observation, we develop an uncertainty estimation algorithm that selectively estimates the uncertainty of highly confident points, using earlier snapshots of the trained model, before their estimates are jittered (and way before they are ready for actual classification). We present extensive experiments indicating that the proposed algorithm provides uncertainty estimates that are consistently better than all known methods.
In an attempt to better understand generalization in deep learning, we study several possible explanations. We show that implicit regularization induced by the optimization method is playing a key role in generalization and success of deep learning models. Motivated by this view, we study how different complexity measures can ensure generalization and explain how optimization algorithms can implicitly regularize complexity measures. We empirically investigate the ability of these measures to explain different observed phenomena in deep learning. We further study the invariances in neural networks, suggest complexity measures and optimization algorithms that have similar invariances to those in neural networks and evaluate them on a number of learning tasks.
Most theoretical studies explaining the regularization effect in deep learning have only focused on gradient descent with a sufficient small learning rate or even gradient flow (infinitesimal learning rate). Such researches, however, have neglected a reasonably large learning rate applied in most practical applications. In this work, we characterize the implicit bias effect of deep linear networks for binary classification using the logistic loss in the large learning rate regime, inspired by the seminal work by Lewkowycz et al. [26] in a regression setting with squared loss. They found a learning rate regime with a large stepsize named the catapult phase, where the loss grows at the early stage of training and eventually converges to a minimum that is flatter than those found in the small learning rate regime. We claim that depending on the separation conditions of data, the gradient descent iterates will converge to a flatter minimum in the catapult phase. We rigorously prove this claim under the assumption of degenerate data by overcoming the difficulty of the non-constant Hessian of logistic loss and further characterize the behavior of loss and Hessian for non-separable data. Finally, we demonstrate that flatter minima in the space spanned by non-separable data along with the learning rate in the catapult phase can lead to better generalization empirically.
We provide a detailed asymptotic study of gradient flow trajectories and their implicit optimization bias when minimizing the exponential loss over diagonal linear networks. This is the simplest model displaying a transition between kernel and non-kernel (rich or active) regimes. We show how the transition is controlled by the relationship between the initialization scale and how accurately we minimize the training loss. Our results indicate that some limit behaviors of gradient descent only kick in at ridiculous training accuracies (well beyond $10^{-100}$). Moreover, the implicit bias at reasonable initialization scales and training accuracies is more complex and not captured by these limits.
The dynamic ensemble selection of classifiers is an effective approach for processing label-imbalanced data classifications. However, such a technique is prone to overfitting, owing to the lack of regularization methods and the dependence of the aforementioned technique on local geometry. In this study, focusing on binary imbalanced data classification, a novel dynamic ensemble method, namely adaptive ensemble of classifiers with regularization (AER), is proposed, to overcome the stated limitations. The method solves the overfitting problem through implicit regularization. Specifically, it leverages the properties of stochastic gradient descent to obtain the solution with the minimum norm, thereby achieving regularization; furthermore, it interpolates the ensemble weights by exploiting the global geometry of data to further prevent overfitting. According to our theoretical proofs, the seemingly complicated AER paradigm, in addition to its regularization capabilities, can actually reduce the asymptotic time and memory complexities of several other algorithms. We evaluate the proposed AER method on seven benchmark imbalanced datasets from the UCI machine learning repository and one artificially generated GMM-based dataset with five variations. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the major existing algorithms based on multiple metrics in most cases, and two hypothesis tests (McNemars and Wilcoxon tests) verify the statistical significance further. In addition, the proposed method has other preferred properties such as special advantages in dealing with highly imbalanced data, and it pioneers the research on the regularization for dynamic ensemble methods.