Batch normalization (BN) is a popular and ubiquitous method in deep learning that has been shown to decrease training time and improve generalization performance of neural networks. Despite its success, BN is not theoretically well understood. It is
not suitable for use with very small mini-batch sizes or online learning. In this paper, we propose a new method called Batch Normalization Preconditioning (BNP). Instead of applying normalization explicitly through a batch normalization layer as is done in BN, BNP applies normalization by conditioning the parameter gradients directly during training. This is designed to improve the Hessian matrix of the loss function and hence convergence during training. One benefit is that BNP is not constrained on the mini-batch size and works in the online learning setting. Furthermore, its connection to BN provides theoretical insights on how BN improves training and how BN is applied to special architectures such as convolutional neural networks.
In recent years, knowledge graphs have been widely applied to organize data in a uniform way and enhance many tasks that require knowledge, for example, online shopping which has greatly facilitated peoples life. As a backbone for online shopping pla
tforms, we built a billion-scale e-commerce product knowledge graph for various item knowledge services such as item recommendation. However, such knowledge services usually include tedious data selection and model design for knowledge infusion, which might bring inappropriate results. Thus, to avoid this problem, we propose a Pre-trained Knowledge Graph Model (PKGM) for our billion-scale e-commerce product knowledge graph, providing item knowledge services in a uniform way for embedding-based models without accessing triple data in the knowledge graph. Notably, PKGM could also complete knowledge graphs during servicing, thereby overcoming the common incompleteness issue in knowledge graphs. We test PKGM in three knowledge-related tasks including item classification, same item identification, and recommendation. Experimental results show PKGM successfully improves the performance of each task.
Recent neural-based aspect-based sentiment analysis approaches, though achieving promising improvement on benchmark datasets, have reported suffering from poor robustness when encountering confounder such as non-target aspects. In this paper, we take
a causal view to addressing this issue. We propose a simple yet effective method, namely, Sentiment Adjustment (SENTA), by applying a backdoor adjustment to disentangle those confounding factors. Experimental results on the Aspect Robustness Test Set (ARTS) dataset demonstrate that our approach improves the performance while maintaining accuracy in the original test set.
