Batchless Normalization: How to Normalize Activations Across Instances with Minimal Memory Requirements

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Berger, Benjamin, Cetina, Victor Uc
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2022
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author Berger, Benjamin
Cetina, Victor Uc
author_facet Berger, Benjamin
Cetina, Victor Uc
contents In training neural networks, batch normalization has many benefits, not all of them entirely understood. But it also has some drawbacks. Foremost is arguably memory consumption, as computing the batch statistics requires all instances within the batch to be processed simultaneously, whereas without batch normalization it would be possible to process them one by one while accumulating the weight gradients. Another drawback is that that distribution parameters (mean and standard deviation) are unlike all other model parameters in that they are not trained using gradient descent but require special treatment, complicating implementation. In this paper, I show a simple and straightforward way to address these issues. The idea, in short, is to add terms to the loss that, for each activation, cause the minimization of the negative log likelihood of a Gaussian distribution that is used to normalize the activation. Among other benefits, this will hopefully contribute to the democratization of AI research by means of lowering the hardware requirements for training larger models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2212_14729
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Batchless Normalization: How to Normalize Activations Across Instances with Minimal Memory Requirements
Berger, Benjamin
Cetina, Victor Uc
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
I.2.6
In training neural networks, batch normalization has many benefits, not all of them entirely understood. But it also has some drawbacks. Foremost is arguably memory consumption, as computing the batch statistics requires all instances within the batch to be processed simultaneously, whereas without batch normalization it would be possible to process them one by one while accumulating the weight gradients. Another drawback is that that distribution parameters (mean and standard deviation) are unlike all other model parameters in that they are not trained using gradient descent but require special treatment, complicating implementation. In this paper, I show a simple and straightforward way to address these issues. The idea, in short, is to add terms to the loss that, for each activation, cause the minimization of the negative log likelihood of a Gaussian distribution that is used to normalize the activation. Among other benefits, this will hopefully contribute to the democratization of AI research by means of lowering the hardware requirements for training larger models.
title Batchless Normalization: How to Normalize Activations Across Instances with Minimal Memory Requirements
topic Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.14729