Penalising the biases in norm regularisation enforces sparsity

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Boursier, Etienne, Flammarion, Nicolas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Boursier, Etienne
Flammarion, Nicolas
author_facet Boursier, Etienne
Flammarion, Nicolas
contents Controlling the parameters' norm often yields good generalisation when training neural networks. Beyond simple intuitions, the relation between regularising parameters' norm and obtained estimators remains theoretically misunderstood. For one hidden ReLU layer networks with unidimensional data, this work shows the parameters' norm required to represent a function is given by the total variation of its second derivative, weighted by a $\sqrt{1+x^2}$ factor. Notably, this weighting factor disappears when the norm of bias terms is not regularised. The presence of this additional weighting factor is of utmost significance as it is shown to enforce the uniqueness and sparsity (in the number of kinks) of the minimal norm interpolator. Conversely, omitting the bias' norm allows for non-sparse solutions. Penalising the bias terms in the regularisation, either explicitly or implicitly, thus leads to sparse estimators.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2303_01353
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Penalising the biases in norm regularisation enforces sparsity
Boursier, Etienne
Flammarion, Nicolas
Machine Learning
Controlling the parameters' norm often yields good generalisation when training neural networks. Beyond simple intuitions, the relation between regularising parameters' norm and obtained estimators remains theoretically misunderstood. For one hidden ReLU layer networks with unidimensional data, this work shows the parameters' norm required to represent a function is given by the total variation of its second derivative, weighted by a $\sqrt{1+x^2}$ factor. Notably, this weighting factor disappears when the norm of bias terms is not regularised. The presence of this additional weighting factor is of utmost significance as it is shown to enforce the uniqueness and sparsity (in the number of kinks) of the minimal norm interpolator. Conversely, omitting the bias' norm allows for non-sparse solutions. Penalising the bias terms in the regularisation, either explicitly or implicitly, thus leads to sparse estimators.
title Penalising the biases in norm regularisation enforces sparsity
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01353