Improving Robustness via Tilted Exponential Layer: A Communication-Theoretic Perspective

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Hauptverfasser: Puranik, Bhagyashree, Beirami, Ahmad, Qin, Yao, Madhow, Upamanyu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Puranik, Bhagyashree
Beirami, Ahmad
Qin, Yao
Madhow, Upamanyu
author_facet Puranik, Bhagyashree
Beirami, Ahmad
Qin, Yao
Madhow, Upamanyu
contents State-of-the-art techniques for enhancing robustness of deep networks mostly rely on empirical risk minimization with suitable data augmentation. In this paper, we propose a complementary approach motivated by communication theory, aimed at enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio at the output of a neural network layer via neural competition during learning and inference. In addition to standard empirical risk minimization, neurons compete to sparsely represent layer inputs by maximization of a tilted exponential (TEXP) objective function for the layer. TEXP learning can be interpreted as maximum likelihood estimation of matched filters under a Gaussian model for data noise. Inference in a TEXP layer is accomplished by replacing batch norm by a tilted softmax, which can be interpreted as computation of posterior probabilities for the competing signaling hypotheses represented by each neuron. After providing insights via simplified models, we show, by experimentation on standard image datasets, that TEXP learning and inference enhances robustness against noise and other common corruptions, without requiring data augmentation. Further cumulative gains in robustness against this array of distortions can be obtained by appropriately combining TEXP with data augmentation techniques. The code for all our experiments is available at https://github.com/bhagyapuranik/texp_for_robustness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_01047
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Robustness via Tilted Exponential Layer: A Communication-Theoretic Perspective
Puranik, Bhagyashree
Beirami, Ahmad
Qin, Yao
Madhow, Upamanyu
Machine Learning
Information Theory
Signal Processing
State-of-the-art techniques for enhancing robustness of deep networks mostly rely on empirical risk minimization with suitable data augmentation. In this paper, we propose a complementary approach motivated by communication theory, aimed at enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio at the output of a neural network layer via neural competition during learning and inference. In addition to standard empirical risk minimization, neurons compete to sparsely represent layer inputs by maximization of a tilted exponential (TEXP) objective function for the layer. TEXP learning can be interpreted as maximum likelihood estimation of matched filters under a Gaussian model for data noise. Inference in a TEXP layer is accomplished by replacing batch norm by a tilted softmax, which can be interpreted as computation of posterior probabilities for the competing signaling hypotheses represented by each neuron. After providing insights via simplified models, we show, by experimentation on standard image datasets, that TEXP learning and inference enhances robustness against noise and other common corruptions, without requiring data augmentation. Further cumulative gains in robustness against this array of distortions can be obtained by appropriately combining TEXP with data augmentation techniques. The code for all our experiments is available at https://github.com/bhagyapuranik/texp_for_robustness.
title Improving Robustness via Tilted Exponential Layer: A Communication-Theoretic Perspective
topic Machine Learning
Information Theory
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01047