Neural Collapse for Cross-entropy Class-Imbalanced Learning with Unconstrained ReLU Feature Model

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dang, Hien, Tran, Tho, Nguyen, Tan, Ho, Nhat
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911907138502656
author Dang, Hien
Tran, Tho
Nguyen, Tan
Ho, Nhat
author_facet Dang, Hien
Tran, Tho
Nguyen, Tan
Ho, Nhat
contents The current paradigm of training deep neural networks for classification tasks includes minimizing the empirical risk that pushes the training loss value towards zero, even after the training error has been vanished. In this terminal phase of training, it has been observed that the last-layer features collapse to their class-means and these class-means converge to the vertices of a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF). This phenomenon is termed as Neural Collapse (NC). To theoretically understand this phenomenon, recent works employ a simplified unconstrained feature model to prove that NC emerges at the global solutions of the training problem. However, when the training dataset is class-imbalanced, some NC properties will no longer be true. For example, the class-means geometry will skew away from the simplex ETF when the loss converges. In this paper, we generalize NC to imbalanced regime for cross-entropy loss under the unconstrained ReLU feature model. We prove that, while the within-class features collapse property still holds in this setting, the class-means will converge to a structure consisting of orthogonal vectors with different lengths. Furthermore, we find that the classifier weights are aligned to the scaled and centered class-means with scaling factors depend on the number of training samples of each class, which generalizes NC in the class-balanced setting. We empirically prove our results through experiments on practical architectures and dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_02058
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Collapse for Cross-entropy Class-Imbalanced Learning with Unconstrained ReLU Feature Model
Dang, Hien
Tran, Tho
Nguyen, Tan
Ho, Nhat
Machine Learning
The current paradigm of training deep neural networks for classification tasks includes minimizing the empirical risk that pushes the training loss value towards zero, even after the training error has been vanished. In this terminal phase of training, it has been observed that the last-layer features collapse to their class-means and these class-means converge to the vertices of a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF). This phenomenon is termed as Neural Collapse (NC). To theoretically understand this phenomenon, recent works employ a simplified unconstrained feature model to prove that NC emerges at the global solutions of the training problem. However, when the training dataset is class-imbalanced, some NC properties will no longer be true. For example, the class-means geometry will skew away from the simplex ETF when the loss converges. In this paper, we generalize NC to imbalanced regime for cross-entropy loss under the unconstrained ReLU feature model. We prove that, while the within-class features collapse property still holds in this setting, the class-means will converge to a structure consisting of orthogonal vectors with different lengths. Furthermore, we find that the classifier weights are aligned to the scaled and centered class-means with scaling factors depend on the number of training samples of each class, which generalizes NC in the class-balanced setting. We empirically prove our results through experiments on practical architectures and dataset.
title Neural Collapse for Cross-entropy Class-Imbalanced Learning with Unconstrained ReLU Feature Model
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02058