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Hauptverfasser: Dauphin, Yann N., Agarwala, Atish, Mobahi, Hossein
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10809
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author Dauphin, Yann N.
Agarwala, Atish
Mobahi, Hossein
author_facet Dauphin, Yann N.
Agarwala, Atish
Mobahi, Hossein
contents Recent work has shown that methods like SAM which either explicitly or implicitly penalize second order information can improve generalization in deep learning. Seemingly similar methods like weight noise and gradient penalties often fail to provide such benefits. We show that these differences can be explained by the structure of the Hessian of the loss. First, we show that a common decomposition of the Hessian can be quantitatively interpreted as separating the feature exploitation from feature exploration. The feature exploration, which can be described by the Nonlinear Modeling Error matrix (NME), is commonly neglected in the literature since it vanishes at interpolation. Our work shows that the NME is in fact important as it can explain why gradient penalties are sensitive to the choice of activation function. Using this insight we design interventions to improve performance. We also provide evidence that challenges the long held equivalence of weight noise and gradient penalties. This equivalence relies on the assumption that the NME can be ignored, which we find does not hold for modern networks since they involve significant feature learning. We find that regularizing feature exploitation but not feature exploration yields performance similar to gradient penalties.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_10809
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neglected Hessian component explains mysteries in Sharpness regularization
Dauphin, Yann N.
Agarwala, Atish
Mobahi, Hossein
Machine Learning
Recent work has shown that methods like SAM which either explicitly or implicitly penalize second order information can improve generalization in deep learning. Seemingly similar methods like weight noise and gradient penalties often fail to provide such benefits. We show that these differences can be explained by the structure of the Hessian of the loss. First, we show that a common decomposition of the Hessian can be quantitatively interpreted as separating the feature exploitation from feature exploration. The feature exploration, which can be described by the Nonlinear Modeling Error matrix (NME), is commonly neglected in the literature since it vanishes at interpolation. Our work shows that the NME is in fact important as it can explain why gradient penalties are sensitive to the choice of activation function. Using this insight we design interventions to improve performance. We also provide evidence that challenges the long held equivalence of weight noise and gradient penalties. This equivalence relies on the assumption that the NME can be ignored, which we find does not hold for modern networks since they involve significant feature learning. We find that regularizing feature exploitation but not feature exploration yields performance similar to gradient penalties.
title Neglected Hessian component explains mysteries in Sharpness regularization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10809