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Related papers: A Mean Field Theory of Batch Normalization

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Gradient dynamics play a central role in determining the stability and generalization of deep neural networks. In this work, we provide an empirical analysis of how variance and standard deviation of gradients evolve during training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Vincent-Daniel Yun

In the mean field regime, neural networks are appropriately scaled so that as the width tends to infinity, the learning dynamics tends to a nonlinear and nontrivial dynamical limit, known as the mean field limit. This lends a way to study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Huy Tuan Pham , Phan-Minh Nguyen

We develop a mathematically rigorous framework for multilayer neural networks in the mean field regime. As the network's widths increase, the network's learning trajectory is shown to be well captured by a meaningful and dynamically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Phan-Minh Nguyen , Huy Tuan Pham

In this work, we propose a notion of practical learnability grounded in finite sample settings, and develop a conjugate learning theoretical framework based on convex conjugate duality to characterize this learnability property. Building on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-20 Binchuan Qi

It is a common assumption that the activation of different layers in neural networks follow Gaussian distribution. This distribution can be transformed using normalization techniques, such as batch-normalization, increasing convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Andras Horvath , Jalal Al-afandi

In this paper, we provide the first precise distributional characterization of gradient descent iterates for general multi-layer neural networks under the canonical single-index regression model, in the `finite-width proportional regime'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Qiyang Han , Masaaki Imaizumi

The skip-connections used in residual networks have become a standard architecture choice in deep learning due to the increased training stability and generalization performance with this architecture, although there has been limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-08 Spencer Frei , Yuan Cao , Quanquan Gu

The problem of vanishing and exploding gradients has been a long-standing obstacle that hinders the effective training of neural networks. Despite various tricks and techniques that have been employed to alleviate the problem in practice,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Yao Lu , Stephen Gould , Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan

The key to generalization is controlling the complexity of the network. However, there is no obvious control of complexity -- such as an explicit regularization term -- in the training of deep networks for classification. We will show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Andrzej Banburski , Qianli Liao , Brando Miranda , Lorenzo Rosasco , Fernanda De La Torre , Jack Hidary , Tomaso Poggio

While the authors of Batch Normalization (BN) identify and address an important problem involved in training deep networks-- \textit{Internal Covariate Shift}-- the current solution has certain drawbacks. For instance, BN depends on batch…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-21 Devansh Arpit , Yingbo Zhou , Hung Ngo , Venu Govindaraju

Training deep neural networks with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) can often achieve zero training loss on real-world tasks although the optimization landscape is known to be highly non-convex. To understand the success of SGD for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-15 Yiping Lu , Chao Ma , Yulong Lu , Jianfeng Lu , Lexing Ying

\emph{Batch normalization} is a successful building block of neural network architectures. Yet, it is not well understood. A neural network layer with batch normalization comprises three components that affect the representation induced by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Ido Nachum , Marco Bondaschi , Michael Gastpar , Anatoly Khina

A key component of most neural network architectures is the use of normalization layers, such as Batch Normalization. Despite its common use and large utility in optimizing deep architectures, it has been challenging both to generically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Cecilia Summers , Michael J. Dinneen

We introduce a general theoretical framework, designed for the study of gradient optimisation of deep neural networks, that encompasses ubiquitous architecture choices including batch normalisation, weight normalisation and skip…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Lachlan Ewen MacDonald , Jack Valmadre , Hemanth Saratchandran , Simon Lucey

Normalization techniques have only recently begun to be exploited in supervised learning tasks. Batch normalization exploits mini-batch statistics to normalize the activations. This was shown to speed up training and result in better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-08 Mengye Ren , Renjie Liao , Raquel Urtasun , Fabian H. Sinz , Richard S. Zemel

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) are difficult to train, and suffer from drop of accuracy. It appears in practice that BNNs fail to train in the absence of Batch Normalization (BatchNorm) layer. We find the main role of BatchNorm is to avoid…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-30 Eyyüb Sari , Mouloud Belbahri , Vahid Partovi Nia

Batch normalization is currently the most widely used variant of internal normalization for deep neural networks. Additional work has shown that the normalization of weights and additional conditioning as well as the normalization of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Wolfgang Fuhl , Enkelejda Kasneci

Training very deep neural networks requires controlling the propagation of magnitudes across depth. Without such control, activations and gradients may vanish, explode, or enter unstable regimes that make optimization fail. Modern…

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) combine the expressive power of deep learning with the advantages of Bayesian formalism. In recent years, the analysis of wide, deep BNNs has provided theoretical insight into their priors and posteriors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Beau Coker , Wessel P. Bruinsma , David R. Burt , Weiwei Pan , Finale Doshi-Velez

Batch normalization was introduced in 2015 to speed up training of deep convolution networks by normalizing the activations across the current batch to have zero mean and unity variance. The results presented here show an interesting aspect…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-02-22 Mohamed Hajaj , Duncan Gillies