Related papers: Normalization and effective learning rates in rein…
The successful training of deep neural networks requires addressing challenges such as overfitting, numerical instabilities leading to divergence, and increasing variance in the residual stream. A common solution is to apply regularization…
Re-initializing a neural network during training has been observed to improve generalization in recent works. Yet it is neither widely adopted in deep learning practice nor is it often used in state-of-the-art training protocols. This…
A significant advance in accelerating neural network training has been the development of normalization methods, permitting the training of deep models both faster and with better accuracy. These advances come with practical challenges: for…
Normalization layers are a staple in state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures. They are widely believed to stabilize training, enable higher learning rate, accelerate convergence and improve generalization, though the reason for…
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…
Training state-of-the-art, deep neural networks is computationally expensive. One way to reduce the training time is to normalize the activities of the neurons. A recently introduced technique called batch normalization uses the…
Continual learning of deep neural networks is a key requirement for scaling them up to more complex applicative scenarios and for achieving real lifelong learning of these architectures. Previous approaches to the problem have considered…
Normalization layers are critical components of modern AI systems, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc. Empirically, they are known to stabilize training dynamics and improve generalization ability. However, the underlying theoretical…
Learning rate is one of the most important hyper-parameters that has a significant influence on neural network training. Learning rate schedules are widely used in real practice to adjust the learning rate according to pre-defined schedules…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has been receiving increasingly more attention thanks to its encouraging performance on a variety of control tasks. Yet, conventional regularization techniques in training neural networks (e.g., $L_2$…
Plasticity Loss is an increasingly important phenomenon that refers to the empirical observation that as a neural network is continually trained on a sequence of changing tasks, its ability to adapt to a new task diminishes over time. We…
Loss of plasticity, trainability loss, and primacy bias have been identified as issues arising when training deep neural networks on sequences of tasks -- all referring to the increased difficulty in training on new tasks. We propose to use…
Deep learning regularization techniques, such as dropout, layer normalization, or weight decay, are widely adopted in the construction of modern artificial neural networks, often resulting in more robust training processes and improved…
Regularization is typically understood as improving generalization by altering the landscape of local extrema to which the model eventually converges. Deep neural networks (DNNs), however, challenge this view: We show that removing…
Batch Normalization is a commonly used trick to improve the training of deep neural networks. These neural networks use L2 regularization, also called weight decay, ostensibly to prevent overfitting. However, we show that L2 regularization…
Weight decay is often used to ensure good generalization in the training practice of deep neural networks with batch normalization (BN-DNNs), where some convolution layers are invariant to weight rescaling due to the normalization. In this…
Deep convolutional neural networks are known to be unstable during training at high learning rate unless normalization techniques are employed. Normalizing weights or activations allows the use of higher learning rates, resulting in faster…
Many failures in deep continual and reinforcement learning are associated with increasing magnitudes of the weights, making them hard to change and potentially causing overfitting. While many methods address these learning failures, they…
Deep neural networks exploiting millions of parameters are nowadays the norm in deep learning applications. This is a potential issue because of the great amount of computational resources needed for training, and of the possible loss of…
The success of deep neural networks is in part due to the use of normalization layers. Normalization layers like Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization and Weight Normalization are ubiquitous in practice, as they improve generalization…