Norm matters: efficient and accurate normalization schemes in deep networks
E Hoffer, R Banner, I Golan… - Advances in Neural …, 2018 - proceedings.neurips.cc
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2018•proceedings.neurips.cc
Over the past few years, Batch-Normalization has been commonly used in deep networks,
allowing faster training and high performance for a wide variety of applications. However,
the reasons behind its merits remained unanswered, with several shortcomings that
hindered its use for certain tasks. In this work, we present a novel view on the purpose and
function of normalization methods and weight-decay, as tools to decouple weights' norm
from the underlying optimized objective. This property highlights the connection between …
allowing faster training and high performance for a wide variety of applications. However,
the reasons behind its merits remained unanswered, with several shortcomings that
hindered its use for certain tasks. In this work, we present a novel view on the purpose and
function of normalization methods and weight-decay, as tools to decouple weights' norm
from the underlying optimized objective. This property highlights the connection between …
Abstract
Over the past few years, Batch-Normalization has been commonly used in deep networks, allowing faster training and high performance for a wide variety of applications. However, the reasons behind its merits remained unanswered, with several shortcomings that hindered its use for certain tasks. In this work, we present a novel view on the purpose and function of normalization methods and weight-decay, as tools to decouple weights' norm from the underlying optimized objective. This property highlights the connection between practices such as normalization, weight decay and learning-rate adjustments. We suggest several alternatives to the widely used batch-norm, using normalization in and spaces that can substantially improve numerical stability in low-precision implementations as well as provide computational and memory benefits. We demonstrate that such methods enable the first batch-norm alternative to work for half-precision implementations. Finally, we suggest a modification to weight-normalization, which improves its performance on large-scale tasks.
proceedings.neurips.cc