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Survival Loss: A Neuron Death Regularizer

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Advances in Physical Agents II (WAF 2020)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1285))

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Abstract

We found that combining the L2 regularizer with Adam kills up to 60% of filters in ResNet-110 trained on CIFAR-100 as opposed to combining L2 with Momentum. It does not have a significant impact in terms of accuracy though, where both reach similar values. However, we found that this can be a serious issue if the impaired model is used as a pre-trained model for another more complex dataset (e.g. larger number of categories). This situation actually happens in continual learning. In this paper we conduct a study on the impact of dead filters in continual learning when the dataset increases its difficulty over time and more power from the network is required. Furthermore, we propose a new regularization term referred to as survival loss, that complements L2 to avoid filters to die when combined with Adam. We show that the survival loss improves accuracy in a simulated continual learning set-up, with the prospect of higher improvements as more iterations arrive.

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Correspondence to Emilio J. Almazán .

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Almazán, E.J., Tovar, J., Calle, A.d.l. (2021). Survival Loss: A Neuron Death Regularizer. In: Bergasa, L.M., Ocaña, M., Barea, R., López-Guillén, E., Revenga, P. (eds) Advances in Physical Agents II. WAF 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1285. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62579-5_21

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