Neural Network Memorization Dissection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) can easily fit a random labeling of the training data with zero training error. What is the difference between DNNs trained with random labels and the ones trained with true labels? Our paper answers this question with two contributions. First, we study the memorization properties of DNNs. Our empirical experiments shed light on how DNNs prioritize the learning of simple input patterns. In the second part, we propose to measure the similarity between what different DNNs have learned and memorized. With the proposed approach, we analyze and compare DNNs trained on data with true labels and random labels. The analysis shows that DNNs have \textit{One way to Learn} and \textit{N ways to Memorize}. We also use gradient information to gain an understanding of the analysis results.Comment: Workshop on Machine Learning with Guarantees, NeurIPS 201

Introspective Learning by Distilling Knowledge from Online Self-explanation

In recent years, many explanation methods have been proposed to explain individual classifications of deep neural networks. However, how to leverage the created explanations to improve the learning process has been less explored. As the privileged information, the explanations of a model can be used to guide the learning process of the model itself. In the community, another intensively investigated privileged information used to guide the training of a model is the knowledge from a powerful teacher model. The goal of this work is to leverage the self-explanation to improve the learning process by borrowing ideas from knowledge distillation. We start by investigating the effective components of the knowledge transferred from the teacher network to the student network. Our investigation reveals that both the responses in non-ground-truth classes and class-similarity information in teacher's outputs contribute to the success of the knowledge distillation. Motivated by the conclusion, we propose an implementation of introspective learning by distilling knowledge from online self-explanations. The models trained with the introspective learning procedure outperform the ones trained with the standard learning procedure, as well as the ones trained with different regularization methods. When compared to the models learned from peer networks or teacher networks, our models also show competitive performance and requires neither peers nor teachers

When Do Curricula Work?

Inspired by human learning, researchers have proposed ordering examples during training based on their difficulty. Both curriculum learning, exposing a network to easier examples early in training, and anti-curriculum learning, showing the most difficult examples first, have been suggested as improvements to the standard i.i.d. training. In this work, we set out to investigate the relative benefits of ordered learning. We first investigate the \emph{implicit curricula} resulting from architectural and optimization bias and find that samples are learned in a highly consistent order. Next, to quantify the benefit of \emph{explicit curricula}, we conduct extensive experiments over thousands of orderings spanning three kinds of learning: curriculum, anti-curriculum, and random-curriculum -- in which the size of the training dataset is dynamically increased over time, but the examples are randomly ordered. We find that for standard benchmark datasets, curricula have only marginal benefits, and that randomly ordered samples perform as well or better than curricula and anti-curricula, suggesting that any benefit is entirely due to the dynamic training set size. Inspired by common use cases of curriculum learning in practice, we investigate the role of limited training time budget and noisy data in the success of curriculum learning. Our experiments demonstrate that curriculum, but not anti-curriculum can indeed improve the performance either with limited training time budget or in existence of noisy data.Comment: ICLR 202