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Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_5
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper proposes a novel dropout ("standout")
approach to regularization in deep networks. In contrast to the familiar
dropout (recently popularized by successes of convolutional deep networks
in work by Hinton and colleagues) the probability of a unit to drop out is
estimated by a parametric model, using the network weights. This is shown
to be equivalent to a belief network overlaying the main feed-forward
network. The paper describes a method for jointly learning the parameters
of the main network and this additional dropout belief network, and
reports on empirical evaluation showing that this is potentially a more
efficient regularization technique.
I liked the paper quite a bit.
It is well written, and the central idea seems clever, original, and
timely. It makes a lot of sense that a data-driven dropout would be more
efficient. Of course, much of the proposed framework is ad-hoc (as
admitted on ll. 424-427) but I don't hold it against the paper, since this
is currently the nature of much of the cutting edge research on deep
networks. Given the huge surge of interest in those, I am sure this paper
will generate significant interest.
I have a couple of minor
comments:
- It is unfortunate (but, again, common to the field)
that the experiments involve a fairly large number of engineering
decisions (number of units, values of learning rates, tweaking of schedule
of updating some weights in some epochs or not) that would be hard to
translate to different experiments/applications. So in that sense the
field remains largely a form of art/craft.
- The experiments are
sufficient to arouse interest in the proposed ideas, although hardly
significant (MNIST digits seem to have outlived their usefulness since
many methods now achieve statistically indistinguishable error rates near
zero, and NORB is somewhat artificial in nature). It's OK by me since
advancing state of the art on any particular application is not the point
here.
- There seems to be a connection to mixture of experts
architecture (hinted at on l. 98) and if so it would be good to discuss it
in a bit more depth.
- A cartoon level figure illustrating
different architectures used in experiments would be very helpful.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
Nice paper, on a fundamental question (regularization)
in a highly active subfield (deep learning), introducing novel and
potentially important idea. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_6
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
Summary:
"Adaptive dropout for training deep
neural networks" describes and evaluates a new neural network
architecture that combines a sigmoid belief network and a conventional
feedforward network.
Pro: * very strong results on MNIST and
NORB * novel model that generalizes dropout to full neural networks
Con: * little theoretical insight * empirical results
somewhat scattered * training algorithm not perfectly clear
Quality:
The strongest element of this work, to me, is
the empirical results. The performance of this non-convolutional model
on MNIST and NORB is impressive.
The intuition that the stochastic
units implement some Bayesian sampling over models doesn't inspire me
personally, but I don't object to the hypothesizing.
The learning
algorithm appears to require more computation per iteration than
standard backprop and SGD, the authors should add some discussion of
training speed to the results / discussion.
The experimental
results are not obviously focussed on any particular claim. For
example, the proposed method is a stochastic neural network, but it is
never simply trained as a supervised model. Why is it trained first as
an autoencoder? How much autoencoder training was necessary? Several
hyperparamters governing the optimization process appear to have been
tuned, were these tuned separately for the different model
architectures? If they weren't, then what can the reader draw from the
model comparison scores? For me, the experiment section mainly says
that using your model, Nesterov momentum, AE pre-training, and careful
hyperparameter optimization, you got a tweaked our fully connected
model to get .8 on MNIST and 5.8 on NORB.
Using \alpha and \beta
to tie \pi to 'w' and then also using ReLU units for the
non-stochastic parts of the model makes it feel like there's a much
simpler way to explain what you've done: namely, you have used a new
activaction function that is a ReLU with some stochastic noise added
around the inflection point. This may well be a good way (like
maxout?) to get the learning benefits of linear units without losing
so many units because they just turn "off" and can't come back on
again.
Clarity:
The paper is well-organized, following
the standard presentation for papers of this type.
"principal"
-> principle "each experts" -> each expert
Figures 1 and
2 are not clear to me, what am I supposed to see? Are the images in
Figure 1 sorted by class label for example? Why does the leftmost one
look nothing like a 0 or a 1, and the rightmost one look nothing like
a 9 or 0.
In describing the learning algorithm, could the
authors explain the procedure for training \pi in more detail? It
isn't clear to me. What is the free energy here, and how is it
possible to estimate each m_j's contribution fast enough for learning?
Section 4 is confusing, because after sketching one procedure for
training \pi in Section 3, this Section throws it away and makes \pi
an affine transformation of 'w'. It's not very good to say "we found
this technique works very well in practice", I'd like to see the
evidence for myself (that's what this paper's for). If it doesn't make
any difference in terms of end-of-training accuracy, then why did you
tie them?
Why are not showing your CIFAR-10 results?
In
line 190, you say that \alpha and \beta are "learnt" but then in line 194
these are described as hyper-parameters. Which is it?
If
\pi and w are tied by \alpha and \beta, then wouldn't a single "activation
function" plot be a clearer way to explain the effect of \alpha and
\beta than Figure 3? Figure 3 is tough to interpret for me, I don't
know what to make of activation histograms.
Originality:
The proposed model is novel.
Significance:
At
least some members of the NIPS community love new stochastic/neural
architectures that work well and no one really understands why, that
faction will be intrigued by this paper.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
Paper presents a new model that generalizes dropout
training to multilayer networks, and improves best known non-convolutional
scores on MNIST and NORB, but learning algorithm is not explained
especially clearly and there is very little theoretical
insight. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_7
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
Summary.
The paper introduces a new method
called standout. The idea: a binary belief network is overlaid on a neural
network, and is used to decrease the information content of its hidden
units by selectively setting activities to zero. It's basically a more
controlled way of applying dropout to a neural network (Krizhevsky et al.,
2012), by learning the dropout probability function for each neuron.
Quality / Clarity.
The work and report are of good
quality, and the description of the model is clear.
Originality /
Significance.
The dropout paper from Krizhevsky et al., 2012, has
had quite an impact on the community (very general idea, which I believe
has already helped lots of people improve their results / models). I
expect many papers to build on this idea, and this is of course of them.
Where most derivative papers would focus on understanding what dropout
does, this paper focuses on extending the core idea by making the
probability function learned, and dependent on the input activations of
each neuron. Being myself quite interested and intrigued by dropout, I
think this is a paper worth publishing. Q2: Please
summarize your review in 1-2 sentences
The paper extends the dropout algorithm by proposing
to learn the dropout probability function. It is an elegant idea, with
satisfying experimental results (performance improvement on two standard
datasets, MNIST and NORB).
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
We thank the reviewers for carefully reading our paper
and providing helpful feedback. We are glad that in general the reviews
are quite positive and that the reviewers appreciated our idea and the
record-breaking empirical results. The quality scores are 8, 6 and 7 and
the main feedback is that we should more clearly explain the algorithm and
the details of the experiments, such as engineering decisions. As outlined
below, we have modified the main text to address this feedback as well as
the more minor concerns; we hope this information will assist the
reviewers and area chair in making a decision.
The learning
algorithms
We have modified the main text to more clearly explain
how the algorithms work. In the first case, the standout network and the
neural network have separate parameters, whereas in the second case the
parameters are tied. A sample for the mask variables is drawn using the
standout network, and then forward and backward propagations are used to
compute the updates for connections to units that were not dropped out.
For untied parameters, the standout network updates are obtained by
sampling the mask variables using the current standout network, performing
forward propagation in the neural network, and computing the data
likelihood. The mask variables are sequentially perturbed by combining the
standout network probability for the mask variable with the data
likelihood under the neural network, using a partial forward propagation.
The resulting mask variables are used as complete data for updating the
standout network. We found empirically that the standout network
parameters trained in this way are quite similar (although not identical)
to the neural network parameters, up to an affine transformation. This
motivated the second algorithm, where the neural network parameters are
trained as described above, but the standout parameters are set to an
affine transformation with hyperparameters alpha and beta. These
hyperparameters are determined as explained below.
Speed of
the algorithm
We have modified the main text to more clearly
explain how the computation times compare to those of standard dropout.
The first algorithm takes O(n^2) time, whereas the second algorithm takes
O(kn) time where k is the number of hyper parameter settings and n is the
number of hidden units. For an AE-784-1000-784 architecture, one epoch of
tied-weight standout learning for 50,000 training cases takes 1.73 seconds
on a GTX 580 GPU, in contrast to 1.66 seconds for standard dropout.
Experimental details and engineering choices
We have modified the main text to more clearly explain the
engineering choices and hyperparameter search ranges, and also to clear up
the confusion in section 4 about how alpha and beta were set. We made a
small number of engineering choices that are consistent with previous
publications in the area, so that our results are comparable to the
literature. We used ReLU units, a two-layer architecture, a linear
momentum schedule, and an exponentially decaying learning rate (c.f. Nair
et al 2009; Vincent et al. 2010; Rifai et al 2011; Hinton et al 2012). We
used cross-validation to search over hyperparameters, which included the
number of hidden units (500,1000,1500,2000), the learning rate (0.0001,
0.0003, 0.001, 0.003, 0.01, 0.03) and the values of alpha and beta (-2,
-1.5, -1, -.5, 0, .5, 1, 1.5, 2). Using cross-validation to select
hyperparameters has been shown to translate across application domains,
including vision, speech and natural language processing. Because we used
fully-connected architectures, we didn't have to make choices for filter
widths (Lee et al 2009) or recurrent connectivity (Socher et al 2011).
Pretraining vs discriminative training
In the
initial manuscript, we only reported results obtained by standout using
pretraining. We did perform experiments using discriminative training, but
the classification performance of standout was not distinguishable from
dropout. Here are the results:
Error rate on MNIST
model
regularization Error 784-1000-1000-10 dropout 1.14 +/- 0.11
784-1000-1000-10 standout 1.17 +/- 0.07
Error rate on NORB
model regularization Error 8976-4000-4000-5 dropout 14.14 +/-
0.45 8976-4000-4000-5 standout 13.86 +/- 0.52
We note that
without using a convolutional architecture, the discriminative training
results for NORB are not very competitive, for both standout and dropout.
We agree that it is important to report the above results and we have
modified the main text accordingly.
Minor comments
Regarding the CIFAR-10 dataset, the reason that we didn't
include it in this paper is that in order to obtain competitive results, a
convolutional or patch-pooling architecture with special topology is
needed, which is beyond the scope of the present paper. Nonetheless, for
your interest, we have recently obtained an efficient GPU implementation
of a convolutional standout architecture and we are able to achieve an
error rate of 14.3% using two convolutional layers followed by logistic
regression.
Regarding the comment on the relationship of
standout to a mixture of experts, we will comment on this in the revised
manuscript.
Reviewer_7: Your selection of "Low impact" seems
to be inconsistent with the text of of your review: "It is an elegant
idea, with satisfying experimental results (performance improvement on two
standard datasets, MNIST and NORB)."
To address the request
that we show plots of the activation and standout functions so as to
understand the effect of the hyperparameters, we have included thumbnail
plots in figure 3 in the revised manuscript.
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