Dichotomize and Generalize: PAC-Bayesian Binary Activated Deep Neural Networks

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32 (NeurIPS 2019)

Authors

Gaël Letarte, Pascal Germain, Benjamin Guedj, Francois Laviolette

Abstract

We present a comprehensive study of multilayer neural networks with binary activation, relying on the PAC-Bayesian theory. Our contributions are twofold: (i) we develop an end-to-end framework to train a binary activated deep neural network, (ii) we provide nonvacuous PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for binary activated deep neural networks. Our results are obtained by minimizing the expected loss of an architecture-dependent aggregation of binary activated deep neural networks. Our analysis inherently overcomes the fact that binary activation function is non-differentiable. The performance of our approach is assessed on a thorough numerical experiment protocol on real-life datasets.