Elliptic Loss Regularization

Ali Hasan, Haoming Yang, Yuting Ng, Vahid Tarokh

Keywords: regularizer, loss landscape, diffusion, elliptic

TL;DR: We propose a sampling based regularizer that constrains the loss as a function of inputs to satisfy an elliptic operator, giving favorable theoretical and empirical properties.

Abstract: Regularizing neural networks is important for anticipating model behavior in regions of the data space that are not well represented. In this work, we propose a regularization technique for enforcing a level of smoothness in the mapping between the input space and the loss. We specify the level of regularity by requiring that the loss of the network satisfies an elliptic operator over the data domain. To do this, we modify the usual empirical risk minimization objective such that we instead minimize a new objective that satisfies an elliptic operator over points within the domain. This allows us to use existing theory on elliptic operators to anticipate the behavior of the error for points outside the training set. We propose a tractable computational method that approximates the behavior of the elliptic operator while being computationally efficient. Finally, we analyze the properties of the proposed regularization to understand the performance on common problems of distribution shift and group imbalance. Numerical experiments empirically confirm the promise of the proposed regularization technique.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Submission Number: 10309