Stochastic Weight Matrix-based Regularization Methods for Deep Neural Networks

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to introduce two widely applicable regularization methods based on the direct modification of weight matrices. The first method, Weight Reinitialization, utilizes a simplified Bayesian assumption with partially resetting a sparse subset of the parameters. The second one, Weight Shuffling, introduces an entropy- and weight distribution-invariant non-white noise to the parameters. The latter can also be interpreted as an ensemble approach. The proposed methods are evaluated on benchmark datasets, such as MNIST, CIFAR-10 or the JSB Chorales database, and also on time series modeling tasks. We report gains both regarding performance and entropy of the analyzed networks. We also made our code available as a GitHub repository (https://github.com/rpatrik96/lod-wmm-2019).