TargetDrop: A Targeted Regularization Method for Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: Dropout regularization has been widely used in deep learning but performs less effective for convolutional neural networks since the spatially correlated features allow dropped information to still flow through the networks. Some structured forms of dropout have been proposed to address this but prone to result in over or under regularization as features are dropped randomly. In this paper, we propose a targeted regularization method named TargetDrop which incorporates the attention mechanism to drop the discriminative feature units. Specifically, it masks out the target regions of the feature maps corresponding to the target channels. Experimental results compared with the other methods or applied for different networks demonstrate the regularization effect of our method.