The recently developed Layer Normalization method addresses the same problem as Batch Normalization, but with lower computational overhead and no dependence on the batch so it can be applied consistently during training and testing.
My question is, is layer normalization always better than batch normalization, or are there still some cases where batch normalization can be beneficial?
In the paper of Layer Normalization it says that Batch Normalization works better for Convolutional neural networks. Therefore, it depends on the application type. It gives a reason for this: if each neuron gives similar contributions then shifting and scaling will work well, however, in convnets this is not the case, since at the boundaries of an image the activities of neurons are very different.
So try to apply it only to fully connected layers and RNN's. Although, at least for the former, BN could also potentially perform better than LN depending on the batch size and problem type.
Related
I think convolution layers should be fully connected (see this and this). That is, each feature map should be connected to all feature maps in the previous layer. However, when I looked at this CNN visualization, the second convolution layer is not fully connected to the first. Specifically, each feature map in the second layer is connected to 3~6 (all) feature maps in the first layer, and I don't see any pattern in it. The questions are
Is it canonical/standard to fully connect convolution layers?
What's the rational for the partial connections in the visualization?
Am I missing something here?
Neural networks have the remarkable property that knowledge is not stored anywhere specifically, but in a distributed sense. If you take a working network, you can often cut out large parts and still get a network that works approximately the same.
A related effect is that the exact layout is not very critical. ReLu and Sigmoid (tanh) activation functions are mathematically very different, but both work quite well. Similarly, the exact number of nodes in a layer doesn't really matter.
Fundamentally, this relates to the fact that in training you optimize all weights to minimize your error function, or at least find a local minimum. As long as there are sufficient weights and those are sufficiently independent, you can optimize the error function.
There is another effect to take into account, though. With too many weights and not enough training data, you cannot optimize the network well. Regularization only helps so much. A key insight in CNN's is that they have less weights than a fully connected network, because nodes in a CNN are connected only to a small local neighborhood of nodes in the prior layer.
So, this particular CNN has even less connections than a CNN in which all feature maps are connected, and therefore less weights. That allows you to have more and/or bigger maps for a given amount of data. Is that the best solution? Perhaps - choosing the best layout is still a bit of a black art. But it's not a priori unreasonable.
I am designing a neural network and am trying to determine if I should write it in such a way that each neuron is its own 'process' in Erlang, or if I should just go with C++ and run a network in one thread (I would still use all my cores by running an instance of each network in its own thread).
Is there a good reason to give up the speed of C++ for the asynchronous neurons that Erlang offers?
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do. An artificial neural network is essentially represented by the weight of the connections between nodes. The nodes themselves don't exist in isolation; their values are only calculated (at least in feed-forward networks) through the forward-propagation algorithm, when it is given input.
The backpropagation algorithm for updating weights is definitely parallelizable, but that doesn't seem to be what you're describing.
The usefulness of having neurons in a Neural Network (NN), is to have a multi-dimension matrix which coefficients you want to handle ( to train them, to change them, to adapt them little by little, so as they fit well to the problem you want to solve). On this matrix you can apply numerical methods (proven and efficient) so as to find an acceptable solution, in an acceptable time.
IMHO, with NN (namely with back-propagation training method), the goal is to have a matrix which is efficient both at run-time/predict-time, and at training time.
I don't grasp the point of having asynchronous neurons. What would it offers ? what issue would it solve ?
Maybe you could explain clearly what problem you would solve putting them asynchronous ?
I am indeed inverting your question: what do you want to gain with asynchronicity regarding traditional NN techniques ?
It would depend upon your use case: the neural network computational model and your execution environment. Here is a recent paper (2014) by Plotnikova et al, that uses "Erlang and platform Erlang/OTP with predefined base implementation of actor model functions" and a new model developed by the authors that they describe as “one neuron—one process” using "Gravitation Search Algorithm" for training:
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-06764-3_52
To briefly cite their abstract, "The paper develops asynchronous distributed modification of this algorithm and presents the results of experiments. The proposed architecture shows the performance increase for distributed systems with different environment parameters (high-performance cluster and local network with a slow interconnection bus)."
Also, most other answers here reference a computational model that uses matrix operations for the base of training and simulation, for which the authors of this paper compare by saying, "this case neural network model [ie matrix operations based] becomes fully mathematical and its original nature (from neural networks biological prototypes) gets lost"
The tests were run on three types of systems;
IBM cluster is represented as 15 virtual machines.
Distributed system deployed to the local network is represented as 15 physical machines.
Hybrid system is based on the system 2 but each physical machine has four processor cores.
They provide the following concrete results, "The presented results evidence a good distribution ability of gravitation search, especially for large networks (801 and more neurons). Acceleration depends on the node count almost linearly. If we use 15 nodes we can get about eight times acceleration of the training process."
Finally, they conclude regarding their model, "The model includes three abstraction levels: NNET, MLP and NEURON. Such architecture allows encapsulating some general features on general levels and some specific for the considered neural networks features on special levels. Asynchronous message passing between levels allow to differentiate synchronous and asynchronous parts of training and simulation algorithms and, as a result, to improve the use of resources."
It depends what you are after.
2nd Generation of Neural Networks are synchronous. They perform computations on an input-output basis without a delay, and can be trained either through reinforcement or back-propagation. This is the prevailing type of ANN at the moment and the easiest to get started with if you are trying to solve a problem via machine learning, lots of literature and examples available.
3rd Generation of Neural Networks (so-called "Spiking Neural Networks") are asynchronous. Signals propagate internally through the network as a chain-reaction of spiking events, and can create interesting patterns and oscillations depending on the shape of the network. While they model biological brains more closely they are also harder to make use of in a practical setting.
I think that async computation for NNs might prove beneficial for the (recognition) performance. In fact, the result might be similar (maybe less pronounced) to using dropout.
But a straight-forward implementation of async NNs would be much slower, because for synchronous NNs you can use linear algebra libraries, which make good use of vectorization or GPUs.
I'm trying to classify hotel image data using Convolutional neural network..
Below are some highlights:
Image preprocessing:
converting to gray-scale
resizing all images to same resolution
normalizing image data
finding pca components
Convolutional neural network:
Input- 32*32
convolution- 16 filters, 3*3 filter size
pooling- 2*2 filter size
dropout- dropping with 0.5 probability
fully connected- 256 units
dropout- dropping with 0.5 probability
output- 8 classes
Libraries used:
Lasagne
nolearn
But, I'm getting less accuracy on test data which is around 28% only.
Any possible reason for such less accuracy? Any suggested improvement?
Thanks in advance.
There are several possible reasons for low accuracy on test data, so without more information and a healthy amount of experimentation, it will be impossible to provide a concrete answer. Having said that, there are a few points worth mentioning:
As #lejlot mentioned in the comments, the PCA pre-processing step is suspicious. The fundamental CNN architecture is designed to require minimal pre-processing, and it's crucial that the basic structure of the image remains intact. This is because CNNs need to be able to find useful, spatially-local features.
For detecting complex objects from image data, it's likely that you'll benefit from more convolutional layers. Chances are, given the simple architecture you've described, that it simply doesn't possess the necessary expressiveness to handle the classification task.
Also, you mention you apply dropout after the convolutional layer. In general, the research I've seen indicates that dropout is not particularly effective on convolutional layers. I personally would recommend removing it to see if it has any impact. If you do wind up needing regularization on your convolutional layers, (which in my experience is often unnecessary since the shared kernels often already act as a powerful regularizer), you might consider stochastic pooling.
Among the most important tips I can give is to build a solid mechanism for measuring the quality of the model and then experiment. Try modifying the architecture and then tuning hyper-parameters to see what yields the best results. In particular, make sure to monitor training loss vs. validation loss so that you can identify when the model begins overfitting.
After 2012 Imagenet, all convolutional neural networks which performs good(state of the art) are adding more convolutional neural network, they even use zero padding to increase the convolutional neural network.
Increase the number of convolutional neural network.
Some says that dropout is not that effective on CNN, however it is not bad to use, but
You should lower the dropout value, you should try it(May be 0.2).
Data should be analysed. If it is low,
You should use data augmentation techniques.
If you have more data in one of the labels,
You are stuck with the imbalanced data problem. But you should not consider it for now.
You can
Fine-Tune from VGG-Net or some other CNN's should be considered.
Also, don't convert to grayscale, after image-to-array transformation, you should just divide 225.
I think that you learned CNN from some tutorial(MNIST) and you think that you should turn it to grayscale.
Given two layers of a neural network that have a 2D representation, i.e. fields of activation. I'd like to connect each neuron of the lower layer to the near neurons of the upper layer, say within a certain radius. Is this possible with TensorFlow?
This is similar to a convolution, but the weight kernels should not be tied. I'm trying to avoid connecting both layers fully first and masking out most of the parameters, in order to keep the number of parameters low.
I don't see a simple way to do this with existing TensorFlow ops efficiently, but there might be some tricks with sparse things. However, ops for efficient locally connected, non-convolutional neural net layers would be very useful, so you might want to file a feature request as a GitHub issue.
I was looking for an automatic way to decide how many layers should I apply to my network depends on data and computer configuration. I searched in web, but I could not find anything. Maybe my keywords or looking ways are wrong.
Do you have any idea?
The number of layers, or depth, of a neural network is one of its hyperparameters.
This means that it is a quantity that can not be learned from the data, but you should choose it before trying to fit your dataset. According to Bengio,
We define a hyper-
parameter for a learning algorithm A as a variable to
be set prior to the actual application of A to the data,
one that is not directly selected by the learning algo-
rithm itself.
There are three main approaches to find out the optimal value for an hyperparameter. The first two are well explained in the paper I linked.
Manual search. Using well-known black magic, the researcher choose the optimal value through try-and-error.
Automatic search. The researcher relies on an automated routine in order to speed up the search.
Bayesian optimization.
More specifically, adding more layers to a deep neural network is likely to improve the performance (reduce generalization error), up to a certain number when it overfits the training data.
So, in practice, you should train your ConvNet with, say, 4 layers, try adding one hidden layer and train again, until you see some overfitting. Of course, some strong regularization techniques (such as dropout) is required.