SmoothOut: Smoothing Out Sharp Minima to Improve Generalization in Deep Learning

Related paper

This is the code of paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.07898 . In SGD, especially large-batch SGD, of deep neural networks, Some hypothesize that the convergence to sharp minima is the reason of bad generalization. In the paper, smoothout method is proposed to eliminate sharp minima in deep neural networks to improve generalization.

Tutorial to be updated soon.

Usage

python evaluate.py --model alexnet --dataset imagenet -b 100 --gpus 1 --evaluate TrainingResults/2018-03-17_11-28-33/model_best.pth.tar --ss 0.006 --mode train --no-augment

python visualize_sharpness.py --model resnet --dataset cifar10 -b 100 --gpus 1 --evaluate TrainingResults/2018-02-20_19-47-52/model_best.pth.tar  --slave-evaluate TrainingResults/2018-02-20_19-47-18/model_best.pth.tar  --no-visualize_train

python visualize2_sharpness.py --model resnet --dataset cifar10 -b 100 --gpus 1 --evaluate TrainingResults/2018-02-20_19-47-18/model_best.pth.tar  --no-visualize_train --alpha="-0.3:0.02:0.31"

python measure_sharpness.py --model cifar100_shallow --dataset cifar100 --b 100 --gpus 1 --evaluate TrainingResults/2018-02-20_14-05-28/model_best.pth.tar

Dependencies

• pytorch ('0.3.1')
• torchvision to load the datasets, perform image transforms ('0.2.0')
• pandas for logging to csv ('0.23.0')
• bokeh for training visualization conda install bokeh=0.12.0

Data

• Configure your dataset path at data.py.
• To get the ILSVRC data, you should register on their site for access: http://www.image-net.org/ and

mkdir -p pytorch-gen/imagenet
cd pytorch-gen/imagenet
ln -s ${YOUR_IMAGENET_PATH}/train/ train
ln -s ${YOUR_IMAGENET_PATH}/validation/ val

Model configuration

Network model is defined by writing a .py file in models folder, and selecting it using the model flag. Model function must be registered in models/__init__.py The model function must return a trainable network. It can also specify additional training options such optimization regime (either a dictionary or a function), and input transform modifications.

e.g for a model definition:

class Model(nn.Module):

    def __init__(self, num_classes=1000):
        super(Model, self).__init__()
        self.model = nn.Sequential(...)

        self.regime = {
            0: {'optimizer': 'SGD', 'lr': 1e-2,
                'weight_decay': 5e-4, 'momentum': 0.9},
            15: {'lr': 1e-3, 'weight_decay': 0}
        }

        self.input_transform = {
            'train': transforms.Compose([...]),
            'eval': transforms.Compose([...])
        }
    def forward(self, inputs):
        return self.model(inputs)

 def model(**kwargs):
        return Model()