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High-Performance Large-Scale Image Recognition Without Normalization (arxiv.org)
11 points by carbocation on Feb 12, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | 3 comments on HN

In plain words: Deep image classifiers are trained without the usual batch normalization layer by automatically shrinking gradients when training gets shaky, keeping big learning rates and strong image augmentation stable. The result matches the accuracy of the best normalized network of its size while training up to 8.7 times faster.

Abstract

Batch normalization is a key component of most image classification models, but it has many undesirable properties stemming from its dependence on the batch size and interactions between examples. Although recent work has succeeded in training deep ResNets without normalization layers, these models do not match the test accuracies of the best batch-normalized networks, and are often unstable for large learning rates or strong data augmentations. In this work, we develop an adaptive gradient clipping technique which overcomes these instabilities, and design a significantly improved class of Normalizer-Free ResNets. Our smaller models match the test accuracy of an EfficientNet-B7 on ImageNet while being up to 8.7x faster to train, and our largest models attain a new state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy of 86.5%. In addition, Normalizer-Free models attain significantly better performance than their batch-normalized counterparts when finetuning on ImageNet after large-scale pre-training on a dataset of 300 million labeled images, with our best models obtaining an accuracy of 89.2%. Our code is available at https://github.com/deepmind/ deepmind-research/tree/master/nfnets

Andrew Brock, Soham De, Samuel L. Smith, Karen Simonyan
arXiv:2102.06171 · cs.CV, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Feb 11, 2021
abstract · pdf · html

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Also discussed: Feb 2021 (291 points, 83 comments)

It’s so strange to me why Google is still sharing these amazing improvements instead of just giving them in a black box. Is it because engineers would go to another organisation with the ideas?
Not just that, but often researchers care more about building their CV than working on any specific company. A job is temporary, but the papers you write are forever. As a result, part of the reason why Google could even convince these people to work for them, is because Google cultivated this culture of allowing researchers to publish their research in most cases.

I think if Google didn't do that, it's possible these employee simply wouldn't have even decided to join the company.

If you train with a batch size of 1, is there anything wrong with batch norm? I think batch norm of 1 is better termed instance normalization...