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Rethinking “Batch” in BatchNorm (arxiv.org)
3 points by Hard_Space on May 20, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A common neural network layer normalizes a whole group of images together instead of one at a time, creating hidden quirks that can quietly hurt image recognition. This review catalogs those quirks and shows that fixing what goes into the batch solves most of them.

Abstract · Rethinking "Batch" in BatchNorm

BatchNorm is a critical building block in modern convolutional neural networks. Its unique property of operating on "batches" instead of individual samples introduces significantly different behaviors from most other operations in deep learning. As a result, it leads to many hidden caveats that can negatively impact model's performance in subtle ways. This paper thoroughly reviews such problems in visual recognition tasks, and shows that a key to address them is to rethink different choices in the concept of "batch" in BatchNorm. By presenting these caveats and their mitigations, we hope this review can help researchers use BatchNorm more effectively.

Yuxin Wu, Justin Johnson
arXiv:2105.07576 · cs.CV · submitted May 17, 2021
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