Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles

Philip Bachman; Ouais Alsharif; Doina Precup

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arXiv · 1412.4864

Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles

Philip Bachman·Ouais Alsharif·Doina Precup

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Abstract

We formalize the notion of a pseudo-ensemble, a (possibly infinite) collection of child models spawned from a parent model by perturbing it according to some noise process. E.g., dropout (Hinton et. al, 2012) in a deep neural network trains a pseudo-ensemble of child subnetworks generated by randomly masking nodes in the parent network. We present a novel regularizer based on making the behavior of a pseudo-ensemble robust with respect to the noise process generating it. In the fully-supervised setting, our regularizer matches the performance of dropout. But, unlike dropout, our regularizer naturally extends to the semi-supervised setting, where it produces state-of-the-art results. We provide a case study in which we transform the Recursive Neural Tensor Network of (Socher et. al, 2013) into a pseudo-ensemble, which significantly improves its performance on a real-world sentiment analysis benchmark.

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stat.ML cs.LG cs.NE

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Philip Bachman, Ouais Alsharif, Doina Precup. 2014-12-16. Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles. https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.4864

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