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arXiv · 2510.02107

PENEX: AdaBoost-Inspired Neural Network Regularization

Klaus-Rudolf Kladny·Bernhard Schölkopf·Michael Muehlebach
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Abstract

AdaBoost sequentially fits so-called weak learners to minimize an exponential loss, which penalizes misclassified data points more severely than other loss functions like cross-entropy. Paradoxically, AdaBoost generalizes well in practice as the number of weak learners grows. In the present work, we introduce Penalized Exponential Loss (PENEX), a new formulation of the multi-class exponential loss that is theoretically grounded and, in contrast to the existing formulation, amenable to optimization via first-order methods, making it a practical objective for training neural networks. We demonstrate that PENEX effectively increases margins of data points, which can be translated into a generalization bound. Empirically, across computer vision and language tasks, PENEX improves neural network generalization in low-data regimes, matching and in some settings outperforming established regularizers at comparable computational cost. Our results highlight the potential of the exponential loss beyond its application in AdaBoost.

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Klaus-Rudolf Kladny, Bernhard Schölkopf, Michael Muehlebach. 2025-10-02. PENEX: AdaBoost-Inspired Neural Network Regularization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02107

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