Adaptive Random Feature Regularization on Fine-tuning Deep Neural Networks

Shin'ya Yamaguchi, Sekitoshi Kanai, Kazuki Adachi, Daiki Chijiwa; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 23481-23490

While fine-tuning is a de facto standard method for training deep neural networks it still suffers from overfitting when using small target datasets. Previous methods improve fine-tuning performance by maintaining knowledge of the source datasets or introducing regularization terms such as contrastive loss. However these methods require auxiliary source information (e.g. source labels or datasets) or heavy additional computations. In this paper we propose a simple method called adaptive random feature regularization (AdaRand). AdaRand helps the feature extractors of training models to adaptively change the distribution of feature vectors for downstream classification tasks without auxiliary source information and with reasonable computation costs. To this end AdaRand minimizes the gap between feature vectors and random reference vectors that are sampled from class conditional Gaussian distributions. Furthermore AdaRand dynamically updates the conditional distribution to follow the currently updated feature extractors and balance the distance between classes in feature spaces. Our experiments show that AdaRand outperforms the other fine-tuning regularization requiring auxiliary source information and heavy computation costs.