Cooperative Initialization based Deep Neural Network Training

Pravendra Singh, Munender Varshney, Vinay Namboodiri; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020, pp. 1141-1150

Researchers have proposed various activation functions. These activation functions help the deep network to learn non-linear behavior with a significant effect on training dynamics and task performance. The performance of these activations also depends on the initial state of the weight parameters, i.e., different initial state leads to a difference in the performance of a network. In this paper, we have proposed a cooperative initialization for training the deep network using ReLU activation function to improve the network performance. Our approach uses multiple activation functions in the initial few epochs for the update of all sets of weight parameters while training the network. These activation functions cooperate to overcome their drawbacks in the update of weight parameters, which in effect learn better "feature representation" and boost the network performance later. Cooperative initialization based training also helps in reducing the overfitting problem and does not increase the number of parameters, inference (test) time in the final model while improving the performance. Experiments show that our approach outperforms various baselines and, at the same time, performs well over various tasks such as classification and detection. The Top-1 classification accuracy of the model trained using our approach improves by 2.8% for VGG-16 and 2.1% for ResNet-56 on CIFAR-100 dataset.