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Understanding the Robustness of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) to Label Noise


Keskeiset käsitteet
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) achieves significantly higher test accuracy than stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in the presence of random label noise, by preferentially upweighting the gradient contribution of clean examples during early training.
Tiivistelmä

The paper investigates why Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is more robust to label noise than stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The key insights are:

  1. In linear models, SAM's perturbation explicitly upweights the gradient contribution of low-loss (clean) examples, keeping their gradients dominant even as training progresses and noisy examples start to fit. This allows SAM to achieve higher test accuracy by prioritizing learning more clean examples before overfitting to noise.

  2. In deep neural networks, while SAM's logit scale term also exhibits a similar upweighting effect, the authors find that this is not the main driver of SAM's label noise robustness. Instead, the key effect comes from how SAM's perturbation impacts the network Jacobian.

  3. Analyzing a 2-layer deep linear network, the authors show that the Jacobian-only version of SAM (J-SAM) induces a regularization on the norm of the final layer weights and intermediate activations. This implicit regularization helps constrain the network output, keeping the loss of clean examples high even as their training accuracy increases.

  4. Motivated by this analysis, the authors find that simpler regularization schemes mimicking the effect of SAM's Jacobian perturbation can recover a large portion of SAM's label noise robustness gains in deep networks, without the computational overhead of the full SAM update.

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The test accuracy of SAM is 17% higher than SGD on CIFAR10 with 30% label noise. In linear models, the ratio of average gradient norm between clean and noisy examples decays slower for larger SAM perturbation magnitudes. In deep networks, the norm of the final layer weights and intermediate activations decreases significantly when training with SAM.
Lainaukset
"SAM's explicit up-weighting keeps the gradient contribution of clean examples large even after they are fit, slowing down the rate at which noisy examples are learned in comparison." "SAM's effect in deeper networks is instead explained entirely by the effect SAM has on the network Jacobian." "Motivated by our analysis, we see that cheaper alternatives to SAM that explicitly induce these regularization effects largely recover the benefits in deep networks trained on real-world datasets."

Tärkeimmät oivallukset

by Christina Ba... klo arxiv.org 05-07-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.03676.pdf
Why is SAM Robust to Label Noise?

Syvällisempiä Kysymyksiä

How would the conclusions change if the label noise was not completely random, but had some structure or correlation with the input features

If the label noise had some structure or correlation with the input features, the conclusions drawn from the study might change. In the case of structured label noise, where the noise is not completely random but has some pattern or relationship with the input features, the effectiveness of SAM's Jacobian-based regularization may vary. The structured label noise could potentially affect the way SAM prioritizes fitting clean examples before noisy examples. It might influence the optimization trajectory and the robustness of the model to the noise. In the presence of structured label noise, SAM's ability to implicitly regularize the network Jacobian may still be beneficial, but the specific mechanisms and effects could differ. The relationship between the structured label noise and the network Jacobian regularization would need to be carefully analyzed to understand how SAM's performance is impacted. The insights gained from the study on random label noise robustness may need to be reevaluated and adapted to account for the structured nature of the label noise.

Can the insights from this work be extended to other forms of data corruption beyond random label noise, such as adversarial perturbations or domain shift

The insights from this work on SAM's Jacobian-based regularization could potentially be extended to other forms of data corruption beyond random label noise. For example: Adversarial Perturbations: In the case of adversarial perturbations, where small, carefully crafted changes are made to input data to deceive the model, SAM's regularization based on the network Jacobian could help improve robustness. By implicitly regularizing the network's sensitivity to these perturbations, SAM may enhance the model's resilience to adversarial attacks. Domain Shift: When dealing with domain shift, where the distribution of the training and test data differs, SAM's regularization effects on the network Jacobian could aid in adapting the model to the new domain. By stabilizing the network's behavior and reducing sensitivity to changes in the input distribution, SAM's benefits in handling label noise may translate to mitigating the effects of domain shift. By understanding how SAM's Jacobian-based regularization influences the optimization trajectory and generalization properties, similar insights could be applied to address various forms of data corruption and distributional shifts in machine learning tasks.

What other optimization algorithms or regularization techniques could potentially achieve similar benefits to SAM's Jacobian-based regularization in a more computationally efficient manner

Several optimization algorithms or regularization techniques could potentially achieve similar benefits to SAM's Jacobian-based regularization in a more computationally efficient manner. Some alternatives to consider include: Weight Decay: Introducing weight decay, also known as L2 regularization, to penalize large weights in the network. By regularizing the magnitude of the weights, weight decay can help prevent overfitting and improve generalization, similar to the effects of SAM's Jacobian-based regularization. Dropout: Utilizing dropout, a regularization technique that randomly drops out units during training, to prevent co-adaptation of feature detectors. Dropout can act as a form of implicit regularization, promoting robustness and preventing overfitting. Batch Normalization: Incorporating batch normalization layers in the network to stabilize training and improve generalization. Batch normalization can help regularize the network's behavior and enhance its robustness to variations in the input data. Mixup Augmentation: Applying mixup augmentation, a data augmentation technique that blends pairs of training examples, to encourage the model to learn from interpolated samples. Mixup can act as a form of regularization, promoting smoothness in the decision boundary and improving generalization. By exploring these alternative optimization algorithms and regularization techniques, it may be possible to achieve similar benefits to SAM's Jacobian-based regularization in a more efficient and scalable manner.
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