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Concept
Batch normalization
Summary
Batch normalization (also known as batch norm) is a method used to make training of artificial neural networks faster and more stable through normalization of the layers' inputs by re-centering and re-scaling. It was proposed by Sergey Ioffe and Christian Szegedy in 2015.
While the effect of batch normalization is evident, the reasons behind its effectiveness remain under discussion. It was believed that it can mitigate the problem of internal covariate shift, where parameter initialization and changes in the distribution of the inputs of each layer affect the learning rate of the network. Recently, some scholars have argued that batch normalization does not reduce internal covariate shift, but rather smooths the objective function, which in turn improves the performance. However, at initialization, batch normalization in fact induces severe gradient explosion in deep networks, which is only alleviated by skip connections in residual networks. Others maintain that batch normalization achieves length-direction decoupling, and thereby accelerates neural networks.
Each layer of a neural network has inputs with a corresponding distribution, which is affected during the training process by the randomness in the parameter initialization and the randomness in the input data. The effect of these sources of randomness on the distribution of the inputs to internal layers during training is described as internal covariate shift. Although a clear-cut precise definition seems to be missing, the phenomenon observed in experiments is the change on means and variances of the inputs to internal layers during training.
Batch normalization was initially proposed to mitigate internal covariate shift. During the training stage of networks, as the parameters of the preceding layers change, the distribution of inputs to the current layer changes accordingly, such that the current layer needs to constantly readjust to new distributions.
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