Training Deep Neural Networks via Direct Loss Minimization
Yang Song, Alexander Schwing, Richard, Raquel Urtasun
Abstract
Supervised training of deep neural nets typically relies on minimizing cross-entropy. However, in many domains, we are interested in performing well on metrics specific to the application. In this paper we propose a direct loss minimization approach to train deep neural networks, which provably minimizes the application-specific loss function. This is often non-trivial, since these functions are neither smooth nor decomposable and thus are not amenable to optimization with standard gradient-based methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in the context of maximizing average precision for ranking problems. Towards this goal, we develop a novel dynamic programming algorithm that can efficiently compute the weight updates. Our approach proves superior to a variety of baselines in the context of action classification and object detection, especially in the presence of label noise.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v48-songb16,
title = {Training Deep Neural Networks via Direct Loss Minimization},
author = {Song, Yang and Schwing, Alexander and Richard, and Urtasun, Raquel},
booktitle = {Proceedings of The 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {2169--2177},
year = {2016},
editor = {Balcan, Maria Florina and Weinberger, Kilian Q.},
volume = {48},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
address = {New York, New York, USA},
month = {20--22 Jun},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/songb16.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/songb16.html},
abstract = {Supervised training of deep neural nets typically relies on minimizing cross-entropy. However, in many domains, we are interested in performing well on metrics specific to the application. In this paper we propose a direct loss minimization approach to train deep neural networks, which provably minimizes the application-specific loss function. This is often non-trivial, since these functions are neither smooth nor decomposable and thus are not amenable to optimization with standard gradient-based methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in the context of maximizing average precision for ranking problems. Towards this goal, we develop a novel dynamic programming algorithm that can efficiently compute the weight updates. Our approach proves superior to a variety of baselines in the context of action classification and object detection, especially in the presence of label noise.}
}