Evolving Neural Selection with Adaptive Regularization

Over-parameterization is one of the inherent characteristics of modern deep neural networks, which can often be overcome by leveraging regularization methods, such as Dropout. Usually, these methods are applied globally and all the input cases are treated equally. However, given the natural variation of the input space for real-world tasks such as image recognition and natural language understanding, it is unlikely that a fixed regularization pattern will have the same effectiveness for all the input cases. In this work, we demonstrate a method in which the selection of neurons in deep neural networks evolves, adapting to the difficulty of prediction. We propose the Adaptive Neural Selection (ANS) framework, which evolves to weigh neurons in a layer to form network variants that are suitable to handle different input cases. Experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of commonly-used neural network architectures on standard image recognition benchmarks. Ablation studies also validate the effectiveness and contribution of each component in the proposed framework.