Paper:
Learning towards Minimum Hyperspherical Energy
Neural networks are a powerful class of nonlinear functions that can be trained end-to-end on various applications. While the over-parametrization nature in many neural networks renders the ability to fit complex functions and the strong representation power to handle challenging tasks, it also leads to highly correlated neurons that can hurt the generalization ability and incur unnecessary computation cost. As a result, how to regularize the network to avoid undesired representation redundancy becomes an important issue. To this end, we draw inspiration from a well-known problem in physics -Thomson problem, where one seeks to find a state that distributes N electrons on a unit sphere as evenly as possible with minimum potential energy. In light of this intuition, we reduce the redundancy regularization problem to generic energy minimization, and propose a minimum hyperspherical energy (MHE) objective as generic regularization for neural networks. We also propose a few novel variants of MHE, and provide some insights from a theoretical point of view. Finally, we apply neural networks with MHE regularization to several challenging tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our intuition, by showing the superior performance with MHE regularization.

Review:
[Summary] The over-parameterization nature of neural networks has an undesirable consequence that many units become highly correlated after model training. To reduce the redundancy in representation, this paper extends some recent work on diversity regularization in neural networks by proposing the so-called hyperspherical potential energy defined on the Euclidean distance or the angular distance, which, when minimized, helps to increase the diversity of the input weights of different neurons and hence reduce the redundancy. The regularized loss function contains two regularization terms corresponding to the hidden units and the output units, respectively.  [Quality] Note that only the normalized weight vectors lie on the surface of the unit hypersphere. The unnormalized weight vectors generally do not. However, what actually contributes to the computation by each unit (neuron) in the neural network is the unnormalized weight vector. So two normalized weight vectors that are close to each other on the surface of the hypersphere may not actually be close when we consider the unnormalized weight vectors. How does this discrepancy affect the technical soundness of the proposed method?  [Clarity] It is a bit misleading to say “the diversity of neurons” or “the neurons are more diverse”. I think by “neuron” you actually mean “the input weights of the neuron”.  Figure 2 shows an example with only two neurons. Suppose there are many more neurons. How can we ensure that the virtual neurons all reside in the same half-space like that in Figure 1?  It is said in Section 3.7 that previous methods based on orthogonality/angle-promoting regularization model diversity regularization at a more local level while the proposed method based on MHE regularization achieves it in a more top-down manner. I don’t understand what it means by “local level” and “top-down manner” here. Please elaborate.  [Originality] There exist some previous works taking the orthogonality/angle-promoting regularization approach. The novelty of this work is in the MHE regularization terms.  [Significance] The empirical results generally look promising.  The theoretical analysis in Section 4 seems to imply that reducing the hyperspehical energy and hence increasing the diversity is good as it is closely related to improvement in generalization (Section 4.2). However, from the objective function in equation (4), it should be noted that the interplay between data fitting and hyperspherical energy minimization is crucial to achieving good performance. Among other things, finding the proper regularization parameters \lambda_h and \lambda_o is essential. Figure 3 shows the sensitivity analysis for CIFAR-100 with the CNN-9 network model by varying the value of the hyperparameters (I suppose it means both hyperparameters have the same value). What is not known is whether the hyperparameters are sensitive to the dataset and model used. Does changing either the dataset or the model require substantial effort in finding the right values for the hyperparameters?   There are some language errors, e.g., L9: “as even as possible” L26: “that principled guides” L28: “Another stream of works seek to” L37: “geodesic distances … plays” L80: “class-imbalance” L116: “equivalent to optimize” L145: missing “.” after “redundancy” L218: “uniformly distribution” L267: “Results is given” L268: “both … outperforms” L278: “Both … performs” L298: “the our” L302: “can yields” L359: “complementary”, not “complimentary” L364: “as describe”; “MHE complete” Please proofread the paper more thoroughly.  [Post-rebuttal comments]  I have read the author feedback and the other two reviews.  Regarding my comment on using unnormalized weight vectors, I do know the recent research on decoupling intra-class variation from inter-class variation [22-25]. My concern is that MHE (not angular-MHE) does not just focus on the angle when formulating the objective function. The formulation for angular-MHE is more correct. However, in the experiments, A-MHE is not consistently better than MHE. Deeper analysis and understanding of this is necessary.  For my other questions, the author has generally provided satisfactory answers.  I have increased my overall score from “5” (marginally below the acceptance threshold) to “6” (marginally above the acceptance threshold), but I don't think I am ready to vote for anything higher than “6”.