Mode Normalization
Authors: Lucas Deecke, Iain Murray, Hakan Bilen
Keywords: Deep Learning, Expert Models, Normalization, Computer Vision
TL;DR: We present a novel normalization method for deep neural networks that is robust to multi-modalities in intermediate feature distributions.
Abstract: Normalization methods are a central building block in the deep learning toolbox. They accelerate and stabilize training, while decreasing the dependence on manually tuned learning rate schedules. When learning from multi-modal distributions, the effectiveness of batch normalization (BN), arguably the most prominent normalization method, is reduced. As a remedy, we propose a more flexible approach: by extending the normalization to more than a single mean and variance, we detect modes of data on-the-fly, jointly normalizing samples that share common features. We demonstrate that our method outperforms BN and other widely used normalization techniques in several experiments, including single and multi-task datasets.