Pairwise Margin Maximization for Deep Neural Networks

The weight decay regularization term is widely used during training to constrain expressivity, avoid overfitting, and improve generalization. Historically, this concept was borrowed from the SVM maximum margin principle and extended to multiclass deep networks. Carefully inspecting this principle reveals that it is not optimal for multi-class classification in general, and in particular when using deep neural networks. In this paper, we explain why this commonly used principle is not optimal and propose a new regularization scheme, called Pairwise Margin Maximization (PMM), which measures the minimal amount of displacement an instance should take until its predicted classification is switched. In deep neural networks, PMM can be implemented in the vector space before the network’s output layer, i.e., in the deep feature space, where we add an additional normalization term to avoid convergence to a trivial solution. We demonstrate empirically a substantial improvement when training a deep neural network with PMM compared to the standard regularization terms.