Title
Do Normalization Layers in a Deep ConvNet Really Need to Be Distinct?
Abstract
Yes, they do. This work investigates a perspective for deep learning: whether different normalization layers in a ConvNet require different normalizers. This is the first step towards understanding this phenomenon. We allow each convolutional layer to be stacked before a switchable normalization (SN) that learns to choose a normalizer from a pool of normalization methods. Through systematic experiments in ImageNet, COCO, Cityscapes, and ADE20K, we answer three questions: (a) Is it useful to allow each normalization layer to select its own normalizer? (b) What impacts the choices of normalizers? (c) Do different tasks and datasets prefer different normalizers? Our results suggest that (1) using distinct normalizers improves both learning and generalization of a ConvNet; (2) the choices of normalizers are more related to depth and batch size, but less relevant to parameter initialization, learning rate decay, and solver; (3) different tasks and datasets have different behaviors when learning to select normalizers.
Year
Venue
DocType
2018
arXiv: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Journal
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
abs/1811.07727
1
0.35
References 
Authors
24
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ping Luo12540111.68
Zhanglin Peng2264.43
Jiamin Ren3122.25
Ruimao Zhang432518.86