Implicit Regularization via Neural Feature Alignment

  • Aristide Baratin ,
  • Thomas George ,
  • César Laurent ,
  • Devon Hjelm ,
  • Guillaume Lajoie ,
  • Pascal Vincent ,
  • Simon Lacoste-Julien

AISTATS 2021 |

Under review

We approach the problem of implicit regularization in deep learning from a geometrical viewpoint. We highlight a regularization effect induced by a dynamical alignment of the neural tangent features introduced by Jacot et al. (2018), along a small number of taskrelevant directions. This can be interpreted as a combined mechanism of feature selection and compression. By extrapolating a new analysis of Rademacher complexity bounds for linear models, we motivate and study a heuristic complexity measure that captures this phenomenon, in terms of sequences of tangent kernel classes along optimization paths.