STEER: Simple Temporal Regularization For Neural ODEs

Published in 2020 Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NeuRIPS), 2020

Recommended citation: Arnab Ghosh, Harkirat Singh Behl, Emilien Dupont, Philip H. S. Torr, Vinay Namboodiri, “STEER: Simple Temporal Regularization For Neural ODEs”, Proceedings of Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NeuRIPS) 2020 https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10711

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Training Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) is often computationally expensive. Indeed, computing the forward pass of such models involves solving an ODE which can become arbitrarily complex during training. Recent works have shown that regularizing the dynamics of the ODE can partially alleviate this. In this paper we propose a new regularization technique: randomly sampling the end time of the ODE during training. The proposed regularization is simple to implement, has negligible overhead and is effective across a wide variety of tasks. Further, the technique is orthogonal to several other methods proposed to regularize the dynamics of ODEs and as such can be used in conjunction with them. We show through experiments on normalizing flows, time series models and image recognition that the proposed regularization can significantly decrease training time and even improve performance over baseline models.

Recommended citation: Arnab Ghosh, Harkirat Singh Behl, Emilien Dupont, Philip H. S. Torr, Vinay Namboodiri, “STEER: Simple Temporal Regularization For Neural ODEs”, Proceedings of Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NeuRIPS) 2020