Year: 2023
Type: preprint
Abstract: The configuration of latent representations plays a critical role in determining the performance of deep neural network classifiers. In particular, the emergence of well-separated class embeddings in the latent space has been shown to improve both generalization and robustness. In this paper, we propose a method to induce the collapse of latent representations belonging to the same class into a single point, which enhances class separability in the latent space while enforcing Lipschitz continuity in the network. We demonstrate that this phenomenon, which we call \textit{latent point collapse}, is achieved by adding a strong $L_2$ penalty on the penultimate-layer representations and is the result of a push-pull tension developed with the cross-entropy loss function. In addition, we show the practical utility of applying this compressing loss term to the latent representations of a low-dimensional linear penultimate layer. The proposed approach is straightforward to implement and yields substantial improvements in discriminative feature embeddings, along with remarkable gains in robustness to input perturbations.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Sbailò, Luigi, Ghiringhelli, Luca
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4387635401