R-drop: Regularized Dropout For Neural Networks
Xiaobo Liang, Lijun Wu, Juntao Li, Yue Wang, Qi Meng, Tao Qin, Wei Chen, Min Zhang, Tie-Yan Liu . Arxiv 2021 – 238 citations
[Code]
[Paper]
Dropout is a powerful and widely used technique to regularize the training of deep neural networks. In this paper, we introduce a simple regularization strategy upon dropout in model training, namely R-Drop, which forces the output distributions of different sub models generated by dropout to be consistent with each other. Specifically, for each training sample, R-Drop minimizes the bidirectional KL-divergence between the output distributions of two sub models sampled by dropout. Theoretical analysis reveals that R-Drop reduces the freedom of the model parameters and complements dropout. Experiments on (\bf{5}) widely used deep learning tasks ((\bf{18}) datasets in total), including neural machine translation, abstractive summarization, language understanding, language modeling, and image classification, show that R-Drop is universally effective. In particular, it yields substantial improvements when applied to fine-tune large-scale pre-trained models, e.g., ViT, RoBERTa-large, and BART, and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances with the vanilla Transformer model on WMT14 English(\to)German translation ((\bf{30.91}) BLEU) and WMT14 English(\to)French translation ((\bf{43.95}) BLEU), even surpassing models trained with extra large-scale data and expert-designed advanced variants of Transformer models. Our code is available at GitHub{https://github.com/dropreg/R-Drop}.