In recent years, deep neural networks have shown significant progress in computer vision due to their large generalization capacity; however, the overfitting problem ubiquitously threatens the learning process of these highly nonlinear architectures. Dropout is a recent solution to mitigate overfitting that has witnessed significant success in various classification applications. Recently, many efforts have been made to improve the Standard dropout using an unsupervised merit-based semantic selection of neurons in the latent space. However, these studies do not consider the task-relevant information quality and quantity and the diversity of the latent kernels. To solve the challenge of dropping less informative neurons in deep learning, we propose an efficient end-to-end dropout algorithm that selects the most informative neurons with the highest correlation with the target output considering the sparsity in its selection procedure. First, to promote activation diversity, we devise an approach to select the most diverse set of neurons by making use of determinantal point process (DPP) sampling. Furthermore, to incorporate task specificity into deep latent features, a mutual information (MI)-based merit function is developed. Leveraging the proposed MI with DPP sampling, we introduce the novel DPPMI dropout that adaptively adjusts the retention rate of neurons based on their contribution to the neural network task. Empirical studies on real-world classification benchmarks including, MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over recent state-of-the-art dropout algorithms in the literature.
Keywords: deep learning; determinantal point process; dropout; image classification; information theory; regularization methods.