SPCNet: Deep Self-Paced Curriculum Network Incorporated With Inductive Bias

The vulnerability to poor local optimum and the memorization of noise data limit the generalizability and reliability of massively parameterized convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on complex real-world data. Self-paced curriculum learning (SPCL), which models the easy-to-hard learning progression from human beings, is considered as a potential savior. In spite of the fact that numerous SPCL solutions have been explored, it still confronts two main challenges exactly in solving deep networks. By virtue of various designed regularizers, existing weighting schemes independent of the learning objective heavily rely on the prior knowledge. In addition, alternative optimization strategy (AOS) enables the tedious iterative training procedure, thus there is still not an efficient framework that integrates the SPCL paradigm well with networks. This article delivers a novel insight that attention mechanism allows for adaptive enhancement in the contribution of diverse instance information to the gradient propagation. Accordingly, we propose a general-purpose deep SPCL paradigm that incorporates the preferences of implicit regularizer for different samples into the network structure with inductive bias, which in turn is formalized as the self-paced curriculum network (SPCNet). Our proposal allows simultaneous online difficulty estimation, adaptive sample selection, and model updating in an end-to-end manner, which significantly facilitates the collaboration of SPCL to deep networks. Experiments on image classification and scene classification tasks demonstrate that our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art schemes and obtains superior performance.