text: Unlike machines, humans learn through rapid, Abstract model-building. The role of a teacher is not simply to hammer home right or wrong answers, but rather to provide intuitive comments, comparisons, and explanations to a pupil. This is what the Learning Under Privileged Information (LUPI) paradigm endeavors to model by utilizing extra knowledge only available during training. We propose a new LUPI algorithm specifically designed for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). We propose to use a heteroscedastic dropout (i.e. dropout with a varying variance) and make the variance of the dropout a function of privileged information. Intuitively, this corresponds to using the privileged information to control the uncertainty of the model output. We perform experiments using CNNs and RNNs for the tasks of image classification and machine translation. Our method significantly increases the sample efficiency during learning, resulting in higher accuracy with a large margin when the number of training examples is limited. We also theoretically justify the gains in sample efficiency by providing a generalization error bound decreasing with O(1 n), where n is the number of training examples, in an oracle case.
  @cite_36: Deep neural nets with a large number of parameters are very powerful machine learning systems. However, overfitting is a serious problem in such networks. Large networks are also slow to use, making it difficult to deal with overfitting by combining the predictions of many different large neural nets at test time. Dropout is a technique for addressing this problem. The key idea is to randomly drop units (along with their connections) from the neural network during training. This prevents units from co-adapting too much. During training, dropout samples from an exponential number of different "thinned" networks. At test time, it is easy to approximate the effect of averaging the predictions of all these thinned networks by simply using a single unthinned network that has smaller weights. This significantly reduces overfitting and gives major improvements over other regularization methods. We show that dropout improves the performance of neural networks on supervised learning tasks in vision, speech recognition, document classification and computational biology, obtaining state-of-the-art results on many benchmark data sets.
  @cite_4: 
  @cite_6: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are analyzed via the theoretical framework of the information bottleneck (IB) principle. We first show that any DNN can be quantified by the mutual information between the layers and the input and output variables. Using this representation we can calculate the optimal information theoretic limits of the DNN and obtain finite sample generalization bounds. The advantage of getting closer to the theoretical limit is quantifiable both by the generalization bound and by the network's simplicity. We argue that both the optimal architecture, number of layers and features connections at each layer, are related to the bifurcation points of the information bottleneck tradeoff, namely, relevant compression of the input layer with respect to the output layer. The hierarchical representations at the layered network naturally correspond to the structural phase transitions along the information curve. We believe that this new insight can lead to new optimality bounds and deep learning algorithms.
summary: Although we use IB @cite_6 , Gaussian dropout @cite_36 and the re-parametrization trick @cite_4 , we are the first to our knowledge to apply any of these methods to the LUPI problem.