Enlightenment Period Improving DNN Performance
This work addresses performance enhancement in deep learning models by focusing on early training dynamics, offering incremental improvements through targeted data distribution adjustments.
The paper tackles the problem of improving deep neural network performance by analyzing a brief early training phase called the Enlightenment Period, where applying Mixup data augmentation has dual effects, and proposes three strategies that achieve superior performance across diverse architectures and datasets like CIFAR and ImageNet-1K.
The start of deep neural network training is characterized by a brief yet critical phase that lasts from the beginning of the training until the accuracy reaches approximately 50\%. During this phase, disordered representations rapidly transition toward ordered structure, and we term this phase the Enlightenment Period. Through theoretical modeling based on phase transition theory and experimental validation, we reveal that applying Mixup data augmentation during this phase has a dual effect: it introduces a Gradient Interference Effect that hinders performance, while also providing a beneficial Activation Revival Effect to restore gradient updates for saturated neurons. We further demonstrate that this negative interference diminishes as the sample set size or the model parameter size increases, thereby shifting the balance between these two effects. Based on these findings, we propose three strategies that improve performance by solely adjusting the training data distribution within this brief period: the Mixup Pause Strategy for small-scale scenarios, the Alpha Boost Strategy for large-scale scenarios with underfitting, and the High-Loss Removal Strategy for tasks where Mixup is inapplicable (e.g., time series and large language models). Extensive experiments show that these strategies achieve superior performance across diverse architectures such as ViT and ResNet on datasets including CIFAR and ImageNet-1K. Ultimately, this work offers a novel perspective on enhancing model performance by strategically capitalizing on the dynamics of the brief and crucial early stages of training. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/code-A5F1/.