On Sensitive Minima in Margin-based Deep Distance Learning

This paper investigates sensitive minima in popular deep distance learning techniques such as Siamese and Triplet networks. We demonstrate that standard formulations may find solutions that are sensitive to small changes and thus do not generalize well. To alleviate sensitive minima we propose a new approach to regularize margin-based deep distance learning by introducing stochasticity in the loss that encourages robust solutions. Our experimental results on HPatches show promise compared to common regularization techniques including weight decay and dropout, especially for small sample sizes.