LEAP: Learning Embeddings for Adaptive Pace

Determining the optimal order in which data examples are presented to Deep Neural Networks during training is a non-trivial problem. However, choosing a non-trivial scheduling method may drastically improve convergence. In this paper, we propose a Self-Paced Learning (SPL)-fused Deep Metric Learning (DML) framework, which we call Learning Embeddings for Adaptive Pace (LEAP). Our method parameterizes mini-batches dynamically based on the \textit{easiness} and \textit{true diverseness} of the sample within a salient feature representation space. In LEAP, we train an \textit{embedding} Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to learn an expressive representation space by adaptive density discrimination using the Magnet Loss. The \textit{student} CNN classifier dynamically selects samples to form a mini-batch based on the \textit{easiness} from cross-entropy losses and \textit{true diverseness} of examples from the representation space sculpted by the \textit{embedding} CNN. We evaluate LEAP using deep CNN architectures for the task of supervised image classification on MNIST, FashionMNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN. We show that the LEAP framework converges faster with respect to the number of mini-batch updates required to achieve a comparable or better test performance on each of the datasets.