Learning explanations that are hard to vary

Understand

In this paper, we investigate the principle that `good explanations are hard to vary' in the context of deep learning.

• We show that averaging gradients across examples -- akin to a logical OR of patterns -- can favor memorization and `patchwork' solutions that sew together different strategies, instead of identifying invariances.
• To inspect this, we first formalize a notion of consistency for minima of the loss surface, which measures to what extent a minimum appears only when examples are pooled.
• We then propose and experimentally validate a simple alternative algorithm based on a logical AND, that focuses on invariances and prevents memorization in a set of real-world tasks.