Batch normalization is the regularization technique for neural networks presented for the first time in 2015 in this paper.

The paper explains the regularization effect, explains the improvements and tries to provide the clue why it works.

# Achievement

Thanks to the batch norm for the first time the ImageNet exceeded the accuracy of human raters, and stepped the era where machine learning started to classify images better than humans (for the particular classification task).

# How it works in PyTorch?

There are few things important for the batch norm (BN):

• Apply BN to a single layer for every mini batch
• Normalize the output from the batch activations
• In PyTorch if we setaffine=True
• Multiply normalized output by parameter called weight and add to that
• Add to all of that the parameter bias
• If we set track_running_stats=True in PyTorch
• Running statistics will be calculated
• BN output will be less bumpy

Simplified (without using the running statistics) we can express this as:

Where $n$ is the normalization function, $weight$, and $bias$ are our scale and offset parameters, $f$ is our function to create the output from the layer, $x$ and $y$ are the activations.

After the normalization we have the the mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1 for the single batch. Here is the example:

import torch
import torch.nn as nn

# affine=False means nothing to learn
m = nn.BatchNorm1d(10, affine=False)
input = 1000*torch.randn(3, 10)
print(input)
output = m(input)
print(output)
print(output.mean()) # should be 0
print(output.std()) # should be 1


PyTorch class _BatchNorm explains clearly we use the parameters weight and bias if we set self.affine=True :

        if self.affine:
self.weight = Parameter(torch.Tensor(num_features))
self.bias = Parameter(torch.Tensor(num_features))
else:
self.register_parameter('weight', None)
self.register_parameter('bias', None)
if self.track_running_stats:
self.register_buffer('running_mean', torch.zeros(num_features))
self.register_buffer('running_var', torch.ones(num_features))
self.register_buffer('num_batches_tracked', torch.tensor(0, dtype=torch.long))
else:
self.register_parameter('running_mean', None)
self.register_parameter('running_var', None)


Previous code excerpt also shows two more buffers running_mean and running_var that we calculate every mini batch to make the BN output less bumpy.

Couple things to cover from the previous code:

There is a concept of module parameter (nn.Parameter). Parameter is just a tensor limited to the module where it is defined. Usually it will be defined in the module constructor (__init__ method).

register_parameter method in previous code will do some safe checks before set the parameter to None, meaning we will not learn the values of weight and bias if self.affine is not True.

Once we have module parameter defined, it will appear in the module.parameters().

register_buffer is specific tensor that can go to GPU and that can be saved with the model, but it is not meant to be learned (updated) via gradient descent. Instead it is calculated at every mini batch step.

As you may noted in PyTorch we have the training time and the inference time. While we train (learn/fit) we will constantly update the running_mean and running_var with the every mini batch. In the inference time we will just use the values calculated and we will not alter the running mean and var.

Note: running mean and running variance, are statistical methods calculating the moving average. What they essentially do you can spot from the image.

Lastly, it is possible to use BN even if we set affine=False and track_running_stats=False. It will just work.

For completeness, batch norm is one of the four types of the regularization techniques.

REF: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03167