Batch Normalization (BN) (Ioffe and Szegedy 2015) normalizes the features of an input image via statistics of a batch of images and hence BN will bring the noise to the gradient of training loss. Previous works indicate that the noise is important for the optimization and generalization of deep neural networks, but too much noise will harm the performance of networks. In our paper, we offer a new point of view that the self-attention mechanism can help to regulate the noise by enhancing instance-specific information to obtain a better regularization effect. Therefore, we propose an attention-based BN called Instance Enhancement Batch Normalization (IEBN) that recalibrates the information of each channel by a simple linear transformation. IEBN has a good capacity of regulating the batch noise and stabilizing network training to improve generalization even in the presence of two kinds of noise attacks during training. Finally, IEBN outperforms BN with only a light parameter increment in image classification tasks under different network structures and benchmark datasets.

Attention networks have successfully boosted the performance in various vision problems. Previous works lay emphasis on designing a new attention module and individually plug them into the networks. Our paper proposes a novel-and-simple framework that shares an attention module throughout different network layers to encourage the integration of layer-wise information and this parameter-sharing module is referred to as Dense-and-Implicit-Attention (DIA) unit. Many choices of modules can be used in the DIA unit. Since Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) has a capacity of capturing long-distance dependency, we focus on the case when the DIA unit is the modified LSTM (called DIA-LSTM). Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the DIA-LSTM unit is capable of emphasizing layer-wise feature interrelation and leads to significant improvement of image classification accuracy. We further empirically show that the DIA-LSTM has a strong regularization ability on stabilizing the training of deep networks by the experiments with the removal of skip connections (He et al. 2016a) or Batch Normalization (Ioffe and Szegedy 2015) in the whole residual network.

Although deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a variety of robotic control tasks, it's still challenging to apply it to real-world tasks, due to the poor sample efficiency. Attempting to overcome this shortcoming, several works focus on reusing the collected trajectory data during the training by decomposing them into a set of policyirrelevant discrete transitions. However, their improvements are somewhat marginal since i) the amount of the transitions is usually small, and ii) the value assignment only happens in the joint states. To address these issues, this paper introduces a concise yet powerful method to construct Continuous Transition, which exploits the trajectory information by exploiting the potential transitions along the trajectory. Specifically, we propose to synthesize new transitions for training by linearly interpolating the conjunctive transitions. To keep the constructed transitions authentic, we also develop a discriminator to guide the construction process automatically. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a significant improvement in sample efficiency on various complex continuous robotic control problems in MuJoCo and outperforms the advanced modelbased / model-free RL methods.

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