Papers › Stochasticity in Neural ODEs: An Empirical Study

Stochasticity in Neural ODEs: An Empirical Study

22 Feb 2020ICLR Workshop DeepDiffEq 2019 12arXiv:2002.09779archive 2025-07-28

Viktor Oganesyan, Alexandra Volokhova, Dmitry Vetrov

Stochastic regularization of neural networks (e.g. dropout) is a wide-spread technique in deep learning that allows for better generalization. Despite its success, continuous-time models, such as neural ordinary differential equation (ODE), usually rely on a completely deterministic feed-forward operation. This work provides an empirical study of stochastically regularized neural ODE on several image-classification tasks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, TinyImageNet). Building upon the formalism of stochastic differential equations (SDEs), we demonstrate that neural SDE is able to outperform its deterministic counterpart. Further, we show that data augmentation during the training improves the performance of both deterministic and stochastic versions of the same model. However, the improvements obtained by the data augmentation completely eliminate the empirical gains of the stochastic regularization, making the difference in the performance of neural ODE and neural SDE negligible.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

AlexandraVolokhova/stochasticity_in_neural_ode officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Data AugmentationImage Classificationimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections