Papers › Micro-Batch Training with Batch-Channel Normalization and Weight Standardization

Micro-Batch Training with Batch-Channel Normalization and Weight Standardization

25 Mar 2019arXiv:1903.10520archive 2025-07-28

Siyuan Qiao, Huiyu Wang, Chenxi Liu, Wei Shen, Alan Yuille

Batch Normalization (BN) has become an out-of-box technique to improve deep network training. However, its effectiveness is limited for micro-batch training, i.e., each GPU typically has only 1-2 images for training, which is inevitable for many computer vision tasks, e.g., object detection and semantic segmentation, constrained by memory consumption. To address this issue, we propose Weight Standardization (WS) and Batch-Channel Normalization (BCN) to bring two success factors of BN into micro-batch training: 1) the smoothing effects on the loss landscape and 2) the ability to avoid harmful elimination singularities along the training trajectory. WS standardizes the weights in convolutional layers to smooth the loss landscape by reducing the Lipschitz constants of the loss and the gradients; BCN combines batch and channel normalizations and leverages estimated statistics of the activations in convolutional layers to keep networks away from elimination singularities. We validate WS and BCN on comprehensive computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, video recognition and semantic segmentation. All experimental results consistently show that WS and BCN improve micro-batch training significantly. Moreover, using WS and BCN with micro-batch training is even able to match or outperform the performances of BN with large-batch training.

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Code

joe-siyuan-qiao/WeightStandardization officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report
delta6189/Anime-Sketch-Colorizer mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
jinfagang/nb mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
lessw2020/auto-adaptive-ai mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
seujung/WeightStandardization_gluon mentioned on GitHubmxnet report

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Tasks

Image ClassificationInstance SegmentationObject DetectionSegmentationSemantic SegmentationVideo Recognitionimage-classificationobject-detection

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Instance Segmentation COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) AP50 61.07 #79 of 93 Archive leaderboard report
Instance Segmentation COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) AP75 40.82 #79 of 93 Archive leaderboard report
Instance Segmentation COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) APL 56.08 #79 of 93 Archive leaderboard report
Instance Segmentation COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) APM 41.73 #79 of 93 Archive leaderboard report
Instance Segmentation COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) APS 18.32 #79 of 93 Archive leaderboard report
Instance Segmentation COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) mask AP 38.34 #79 of 93 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) AP50 64.15 #144 of 220 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) AP75 47.11 #144 of 220 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) APL 56.39 #144 of 220 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) APM 47.19 #144 of 220 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) APS 25.49 #144 of 220 Archive leaderboard report
Object Detection COCO minival Mask R-CNN-FPN (ResNeXt-101, GN+WS) box AP 43.12 #144 of 220 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Introduced by this paper: Weight Standardization

1x1 ConvolutionAverage PoolingBatch NormalizationConvolutionGlobal Average PoolingGrouped ConvolutionKaiming InitializationReLUResNeXtResNeXt BlockResidual ConnectionWeight Standardization

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