I found in many available neural network code implemented using TensorFlow that regularization terms are often implemented by manually adding an additional term to loss value.

My questions are:

1.Is there a more elegant or recommended way of regularization than doing it manually?

2.I also find that get_variable has an argument regularizer. How should it be used? According to my observation, if we pass a regularizer to it (such as tf.contrib.layers.l2_regularizer, a tensor representing regularized term will be computed and added to a graph collection named tf.GraphKeys.REGULARIZATOIN_LOSSES. Will that collection be automatically used by TensorFlow (e.g. used by optimizers when training)? Or is it expected that I should use that collection by myself?

As you say in the second point, using the regularizer argument is the recommended way. You can use it in get_variable, or set it once in your variable_scope and have all your variables regularized.

The losses are collected in the graph, and you need to manually add them to your cost function like this.

reg_losses = tf.get_collection(tf.GraphKeys.REGULARIZATION_LOSSES)
reg_constant = 0.01  # Choose an appropriate one.
loss = my_normal_loss + reg_constant * sum(reg_losses)​

Hope that helps!

A few aspects of the existing answer were not immediately clear to me, so here is a step-by-step guide:

Define a regularizer. This is where the regularization constant can be set, e.g.:

regularizer = tf.contrib.layers.l2_regularizer(scale=0.1)​

Create variables via:

weights = tf.get_variable(
name="weights",
regularizer=regularizer,
...
)​

Equivalently, variables can be created via the regular weights = tf.Variable(...) constructor, followed by tf.add_to_collection(tf.GraphKeys.REGULARIZATION_LOSSES, weights).

Define some loss term and add the regularization term:

reg_variables = tf.get_collection(tf.GraphKeys.REGULARIZATION_LOSSES)
reg_term = tf.contrib.layers.apply_regularization(regularizer, reg_variables)
loss += reg_term​

Note: It looks like tf.contrib.layers.apply_regularization is implemented as an AddN, so more or less equivalent to sum(reg_variables)

def easier_network(x, reg):
    """ A network based on tf.contrib.learn, with input `x`. """
    with tf.variable_scope('EasyNet'):
        out = layers.flatten(x)
        out = layers.fully_connected(out, 
                num_outputs=200,
                weights_initializer = layers.xavier_initializer(uniform=True),
                weights_regularizer = layers.l2_regularizer(scale=reg),
                activation_fn = tf.nn.tanh)
        out = layers.fully_connected(out, 
                num_outputs=200,
                weights_initializer = layers.xavier_initializer(uniform=True),
                weights_regularizer = layers.l2_regularizer(scale=reg),
                activation_fn = tf.nn.tanh)
        out = layers.fully_connected(out, 
                num_outputs=10, # Because there are ten digits!
                weights_initializer = layers.xavier_initializer(uniform=True),
                weights_regularizer = layers.l2_regularizer(scale=reg),
                activation_fn = None)
        return out 

def main(_):
    mnist = input_data.read_data_sets(FLAGS.data_dir, one_hot=True)
    x = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, 784])
    y_ = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, 10])

    # Make a network with regularization
    y_conv = easier_network(x, FLAGS.regu)
    weights = tf.get_collection(tf.GraphKeys.TRAINABLE_VARIABLES, 'EasyNet') 
    print("")
    for w in weights:
        shp = w.get_shape().as_list()
        print("- {} shape:{} size:{}".format(w.name, shp, np.prod(shp)))
    print("")
    reg_ws = tf.get_collection(tf.GraphKeys.REGULARIZATION_LOSSES, 'EasyNet')
    for w in reg_ws:
        shp = w.get_shape().as_list()
        print("- {} shape:{} size:{}".format(w.name, shp, np.prod(shp)))
    print("")

    # Make the loss function `loss_fn` with regularization.
    cross_entropy = tf.reduce_mean(
        tf.nn.softmax_cross_entropy_with_logits(labels=y_, logits=y_conv))
    loss_fn = cross_entropy + tf.reduce_sum(reg_ws)
    train_step = tf.train.AdamOptimizer(1e-4).minimize(loss_fn)

- EasyNet/fully_connected/weights:0 shape:[784, 200] size:156800
- EasyNet/fully_connected/biases:0 shape:[200] size:200
- EasyNet/fully_connected_1/weights:0 shape:[200, 200] size:40000
- EasyNet/fully_connected_1/biases:0 shape:[200] size:200
- EasyNet/fully_connected_2/weights:0 shape:[200, 10] size:2000
- EasyNet/fully_connected_2/biases:0 shape:[10] size:10

- EasyNet/fully_connected/kernel/Regularizer/l2_regularizer:0 shape:[] size:1.0
- EasyNet/fully_connected_1/kernel/Regularizer/l2_regularizer:0 shape:[] size:1.0
- EasyNet/fully_connected_2/kernel/Regularizer/l2_regularizer:0 shape:[] size:1.0

This post was edited by Laksh Nath at August 31, 2020 3:47 PM IST

Some answers make me more confused.Here I give two methods to make it clearly.

#1.adding all regs by hand
var1 = tf.get_variable(name='v1',shape=[1],dtype=tf.float32)
var2 = tf.Variable(name='v2',initial_value=1.0,dtype=tf.float32)
regularizer = tf.contrib.layers.l1_regularizer(0.1)
reg_term = tf.contrib.layers.apply_regularization(regularizer,[var1,var2])
#here reg_term is a scalar

#2.auto added and read,but using get_variable
with tf.variable_scope('x',
        regularizer=tf.contrib.layers.l2_regularizer(0.1)):
    var1 = tf.get_variable(name='v1',shape=[1],dtype=tf.float32)
    var2 = tf.get_variable(name='v2',shape=[1],dtype=tf.float32)
reg_losses = tf.get_collection(tf.GraphKeys.REGULARIZATION_LOSSES)
#here reg_losses is a list,should be summed ​

Then,it can be added into the total loss