Dropout
Dropout is another powerful regularization technique that randomly “drops out” a portion of neurons during training.
Dropout helps combat overfitting by randomly deactivating a fraction of neurons during each training iteration, forcing the network to develop redundant pathways for information flow. This technique prevents neurons from becoming overly dependent on each other by creating a form of ensemble learning within a single network, where different subnetworks handle similar tasks. The result is a more robust model that relies on distributed representations rather than memorizing specific patterns, ultimately improving generalization to unseen data when all neurons are active during inference.
It’s particularly effective in large neural networks such as LLMs. Here’s how to implement dropout in a transformer-based LLM:
class TransformerWithDropout(nn.Module): def __init__( self, vocab_size...