Improving Neural Network Accuracy by Concurrently Training with a Twin Network

Abstract

Recently within Spiking Neural Networks, a method called Twin Network Augmentation (TNA) has been introduced. This technique claims to improve the validation accuracy of a Spiking Neural Network simply by training two networks in conjunction and matching the logits via the Mean Squared Error loss. In this paper, we validate the viability of this method on a wide range of popular Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benchmarks and compare this approach to existing Knowledge Distillation schemes. Next, we conduct an in-depth study of the different components that make up TNA and determine that its effectiveness is not solely situated in an increase of trainable parameters, but rather the effect of the training methodology. Finally, we analyse the representations learned by networks trained with TNA and highlight their superiority in a number of tasks, thus proving empirically the applicability of Twin Network Augmentation on CNN models.