OATML

The Information Bottleneck (IB) principle characterizes learning and generalization in deep neural networks in terms of the change in two information theoretic quantities and leads to a regularized objective function for training neural networks. These quantities are difficult to compute directly for deep neural networks. We show that it is possible to backpropagate through a simple entropy estimator to obtain an IB training method that works for modern neural network architectures. We evaluate our approach empirically on the CIFAR-10 dataset, showing that IB objectives can yield competitive performance on this dataset with a conceptually simple approach while also performing well against adversarial attacks out-of-the-box.