Topic: stochastic regularization

Behaviourally relevant sensory input is routinely transmitted and processed in biological networks, despite perpetual perceptually unrelated external, and spontaneously generated internal activity. Such activity has traditionally been understood as noise. In feed-forward networks, such noise can pose a challenge, because disambiguating stimulus-evoked activity and noise in deeper layers becomes increasingly difficult, for example in pattern classification tasks. On the other hand, the beneficial effects of noise for stochastic regularization and preventing co-adaptation were recognized in deep