Avoiding overfitting of multilayer perceptrons by training derivatives

A seamless data-driven method of eliminating overfitting is proposed. The technique is based on an extended cost function which includes the deviation of network derivatives from the target function derivatives up to the 4th order. When gradient descent is run for this cost function overfitting becomes nearly non existent. For the most common applications of neural networks high order derivatives of a target are difficult to obtain, so model cases are considered: training a network to approximate an analytical expression inside 2D and 5D domains and solving a Poisson equation inside a 2D circle. To investigate overfitting, fully connected perceptrons of different sizes are trained using sets of points with various density until the cost is stabilized. The extended cost allows to train a network with \(5\cdot 10^{6}\) weights to represent a 2D expression inside \([-1,1]^{2}\) square using only 10 training points with the test set error on average being only 1.5 times higher than the train error. Using the classical cost in comparable conditions results in the test set error being \(2\cdot 10^{4}\) times higher than the train error. In contrast with the common techniques of combating overfitting like regularization or dropout the proposed method is entirely data-driven therefore it introduces no tunable parameters. It also does not restrict weights in any way unlike regularization that can hinder the quality of approximation if its parameters are poorly chosen. Using the extended cost also increases the overall precision by one order of magnitude.