Mass Personalization of Deep Learning

We discuss training techniques, objectives and metrics toward mass personalization of deep learning models. In machine learning, personalization refers to the fact that every trained model should be targeted towards an individual by optimizing one or several performance metrics and often obeying additional constraints. We investigate three methods for personalized training of neural networks. They constitute three forms of curriculum learning. The methods are partially inspired by the "shaping" concept from psychology. Interestingly, we discover that extensive exposure to a limited set of training data in terms of class diversity \emph{early} in the training can lead to an irreversible reduction of the capability of a network to learn from more diverse training data. This is in close alignment with existing theories in human development. In contrast, training on a small data set covering all classes \emph{early} in the training can lead to better performance.