Pytorch: how to add L1 regularizer to activations?

Here is how you do this:

• In your Module’s forward return final output and layers’ output for which you want to apply L1 regularization
• loss variable will be sum of cross entropy loss of output w.r.t. targets and L1 penalties.

Here’s an example code

import torch
from torch.autograd import Variable
from torch.nn import functional as F


class MLP(torch.nn.Module):
    def __init__(self):
        super(MLP, self).__init__()
        self.linear1 = torch.nn.Linear(128, 32)
        self.linear2 = torch.nn.Linear(32, 16)
        self.linear3 = torch.nn.Linear(16, 2)

    def forward(self, x):
        layer1_out = F.relu(self.linear1(x))
        layer2_out = F.relu(self.linear2(layer1_out))
        out = self.linear3(layer2_out)
        return out, layer1_out, layer2_out

batchsize = 4
lambda1, lambda2 = 0.5, 0.01

model = MLP()
optimizer = torch.optim.SGD(model.parameters(), lr=1e-4)

# usually following code is looped over all batches 
# but let's just do a dummy batch for brevity

inputs = Variable(torch.rand(batchsize, 128))
targets = Variable(torch.ones(batchsize).long())

optimizer.zero_grad()
outputs, layer1_out, layer2_out = model(inputs)
cross_entropy_loss = F.cross_entropy(outputs, targets)

all_linear1_params = torch.cat([x.view(-1) for x in model.linear1.parameters()])
all_linear2_params = torch.cat([x.view(-1) for x in model.linear2.parameters()])
l1_regularization = lambda1 * torch.norm(all_linear1_params, 1)
l2_regularization = lambda2 * torch.norm(all_linear2_params, 2)

loss = cross_entropy_loss + l1_regularization + l2_regularization
loss.backward()
optimizer.step()