Weight Decay in Multilayer Perceptrons in Deep Learning Computation

Weight decay, also known as L2 regularization, is a technique used in machine learning to prevent overfitting by adding a penalty term to the objective function that is being optimized. The goal of weight decay is to reduce the complexity of the model by limiting the size of the weights, which can help to prevent overfitting and improve the generalization ability of the model. Weight decay is typically implemented by adding a term to the objective function that is proportional to the sum of the squares of the weights. The strength of the weight decay penalty is controlled by a hyperparameter called the decay rate or regularization strength, which determines the amount of weight decay applied to the model. For example, let's say we are training a linear regression model to predict the price of a house based on the number of bedrooms and the square footage.