TrainingFoundations Updated 2026

Dropout

Definition

A regularization technique that randomly disables neurons during training to prevent overfitting and improve generalization.

Srivastava et al. (2014) introduced dropout: during each training step, a random fraction of units is temporarily removed, forcing the network not to rely on any single neuron. This acts like training a large ensemble of thinned networks and markedly reduces overfitting.

Dropout became a standard ingredient in deep networks and is still used, in various forms, in modern architectures.

References

Primary, peer-reviewed and archival sources for this definition.

Dropout: A Simple Way to Prevent Neural Networks from Overfitting
Srivastava, N., Hinton, G., Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., & Salakhutdinov, R. (2014). Journal of Machine Learning Research, 15(56), 1929–1958.

Dictionary & encyclopedic entries

Cite this entry

MultipleChat. "Dropout." MultipleChat AI & LLM Glossary, 2026. https://multiple.chat/ai-glossary/dropout

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