Studying K-FAC Heuristics by Viewing Adam through a Second-Order Lens
Research into optimisation for deep learning is characterised by a tension between the computational efficiency of first-order, gradient-based methods (such as SGD and Adam) and the theoretical efficiency of second-order, curvature-based methods (such as quasi-Newton methods and K-FAC). Noting that second-order methods often only function effectively with the addition of stabilising heuristics (such as Levenberg-Marquardt damping), we ask how much these (as opposed to the second-order curvature model) contribute to second-order algorithms' performance. We thus study AdamQLR: an optimiser combining damping and learning rate selection techniques from K-FAC (Martens & Grosse, 2015) with the update directions proposed by Adam, inspired by considering Adam through a second-order lens. We evaluate AdamQLR on a range of regression and classification tasks at various scales and hyperparameter tuning methodologies, concluding K-FAC's adaptive heuristics are of variable standalone general effectiveness, and finding an untuned AdamQLR setting can achieve comparable performance vs runtime to tuned benchmarks.
Code (1)
Tasks
Computational EfficiencySecond-order methodsMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Metaheuristics for the operating theater planning and scheduling: A systematic review
There are found a vast number of papers studying the problem of operating theater planning and scheduling. Different variants of this problem are generally recognized to be NP-complete; thus, several solution approaches …
SchedulingFrom Adam to Adam-Like Lagrangians: Second-Order Nonlocal Dynamics
In this paper, we derive an accelerated continuous-time formulation of Adam by modeling it as a second-order integro-differential dynamical system. We relate this inertial nonlocal model to an existing first-order nonloc…
Noise Is Not the Main Factor Behind the Gap Between SGD and Adam on Transformers, but Sign Descent Might Be
The success of the Adam optimizer on a wide array of architectures has made it the default in settings where stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performs poorly. However, our theoretical understanding of this discrepancy i…
When Can You Get Away with Low Memory Adam?
Adam is the go-to optimizer for training modern machine learning models, but it requires additional memory to maintain the moving averages of the gradients and their squares. While various low-memory optimizers have been…
Limitations of the Empirical Fisher Approximation for Natural Gradient Descent
Natural gradient descent, which preconditions a gradient descent update with the Fisher information matrix of the underlying statistical model, is a way to capture partial second-order information. Several highly visible…
Second-order methods