Statistically Significant Stopping of Neural Network Training
The general approach taken when training deep learning classifiers is to save the parameters after every few iterations, train until either a human observer or a simple metric-based heuristic decides the network isn't learning anymore, and then backtrack and pick the saved parameters with the best validation accuracy. Simple methods are used to determine if a neural network isn't learning anymore because, as long as it's well after the optimal values are found, the condition doesn't impact the final accuracy of the model. However from a runtime perspective, this is of great significance to the many cases where numerous neural networks are trained simultaneously (e.g. hyper-parameter tuning). Motivated by this, we introduce a statistical significance test to determine if a neural network has stopped learning. This stopping criterion appears to represent a happy medium compared to other popular stopping criterions, achieving comparable accuracy to the criterions that achieve the highest final accuracies in 77% or fewer epochs, while the criterions which stop sooner do so with an appreciable loss to final accuracy. Additionally, we use this as the basis of a new learning rate scheduler, removing the need to manually choose learning rate schedules and acting as a quasi-line search, achieving superior or comparable empirical performance to existing methods.
Code (1)
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Stopping Rules for Stochastic Gradient Descent via Anytime-Valid Confidence Sequences
The problem of stopping stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in an online manner, based solely on the observed trajectory, is a challenging theoretical problem with significant consequences for applications. While SGD is ro…
Statistical Early Stopping for Reasoning Models
While LLMs have seen substantial improvement in reasoning capabilities, they also sometimes overthink, generating unnecessary reasoning steps, particularly under uncertainty, given ill-posed or ambiguous queries. We intr…
Identifying Higher-order Combinations of Binary Features
Finding statistically significant interactions between binary variables is computationally and statistically challenging in high-dimensional settings, due to the combinatorial explosion in the number of hypotheses. Terad…
Learning the Optimal Stopping for Early Classification within Finite Horizons via Sequential Probability Ratio Test
Time-sensitive machine learning benefits from Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT), which provides an optimal stopping time for early classification of time series. However, in finite horizon scenarios, where input l…
Density Ratio EstimationEarly ClassificationDon't stop me now: Rethinking Validation Criteria for Model Parameter Selection
Despite the extensive literature on training loss functions, the evaluation of generalization on the validation set remains underexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic empirical and statistical study of how the …