Marthe: Scheduling the Learning Rate Via Online Hypergradients

Marthe: Scheduling the Learning Rate Via Online Hypergradients

Michele Donini, Luca Franceschi, Orchid Majumder, Massimiliano Pontil, Paolo Frasconi

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2119-2125. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/293

We study the problem of fitting task-specific learning rate schedules from the perspective of hyperparameter optimization, aiming at good generalization. We describe the structure of the gradient of a validation error w.r.t. the learning rate schedule -- the hypergradient. Based on this, we introduce MARTHE, a novel online algorithm guided by cheap approximations of the hypergradient that uses past information from the optimization trajectory to simulate future behaviour. It interpolates between two recent techniques, RTHO (Franceschi et al., 2017) and HD (Baydin et al. 2018), and is able to produce learning rate schedules that are more stable leading to models that generalize better.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Deep Learning
Machine Learning: Online Learning