No Arabic abstract
Changes in neural architectures have fostered significant breakthroughs in language modeling and computer vision. Unfortunately, novel architectures often require re-thinking the choice of hyperparameters (e.g., learning rate, warmup schedule, and momentum coefficients) to maintain stability of the optimizer. This optimizer instability is often the result of poor parameter initialization, and can be avoided by architecture-specific initialization schemes. In this paper, we present GradInit, an automated and architecture agnostic method for initializing neural networks. GradInit is based on a simple heuristic; the variance of each network layer is adjusted so that a single step of SGD or Adam results in the smallest possible loss value. This adjustment is done by introducing a scalar multiplier variable in front of each parameter block, and then optimizing these variables using a simple numerical scheme. GradInit accelerates the convergence and test performance of many convolutional architectures, both with or without skip connections, and even without normalization layers. It also enables training the original Post-LN Transformer for machine translation without learning rate warmup under a wide range of learning rates and momentum coefficients. Code is available at https://github.com/zhuchen03/gradinit.
Understanding the influence of a training instance on a neural network model leads to improving interpretability. However, it is difficult and inefficient to evaluate the influence, which shows how a models prediction would be changed if a training instance were not used. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for estimating the influence. Our method is inspired by dropout, which zero-masks a sub-network and prevents the sub-network from learning each training instance. By switching between dropout masks, we can use sub-networks that learned or did not learn each training instance and estimate its influence. Through experiments with BERT and VGGNet on classification datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method can capture training influences, enhance the interpretability of error predictions, and cleanse the training dataset for improving generalization.
The rising popularity of intelligent mobile devices and the daunting computational cost of deep learning-based models call for efficient and accurate on-device inference schemes. We propose a quantization scheme that allows inference to be carried out using integer-only arithmetic, which can be implemented more efficiently than floating point inference on commonly available integer-only hardware. We also co-design a training procedure to preserve end-to-end model accuracy post quantization. As a result, the proposed quantization scheme improves the tradeoff between accuracy and on-device latency. The improvements are significant even on MobileNets, a model family known for run-time efficiency, and are demonstrated in ImageNet classification and COCO detection on popular CPUs.
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), including long short-term memory (LSTM) RNNs, have produced state-of-the-art results on a variety of speech recognition tasks. However, these models are often too large in size for deployment on mobile devices with memory and latency constraints. In this work, we study mechanisms for learning compact RNNs and LSTMs via low-rank factorizations and parameter sharing schemes. Our goal is to investigate redundancies in recurrent architectures where compression can be admitted without losing performance. A hybrid strategy of using structured matrices in the bottom layers and shared low-rank factors on the top layers is found to be particularly effective, reducing the parameters of a standard LSTM by 75%, at a small cost of 0.3% increase in WER, on a 2,000-hr English Voice Search task.
We present a new class of adaptive stochastic optimization algorithms, which overcomes many of the known shortcomings of popular adaptive optimizers that are currently used for the fine tuning of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Its underpinning theory relies on advances of Eulers polygonal approximations for stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with monotone coefficients. As a result, it inherits the stability properties of tamed algorithms, while it addresses other known issues, e.g. vanishing gradients in ANNs. In particular, we provide an nonasymptotic analysis and full theoretical guarantees for the convergence properties of an algorithm of this novel class, which we named TH$varepsilon$O POULA (or, simply, TheoPouLa). Finally, several experiments are presented with different types of ANNs, which show the superior performance of TheoPouLa over many popular adaptive optimization algorithms.
Non-convex optimization problems are challenging to solve; the success and computational expense of a gradient descent algorithm or variant depend heavily on the initialization strategy. Often, either random initialization is used or initialization rules are carefully designed by exploiting the nature of the problem class. As a simple alternative to hand-crafted initialization rules, we propose an approach for learning good initialization rules from previous solutions. We provide theoretical guarantees that establish conditions that are sufficient in all cases and also necessary in some under which our approach performs better than random initialization. We apply our methodology to various non-convex problems such as generating adversarial examples, generating post hoc explanations for black-box machine learning models, and allocating communication spectrum, and show consistent gains over other initialization techniques.