We introduce Kalman Gradient Descent, a stochastic optimization algorithm that uses Kalman filtering to adaptively reduce gradient variance in stochastic gradient descent by filtering the gradient estimates. We present both a theoretical analysis of convergence in a non-convex setting and experimental results which demonstrate improved performance on a variety of machine learning areas including neural networks and black box variational inference. We also present a distributed version of our algorithm that enables large-dimensional optimization, and we extend our algorithm to SGD with momentum and RMSProp.
There is an important connection between KGD and meta-learning and adaptive optimization @cite_31 @cite_12 . In @cite_31 , the authors propose a set of auxiliary dynamics for the stepsize @math , which is treated as a vector of @math individual parameters. More recently, in @cite_18 , the authors propose the update @math where the function @math is represented by a recurrent neural network and is learned during the optimization.
@cite_31 @cite_18 @cite_12
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The goal of (stable) sparse recovery is to recover a @math -sparse approximation @math of a vector @math from linear measurements of @math . Specifically, the goal is to recover @math such that @math for some constant @math and norm parameters @math and @math . It is known that, for @math or @math , this task can be accomplished using @math non-adaptive measurements CRT06:Stable-Signal and that this bound is tight DIPW, FPRU, PW11 . In this paper we show that if one is allowed to perform measurements that are adaptive , then the number of measurements can be considerably reduced. Specifically, for @math and @math we show A scheme with @math measurements that uses @math rounds. This is a significant improvement over the best possible non-adaptive bound. A scheme with @math measurements that uses two rounds. This improves over the best possible non-adaptive bound. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first results of this type. We study the Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) algorithm for non-convex optimization. The algorithm performs stochastic gradient descent, where in each step it injects appropriately scaled Gaussian noise to the update. We analyze the algorithm's hitting time to an arbitrary subset of the parameter space. Two results follow from our general theory: First, we prove that for empirical risk minimization, if the empirical risk is point-wise close to the (smooth) population risk, then the algorithm achieves an approximate local minimum of the population risk in polynomial time, escaping suboptimal local minima that only exist in the empirical risk. Second, we show that SGLD improves on one of the best known learnability results for learning linear classifiers under the zero-one loss. We present an approach to automate the process of discovering optimization methods, with a focus on deep learning architectures. We train a Recurrent Neural Network controller to generate a string in a specific domain language that describes a mathematical update equation based on a list of primitive functions, such as the gradient, running average of the gradient, etc. The controller is trained with Reinforcement Learning to maximize the performance of a model after a few epochs. On CIFAR-10, our method discovers several update rules that are better than many commonly used optimizers, such as Adam, RMSProp, or SGD with and without Momentum on a ConvNet model. These optimizers can also be transferred to perform well on different neural network architectures, including Google's neural machine translation system. Despite superior training outcomes, adaptive optimization methods such as Adam, Adagrad or RMSprop have been found to generalize poorly compared to Stochastic gradient descent (SGD). These methods tend to perform well in the initial portion of training but are outperformed by SGD at later stages of training. We investigate a hybrid strategy that begins training with an adaptive method and switches to SGD when appropriate. Concretely, we propose SWATS, a simple strategy which switches from Adam to SGD when a triggering condition is satisfied. The condition we propose relates to the projection of Adam steps on the gradient subspace. By design, the monitoring process for this condition adds very little overhead and does not increase the number of hyperparameters in the optimizer. We report experiments on several standard benchmarks such as: ResNet, SENet, DenseNet and PyramidNet for the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 data sets, ResNet on the tiny-ImageNet data set and language modeling with recurrent networks on the PTB and WT2 data sets. The results show that our strategy is capable of closing the generalization gap between SGD and Adam on a majority of the tasks.