I apply recent work on "learning to think" (2015) and on PowerPlay (2011) to the incremental training of an increasingly general problem solver, continually learning to solve new tasks without forgetting previous skills. The problem solver is a single recurrent neural network (or similar general purpose computer) called ONE. ONE is unusual in the sense that it is trained in various ways, e.g., by black box optimization reinforcement learning artificial evolution as well as supervised unsupervised learning. For example, ONE may learn through neuroevolution to control a robot through environment-changing actions, and learn through unsupervised gradient descent to predict future inputs and vector-valued reward signals as suggested in 1990. User-given tasks can be defined through extra goal-defining input patterns, also proposed in 1990. Suppose ONE has already learned many skills. Now a copy of ONE can be re-trained to learn a new skill, e.g., through neuroevolution without a teacher. Here it may profit from re-using previously learned subroutines, but it may also forget previous skills. Then ONE is retrained in PowerPlay style (2011) on stored input output traces of (a) ONE's copy executing the new skill and (b) previous instances of ONE whose skills are still considered worth memorizing. Simultaneously, ONE is retrained on old traces (even those of unsuccessful trials) to become a better predictor, without additional expensive interaction with the enviroment. More and more control and prediction skills are thus collapsed into ONE, like in the chunker-automatizer system of the neural history compressor (1991). This forces ONE to relate partially analogous skills (with shared algorithmic information) to each other, creating common subroutines in form of shared subnetworks of ONE, to greatly speed up subsequent learning of additional, novel but algorithmically related skills.
Here we apply the basic idea to the incremental skill training of ONE. Both the predictive skills acquired by gradient descent and the task-specific control skills acquired by black box optimization can be collapsed into one single network (namely, ONE itself) through pure gradient descent, by retraining ONE on all input-output traces of all previously learned behaviors that are still deemed useful @cite_101 . Towards this end, we simply retrain ONE to reproduce control behaviors of successful past versions of ONE, but without really executing the behaviors in the environment (usually the expensive part). Simultaneously, all input-output traces ever observed (including those of failed trials) can be used to train ONE to become a better predictor of future inputs, given previous inputs and actions. Of course, this requires to store input-output traces of all trials @cite_24 @cite_85 @cite_16 .
@cite_24 @cite_85 @cite_101 @cite_16
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It is common practice to decay the learning rate. Here we show one can usually obtain the same learning curve on both training and test sets by instead increasing the batch size during training. This procedure is successful for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), SGD with momentum, Nesterov momentum, and Adam. It reaches equivalent test accuracies after the same number of training epochs, but with fewer parameter updates, leading to greater parallelism and shorter training times. We can further reduce the number of parameter updates by increasing the learning rate @math and scaling the batch size @math . Finally, one can increase the momentum coefficient @math and scale @math , although this tends to slightly reduce the test accuracy. Crucially, our techniques allow us to repurpose existing training schedules for large batch training with no hyper-parameter tuning. We train ResNet-50 on ImageNet to @math validation accuracy in under 30 minutes. We learn recurrent neural network optimizers trained on simple synthetic functions by gradient descent. We show that these learned optimizers exhibit a remarkable degree of transfer in that they can be used to efficiently optimize a broad range of derivative-free black-box functions, including Gaussian process bandits, simple control objectives, global optimization benchmarks and hyper-parameter tuning tasks. Up to the training horizon, the learned optimizers learn to trade-off exploration and exploitation, and compare favourably with heavily engineered Bayesian optimization packages for hyper-parameter tuning. We learn recurrent neural network optimizers trained on simple synthetic functions by gradient descent. We show that these learned optimizers exhibit a remarkable degree of transfer in that they can be used to efficiently optimize a broad range of derivative-free black-box functions, including Gaussian process bandits, simple control objectives, global optimization benchmarks and hyper-parameter tuning tasks. Up to the training horizon, the learned optimizers learn to tradeoff exploration and exploitation, and compare favourably with heavily engineered Bayesian optimization packages for hyper-parameter tuning. It is common practice to decay the learning rate. Here we show one can usually obtain the same learning curve on both training and test sets by instead increasing the batch size during training. This procedure is successful for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), SGD with momentum, Nesterov momentum, and Adam. It reaches equivalent test accuracies after the same number of training epochs, but with fewer parameter updates, leading to greater parallelism and shorter training times. We can further reduce the number of parameter updates by increasing the learning rate @math and scaling the batch size @math . Finally, one can increase the momentum coefficient @math and scale @math , although this tends to slightly reduce the test accuracy. Crucially, our techniques allow us to repurpose existing training schedules for large batch training with no hyper-parameter tuning. We train Inception-ResNet-V2 on ImageNet to @math validation accuracy in under 2500 parameter updates, efficiently utilizing training batches of 65536 images.