This paper explores an incremental training strategy for the skip-gram model with negative sampling (SGNS) from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Existing methods of neural word embeddings, including SGNS, are multi-pass algorithms and thus cannot perform incremental model update. To address this problem, we present a simple incremental extension of SGNS and provide a thorough theoretical analysis to demonstrate its validity. Empirical experiments demonstrated the correctness of the theoretical analysis as well as the practical usefulness of the incremental algorithm.
Very recently, proposed an incremental learning method of hierarchical soft-max. Because hierarchical soft-max and negative sampling have different advantages @cite_1 , the incremental SGNS and their method are complementary to each other. Also, their updating method needs to scan not only new but also old training data, and thus is not an incremental algorithm in a strict sense. As a consequence, it potentially incurs the same time complexity as the re-training. Another consequence is that their method has to retain the old training data and thus wastes space, while incremental SGNS can discard old training examples after processing them.
@cite_1
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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.