It is known that the learning rate is the most important hyper-parameter to tune for training deep neural networks. This paper describes a new method for setting the learning rate, named cyclical learning rates, which practically eliminates the need to experimentally find the best values and schedule for the global learning rates. Instead of monotonically decreasing the learning rate, this method lets the learning rate cyclically vary between reasonable boundary values. Training with cyclical learning rates instead of fixed values achieves improved classification accuracy without a need to tune and often in fewer iterations. This paper also describes a simple way to estimate "reasonable bounds" -- linearly increasing the learning rate of the network for a few epochs. In addition, cyclical learning rates are demonstrated on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets with ResNets, Stochastic Depth networks, and DenseNets, and the ImageNet dataset with the AlexNet and GoogLeNet architectures. These are practical tools for everyone who trains neural networks.
Adaptive learning rates are fundamentally different from CLR policies, and CLR can be combined with adaptive learning rates, as shown in Section . In addition, CLR policies are computationally simpler than adaptive learning rates. CLR is likely most similar to the SGDR method @cite_8 that appeared recently.
@cite_8
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Restart techniques are common in gradient-free optimization to deal with multimodal functions. Partial restarts are also gaining popularity in gradient-based optimization to improve the rate of convergence in accelerated gradient schemes to deal with ill-conditioned functions. In this paper, we propose a simple restart technique for stochastic gradient descent to improve its anytime performance when training deep neural networks. We empirically study its performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets where we demonstrate new state-of-the-art results below 4 and 19 , respectively. Our source code is available at this https URL