3,070 research outputs found
Limitations of the Empirical Fisher Approximation for Natural Gradient Descent
Natural gradient descent, which preconditions a gradient descent update with
the Fisher information matrix of the underlying statistical model, is a way to
capture partial second-order information. Several highly visible works have
advocated an approximation known as the empirical Fisher, drawing connections
between approximate second-order methods and heuristics like Adam. We dispute
this argument by showing that the empirical Fisher---unlike the Fisher---does
not generally capture second-order information. We further argue that the
conditions under which the empirical Fisher approaches the Fisher (and the
Hessian) are unlikely to be met in practice, and that, even on simple
optimization problems, the pathologies of the empirical Fisher can have
undesirable effects.Comment: V3: Minor corrections (typographic errors
Newton-MR: Inexact Newton Method With Minimum Residual Sub-problem Solver
We consider a variant of inexact Newton Method, called Newton-MR, in which
the least-squares sub-problems are solved approximately using Minimum Residual
method. By construction, Newton-MR can be readily applied for unconstrained
optimization of a class of non-convex problems known as invex, which subsumes
convexity as a sub-class. For invex optimization, instead of the classical
Lipschitz continuity assumptions on gradient and Hessian, Newton-MR's global
convergence can be guaranteed under a weaker notion of joint regularity of
Hessian and gradient. We also obtain Newton-MR's problem-independent local
convergence to the set of minima. We show that fast local/global convergence
can be guaranteed under a novel inexactness condition, which, to our knowledge,
is much weaker than the prior related works. Numerical results demonstrate the
performance of Newton-MR as compared with several other Newton-type
alternatives on a few machine learning problems.Comment: 35 page
Small steps and giant leaps: Minimal Newton solvers for Deep Learning
We propose a fast second-order method that can be used as a drop-in
replacement for current deep learning solvers. Compared to stochastic gradient
descent (SGD), it only requires two additional forward-mode automatic
differentiation operations per iteration, which has a computational cost
comparable to two standard forward passes and is easy to implement. Our method
addresses long-standing issues with current second-order solvers, which invert
an approximate Hessian matrix every iteration exactly or by conjugate-gradient
methods, a procedure that is both costly and sensitive to noise. Instead, we
propose to keep a single estimate of the gradient projected by the inverse
Hessian matrix, and update it once per iteration. This estimate has the same
size and is similar to the momentum variable that is commonly used in SGD. No
estimate of the Hessian is maintained. We first validate our method, called
CurveBall, on small problems with known closed-form solutions (noisy Rosenbrock
function and degenerate 2-layer linear networks), where current deep learning
solvers seem to struggle. We then train several large models on CIFAR and
ImageNet, including ResNet and VGG-f networks, where we demonstrate faster
convergence with no hyperparameter tuning. Code is available
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