128,261 research outputs found
Developing Effective Online Training Tools For Maine Adaptive Sports And Recreation
Background: Maine Adaptive Sports and Recreation (MASR) relies on volunteers to instruct their participants with disabilities to participate in a variety of adaptive sport programs. Volunteers must have a comprehensive understanding of participants’ health conditions to assist appropriately. MASR’s traditional training program lacked a formal curriculum and assessment of volunteer learning. Our purpose was to create online learning modules and determine whether implementing a massed or distributed schedule resulted in better long term retention. Methods: Two non-randomized groups of eleven adults were assigned to either an in-class, massed format (Group A) or an at-home, distributed schedule (Group B) to complete six online learning modules. Participant competence was assessed prior, immediately after, and two weeks after completion of learning modules. A global rating scale survey and satisfaction survey were also completed to determine perceived confidence in using the information learned and obtain feedback. Results: Post-hoc testing revealed both groups had significant increase in competence after reviewing the modules, in terms of both immediate recall and long-term retention scores compared to baseline. There was a significant difference between group pre-test scores, but no difference between the groups’ immediate recall or long-term retention scores. Both groups exceeded the MCIC score of 2 points for the Global Rate of Change Scale, indicating a notable increase in confidence. Participants reported the modules to be beneficial and effective in the Volunteer Satisfaction Survey. Conclusion: Our findings suggest the online learning modules were effective regardless of the applied learning schedule. Both groups increased their competence and reported improved confidence with the presented material. A small sample size and discrepancies in participant demographics between groups presented limitations which prohibit recommending a superior learning schedule
Training Neural Networks for and by Interpolation
In modern supervised learning, many deep neural networks are able to
interpolate the data: the empirical loss can be driven to near zero on all
samples simultaneously. In this work, we explicitly exploit this interpolation
property for the design of a new optimization algorithm for deep learning,
which we term Adaptive Learning-rates for Interpolation with Gradients (ALI-G).
ALI-G retains the two main advantages of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD),
which are (i) a low computational cost per iteration and (ii) good
generalization performance in practice. At each iteration, ALI-G exploits the
interpolation property to compute an adaptive learning-rate in closed form. In
addition, ALI-G clips the learning-rate to a maximal value, which we prove to
be helpful for non-convex problems. Crucially, in contrast to the learning-rate
of SGD, the maximal learning-rate of ALI-G does not require a decay schedule,
which makes it considerably easier to tune. We provide convergence guarantees
of ALI-G in various stochastic settings. Notably, we tackle the realistic case
where the interpolation property is satisfied up to some tolerance. We provide
experiments on a variety of architectures and tasks: (i) learning a
differentiable neural computer; (ii) training a wide residual network on the
SVHN data set; (iii) training a Bi-LSTM on the SNLI data set; and (iv) training
wide residual networks and densely connected networks on the CIFAR data sets.
ALI-G produces state-of-the-art results among adaptive methods, and even yields
comparable performance with SGD, which requires manually tuned learning-rate
schedules. Furthermore, ALI-G is simple to implement in any standard deep
learning framework and can be used as a drop-in replacement in existing code.Comment: Published at ICML 202
On the adequacy of untuned warmup for adaptive optimization
Adaptive optimization algorithms such as Adam are widely used in deep
learning. The stability of such algorithms is often improved with a warmup
schedule for the learning rate. Motivated by the difficulty of choosing and
tuning warmup schedules, recent work proposes automatic variance rectification
of Adam's adaptive learning rate, claiming that this rectified approach
("RAdam") surpasses the vanilla Adam algorithm and reduces the need for
expensive tuning of Adam with warmup. In this work, we refute this analysis and
provide an alternative explanation for the necessity of warmup based on the
magnitude of the update term, which is of greater relevance to training
stability. We then provide some "rule-of-thumb" warmup schedules, and we
demonstrate that simple untuned warmup of Adam performs more-or-less
identically to RAdam in typical practical settings. We conclude by suggesting
that practitioners stick to linear warmup with Adam, with a sensible default
being linear warmup over training iterations.Comment: AAAI 202
A computational approach to developing cost-efficient adaptive-threshold algorithms for EEG neuro feedback
In electroencephalography (EEG) neurofeedback protocols,
trainees receive feedback about the spectral power of the target
brain wave oscillation and are tasked to increase or decrease this
feedback signal compared to a predetermined threshold. In a recent
computational analysis of a neurofeedback protocol it was shown that
the placement of the threshold has a major impact on the learning
rate and that placed too low or too high leads to no learning or even
unlearning, respectively. However, the optimal threshold placement is
not known in real-life scenarios. Here, these analyses were extended
to assess whether an adaptive-mean threshold procedure could lead
to faster learning curves. The results indicate that such a procedure is
indeed superior to a fixed-mean procedure and that the distribution
of asymptotic EEG power values converges to that obtained with
the optimal-threshold procedure. Surprisingly, the adaptive-mean
procedure leads to thresholds that are higher than the optimal one,
which is explained through the increase in threshold lagging behind
the increase in the likelihood of activation of the target neurons. To
date, no computational model was used to compute the cost-efficiency
of EEG neurofeedback procedures. The current simulation (within
the specific reinforcement schedule) demonstrated a 35% reduction
in training time, which could translate into sizeable financial savings.
This study demonstrates the utility of computational methods in
neurofeedback research and opens up further developments that
tackle specific neurofeedback protocols to assess their real-life cost-
efficiency
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