Timezone: »

 
Poster
DoG is SGD's Best Friend: A Parameter-Free Dynamic Step Size Schedule
Maor Ivgi · Oliver Hinder · Yair Carmon

Thu Jul 27 04:30 PM -- 06:00 PM (PDT) @ Exhibit Hall 1 #700

We propose a tuning-free dynamic SGD step size formula, which we call Distance over Gradients (DoG). The DoG step sizes depend on simple empirical quantities (distance from the initial point and norms of gradients) and have no ``learning rate'' parameter. Theoretically, we show that, for stochastic convex optimization, a slight variation of the DoG formula enjoys strong, high-probability parameter-free convergence guarantees and iterate movement bounds. Empirically, we consider a broad range of vision and language transfer learning tasks, and show that DoG's performance is close to that of SGD with tuned learning rate. We also propose a per-layer variant of DoG that generally outperforms tuned SGD, approaching the performance of tuned Adam. A PyTorch implementation of our algorithms is available at https://github.com/formll/dog.

Author Information

Maor Ivgi (Tel Aviv University)
Oliver Hinder (University of Pittsburgh)
Yair Carmon (Tel Aviv University)

More from the Same Authors