meProp: Sparsified Back Propagation for Accelerated Deep Learning with Reduced Overfitting
Abstract
We propose a simple yet effective technique for neural network learning. The forward propagation is computed as usual. In back propagation, only a small subset of the full gradient is computed to update the model parameters. The gradient vectors are sparsified in such a way that only the top- elements (in terms of magnitude) are kept. As a result, only rows or columns (depending on the layout) of the weight matrix are modified, leading to a linear reduction ( divided by the vector dimension) in the computational cost. Surprisingly, experimental results demonstrate that we can update only 1-4% of the weights at each back propagation pass. This does not result in a larger number of training iterations. More interestingly, the accuracy of the resulting models is actually improved rather than degraded, and a detailed analysis is given. The code is available at https://github.com/lancopku/meProp
Cite
@article{arxiv.1706.06197,
title = {meProp: Sparsified Back Propagation for Accelerated Deep Learning with Reduced Overfitting},
author = {Xu Sun and Xuancheng Ren and Shuming Ma and Houfeng Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.06197},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Accepted by the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2017)