Related papers: Optimizing Neural Networks with Kronecker-factored…
In this technical report, we consider an approach that combines the PPO objective and K-FAC natural gradient optimization, for which we call PPOKFAC. We perform a range of empirical analysis on various aspects of the algorithm, such as…
In this work, we propose to apply trust region optimization to deep reinforcement learning using a recently proposed Kronecker-factored approximation to the curvature. We extend the framework of natural policy gradient and propose to…
We consider optimization problems in which the goal is find a $k$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{R}^n$, $k<<n$, which minimizes a convex and smooth loss. Such problems generalize the fundamental task of principal component analysis (PCA)…
Second order stochastic optimizers allow parameter update step size and direction to adapt to loss curvature, but have traditionally required too much memory and compute for deep learning. Recently, Shampoo [Gupta et al., 2018] introduced a…
Natural gradient descent (NGD) is a powerful optimization technique for machine learning, but the computational complexity of the inverse Fisher information matrix limits its application in training deep neural networks. To overcome this…
Online Continual Learning (OCL) for image classification represents a challenging subset of Continual Learning, focusing on classifying images from a stream without assuming data independence and identical distribution (i.i.d). The primary…
We describe a family of descent algorithms which generalizes common existing schemes used in applications such as neural network training and more broadly for optimization of smooth functions--potentially for global optimization, or as a…
Natural gradient descent (NGD) provided deep insights and powerful tools to deep neural networks. However the computation of Fisher information matrix becomes more and more difficult as the network structure turns large and complex. This…
Natural gradients have long been studied in deep reinforcement learning due to their fast convergence properties and covariant weight updates. However, computing natural gradients requires inversion of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) at…
Learning a deep neural network requires solving a challenging optimization problem: it is a high-dimensional, non-convex and non-smooth minimization problem with a large number of terms. The current practice in neural network optimization…
Feed-forward neural networks can be understood as a combination of an intermediate representation and a linear hypothesis. While most previous works aim to diversify the representations, we explore the complementary direction by performing…
Variational Bayesian neural nets combine the flexibility of deep learning with Bayesian uncertainty estimation. Unfortunately, there is a tradeoff between cheap but simple variational families (e.g.~fully factorized) or expensive and…
Despite the predominant use of first-order methods for training deep learning models, second-order methods, and in particular, natural gradient methods, remain of interest because of their potential for accelerating training through the use…
We present practical Levenberg-Marquardt variants of Gauss-Newton and natural gradient methods for solving non-convex optimization problems that arise in training deep neural networks involving enormous numbers of variables and huge data…
In this paper we propose and study a technique to reduce the number of parameters and computation time in fully-connected layers of neural networks using Kronecker product, at a mild cost of the prediction quality. The technique proceeds by…
Efficiently approximating local curvature information of the loss function is a key tool for optimization and compression of deep neural networks. Yet, most existing methods to approximate second-order information have high computational or…
This paper introduces a new stochastic optimization method based on the regularized Fisher information matrix (FIM), named SOFIM, which can efficiently utilize the FIM to approximate the Hessian matrix for finding Newton's gradient update…
This paper establishes a mathematical foundation for the Adam optimizer, elucidating its connection to natural gradient descent through Riemannian and information geometry. We provide an accessible and detailed analysis of the diagonal…
A deep neural network is a hierarchical nonlinear model transforming input signals to output signals. Its input-output relation is considered to be stochastic, being described for a given input by a parameterized conditional probability…
We consider the problem of recovering low-rank matrices from random rank-one measurements, which spans numerous applications including covariance sketching, phase retrieval, quantum state tomography, and learning shallow polynomial neural…