Related papers: When, Where and Why to Average Weights?
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) can lead to reward hacking, where LLMs exploit failures in the reward model (RM) to achieve seemingly high rewards without meeting the…
In this paper, we explore techniques centered around periodic sampling of model weights that provide convergence improvements on gradient update methods (vanilla \acs{SGD}, Momentum, Adam) for a variety of vision problems (classification,…
Complex learning rate schedules have become an integral part of deep learning. We find empirically that common fine-tuned schedules decay the learning rate after the weight norm bounces. This leads to the proposal of ABEL: an automatic…
Many machine learning tasks in the natural sciences are precisely equivariant to particular symmetries. Nonetheless, equivariant methods are often not employed, perhaps because training is perceived to be challenging, or the symmetry is…
Deep learning uses neural networks which are parameterised by their weights. The neural networks are usually trained by tuning the weights to directly minimise a given loss function. In this paper we propose to re-parameterise the weights…
Weight averaging of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) iterates is a popular method for training deep learning models. While it is often used as part of complex training pipelines to improve generalization or serve as a `teacher' model,…
Valuable training data is often owned by independent organizations and located in multiple data centers. Most deep learning approaches require to centralize the multi-datacenter data for performance purpose. In practice, however, it is…
Two popular approaches for distributed training of SVMs on big data are parameter averaging and ADMM. Parameter averaging is efficient but suffers from loss of accuracy with increase in number of partitions, while ADMM in the feature space…
Multitask Learning is a Machine Learning paradigm that aims to train a range of (usually related) tasks with the help of a shared model. While the goal is often to improve the joint performance of all training tasks, another approach is to…
Averaging neural network parameters is an intuitive method for fusing the knowledge of two independent models. It is most prominently used in federated learning. If models are averaged at the end of training, this can only lead to a good…
Despite the simplicity, stochastic gradient descent (SGD)-like algorithms are successful in training deep neural networks (DNNs). Among various attempts to improve SGD, weight averaging (WA), which averages the weights of multiple models,…
Background: Deep learning models are typically trained using stochastic gradient descent or one of its variants. These methods update the weights using their gradient, estimated from a small fraction of the training data. It has been…
Training large neural networks and merging task-specific models both exploit low-rank structure and require parameter importance estimation, yet these challenges have been pursued in isolation. Current workflows compute curvature…
Model averaging has gained significant attention in recent years due to its ability of fusing information from different models. The critical challenge in frequentist model averaging is the choice of weight vector. The bootstrap method,…
We generalize the standard Hopfield model to the case when a weight is assigned to each input pattern. The weight can be interpreted as the frequency of the pattern occurrence at the input of the network. In the framework of the statistical…
Inspired by recent research that recommends starting neural networks training with large learning rates (LRs) to achieve the best generalization, we explore this hypothesis in detail. Our study clarifies the initial LR ranges that provide…
Model averaging is an important alternative to model selection with attractive prediction accuracy. However, its application to high-dimensional data remains under-explored. We propose a high-dimensional model averaging method via…
The generalization of machine learning models has a complex dependence on the data, model and learning algorithm. We study train and test performance, as well as the generalization gap given by the mean of their difference over different…
Finetuning on domain-specific data is a well-established method for enhancing LLM performance on downstream tasks. Training on each dataset produces a new set of model weights, resulting in a multitude of checkpoints saved in-house or on…
Agents trained with deep reinforcement learning algorithms are capable of performing highly complex tasks including locomotion in continuous environments. We investigate transferring the learning acquired in one task to a set of previously…