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Chen Xing

Alumni

Publications

A Walk with SGD
Chen Xing
Devansh Arpit
Christos Tsirigotis
Yoshua Bengio
Exploring why stochastic gradient descent (SGD) based optimization methods train deep neural networks (DNNs) that generalize well has become… (voir plus) an active area of research. Towards this end, we empirically study the dynamics of SGD when training over-parametrized DNNs. Specifically we study the DNN loss surface along the trajectory of SGD by interpolating the loss surface between parameters from consecutive \textit{iterations} and tracking various metrics during training. We find that the loss interpolation between parameters before and after a training update is roughly convex with a minimum (\textit{valley floor}) in between for most of the training. Based on this and other metrics, we deduce that during most of the training, SGD explores regions in a valley by bouncing off valley walls at a height above the valley floor. This 'bouncing off walls at a height' mechanism helps SGD traverse larger distance for small batch sizes and large learning rates which we find play qualitatively different roles in the dynamics. While a large learning rate maintains a large height from the valley floor, a small batch size injects noise facilitating exploration. We find this mechanism is crucial for generalization because the valley floor has barriers and this exploration above the valley floor allows SGD to quickly travel far away from the initialization point (without being affected by barriers) and find flatter regions, corresponding to better generalization.
2018-02-23
ArXiv (prépublication)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org