Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Wang, Runzhe, Malladi, Sadhika, Wang, Tianhao, Lyu, Kaifeng, Li, Zhiyuan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15196
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866913316298817536
author Wang, Runzhe
Malladi, Sadhika
Wang, Tianhao
Lyu, Kaifeng
Li, Zhiyuan
author_facet Wang, Runzhe
Malladi, Sadhika
Wang, Tianhao
Lyu, Kaifeng
Li, Zhiyuan
contents Momentum is known to accelerate the convergence of gradient descent in strongly convex settings without stochastic gradient noise. In stochastic optimization, such as training neural networks, folklore suggests that momentum may help deep learning optimization by reducing the variance of the stochastic gradient update, but previous theoretical analyses do not find momentum to offer any provable acceleration. Theoretical results in this paper clarify the role of momentum in stochastic settings where the learning rate is small and gradient noise is the dominant source of instability, suggesting that SGD with and without momentum behave similarly in the short and long time horizons. Experiments show that momentum indeed has limited benefits for both optimization and generalization in practical training regimes where the optimal learning rate is not very large, including small- to medium-batch training from scratch on ImageNet and fine-tuning language models on downstream tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_15196
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Marginal Value of Momentum for Small Learning Rate SGD
Wang, Runzhe
Malladi, Sadhika
Wang, Tianhao
Lyu, Kaifeng
Li, Zhiyuan
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
Momentum is known to accelerate the convergence of gradient descent in strongly convex settings without stochastic gradient noise. In stochastic optimization, such as training neural networks, folklore suggests that momentum may help deep learning optimization by reducing the variance of the stochastic gradient update, but previous theoretical analyses do not find momentum to offer any provable acceleration. Theoretical results in this paper clarify the role of momentum in stochastic settings where the learning rate is small and gradient noise is the dominant source of instability, suggesting that SGD with and without momentum behave similarly in the short and long time horizons. Experiments show that momentum indeed has limited benefits for both optimization and generalization in practical training regimes where the optimal learning rate is not very large, including small- to medium-batch training from scratch on ImageNet and fine-tuning language models on downstream tasks.
title The Marginal Value of Momentum for Small Learning Rate SGD
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15196