When Will Gradient Regularization Be Harmful?

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhao, Yang, Zhang, Hao, Hu, Xiuyuan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zhao, Yang
Zhang, Hao
Hu, Xiuyuan
author_facet Zhao, Yang
Zhang, Hao
Hu, Xiuyuan
contents Gradient regularization (GR), which aims to penalize the gradient norm atop the loss function, has shown promising results in training modern over-parameterized deep neural networks. However, can we trust this powerful technique? This paper reveals that GR can cause performance degeneration in adaptive optimization scenarios, particularly with learning rate warmup. Our empirical and theoretical analyses suggest this is due to GR inducing instability and divergence in gradient statistics of adaptive optimizers at the initial training stage. Inspired by the warmup heuristic, we propose three GR warmup strategies, each relaxing the regularization effect to a certain extent during the warmup course to ensure the accurate and stable accumulation of gradients. With experiments on Vision Transformer family, we confirm the three GR warmup strategies can effectively circumvent these issues, thereby largely improving the model performance. Meanwhile, we note that scalable models tend to rely more on the GR warmup, where the performance can be improved by up to 3\% on Cifar10 compared to baseline GR. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/zhaoyang-0204/gnp}{https://github.com/zhaoyang-0204/gnp}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_09723
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Will Gradient Regularization Be Harmful?
Zhao, Yang
Zhang, Hao
Hu, Xiuyuan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
55N31
I.4.0
Gradient regularization (GR), which aims to penalize the gradient norm atop the loss function, has shown promising results in training modern over-parameterized deep neural networks. However, can we trust this powerful technique? This paper reveals that GR can cause performance degeneration in adaptive optimization scenarios, particularly with learning rate warmup. Our empirical and theoretical analyses suggest this is due to GR inducing instability and divergence in gradient statistics of adaptive optimizers at the initial training stage. Inspired by the warmup heuristic, we propose three GR warmup strategies, each relaxing the regularization effect to a certain extent during the warmup course to ensure the accurate and stable accumulation of gradients. With experiments on Vision Transformer family, we confirm the three GR warmup strategies can effectively circumvent these issues, thereby largely improving the model performance. Meanwhile, we note that scalable models tend to rely more on the GR warmup, where the performance can be improved by up to 3\% on Cifar10 compared to baseline GR. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/zhaoyang-0204/gnp}{https://github.com/zhaoyang-0204/gnp}.
title When Will Gradient Regularization Be Harmful?
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
55N31
I.4.0
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09723