To Clip or not to Clip: the Dynamics of SGD with Gradient Clipping in High-Dimensions

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Marshall, Noah, Xiao, Ke Liang, Agarwala, Atish, Paquette, Elliot
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Marshall, Noah
Xiao, Ke Liang
Agarwala, Atish
Paquette, Elliot
author_facet Marshall, Noah
Xiao, Ke Liang
Agarwala, Atish
Paquette, Elliot
contents The success of modern machine learning is due in part to the adaptive optimization methods that have been developed to deal with the difficulties of training large models over complex datasets. One such method is gradient clipping: a practical procedure with limited theoretical underpinnings. In this work, we study clipping in a least squares problem under streaming SGD. We develop a theoretical analysis of the learning dynamics in the limit of large intrinsic dimension-a model and dataset dependent notion of dimensionality. In this limit we find a deterministic equation that describes the evolution of the loss and demonstrate that this equation predicts the path of clipped SGD on synthetic, CIFAR10, and Wikitext2 data. We show that with Gaussian noise clipping cannot improve SGD performance. Yet, in other noisy settings, clipping can provide benefits with tuning of the clipping threshold. We propose a simple heuristic for near optimal scheduling of the clipping threshold which requires the tuning of only one hyperparameter. We conclude with a discussion about the links between high-dimensional clipping and neural network training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_11733
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle To Clip or not to Clip: the Dynamics of SGD with Gradient Clipping in High-Dimensions
Marshall, Noah
Xiao, Ke Liang
Agarwala, Atish
Paquette, Elliot
Machine Learning
The success of modern machine learning is due in part to the adaptive optimization methods that have been developed to deal with the difficulties of training large models over complex datasets. One such method is gradient clipping: a practical procedure with limited theoretical underpinnings. In this work, we study clipping in a least squares problem under streaming SGD. We develop a theoretical analysis of the learning dynamics in the limit of large intrinsic dimension-a model and dataset dependent notion of dimensionality. In this limit we find a deterministic equation that describes the evolution of the loss and demonstrate that this equation predicts the path of clipped SGD on synthetic, CIFAR10, and Wikitext2 data. We show that with Gaussian noise clipping cannot improve SGD performance. Yet, in other noisy settings, clipping can provide benefits with tuning of the clipping threshold. We propose a simple heuristic for near optimal scheduling of the clipping threshold which requires the tuning of only one hyperparameter. We conclude with a discussion about the links between high-dimensional clipping and neural network training.
title To Clip or not to Clip: the Dynamics of SGD with Gradient Clipping in High-Dimensions
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11733