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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Harvey, Ethan, Petrov, Mikhail, Hughes, Michael C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19675
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author Harvey, Ethan
Petrov, Mikhail
Hughes, Michael C.
author_facet Harvey, Ethan
Petrov, Mikhail
Hughes, Michael C.
contents A number of popular transfer learning methods rely on grid search to select regularization hyperparameters that control over-fitting. This grid search requirement has several key disadvantages: the search is computationally expensive, requires carving out a validation set that reduces the size of available data for model training, and requires practitioners to specify candidate values. In this paper, we propose an alternative to grid search: directly learning regularization hyperparameters on the full training set via model selection techniques based on the evidence lower bound ("ELBo") objective from variational methods. For deep neural networks with millions of parameters, we specifically recommend a modified ELBo that upweights the influence of the data likelihood relative to the prior while remaining a valid bound on the evidence for Bayesian model selection. Our proposed technique overcomes all three disadvantages of grid search. We demonstrate effectiveness on image classification tasks on several datasets, yielding heldout accuracy comparable to existing approaches with far less compute time.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_19675
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning the Regularization Strength for Deep Fine-Tuning via a Data-Emphasized Variational Objective
Harvey, Ethan
Petrov, Mikhail
Hughes, Michael C.
Machine Learning
A number of popular transfer learning methods rely on grid search to select regularization hyperparameters that control over-fitting. This grid search requirement has several key disadvantages: the search is computationally expensive, requires carving out a validation set that reduces the size of available data for model training, and requires practitioners to specify candidate values. In this paper, we propose an alternative to grid search: directly learning regularization hyperparameters on the full training set via model selection techniques based on the evidence lower bound ("ELBo") objective from variational methods. For deep neural networks with millions of parameters, we specifically recommend a modified ELBo that upweights the influence of the data likelihood relative to the prior while remaining a valid bound on the evidence for Bayesian model selection. Our proposed technique overcomes all three disadvantages of grid search. We demonstrate effectiveness on image classification tasks on several datasets, yielding heldout accuracy comparable to existing approaches with far less compute time.
title Learning the Regularization Strength for Deep Fine-Tuning via a Data-Emphasized Variational Objective
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19675