Simple Linear Neuron Boosting

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Munoz, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Munoz, Daniel
author_facet Munoz, Daniel
contents Given a differentiable network architecture and loss function, we revisit optimizing the network's neurons in function space using Boosted Backpropagation (Grubb & Bagnell, 2010), in contrast to optimizing in parameter space. From this perspective, we reduce descent in the space of linear functions that optimizes the network's backpropagated-errors to a preconditioned gradient descent algorithm. We show that this preconditioned update rule is equivalent to reparameterizing the network to whiten each neuron's features, with the benefit that the normalization occurs outside of inference. In practice, we use this equivalence to construct an online estimator for approximating the preconditioner and we propose an online, matrix-free learning algorithm with adaptive step sizes. The algorithm is applicable whenever autodifferentiation is available, including convolutional networks and transformers, and it is simple to implement for both the local and distributed training settings. We demonstrate fast convergence both in terms of epochs and wall clock time on a variety of tasks and networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_01131
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simple Linear Neuron Boosting
Munoz, Daniel
Machine Learning
Given a differentiable network architecture and loss function, we revisit optimizing the network's neurons in function space using Boosted Backpropagation (Grubb & Bagnell, 2010), in contrast to optimizing in parameter space. From this perspective, we reduce descent in the space of linear functions that optimizes the network's backpropagated-errors to a preconditioned gradient descent algorithm. We show that this preconditioned update rule is equivalent to reparameterizing the network to whiten each neuron's features, with the benefit that the normalization occurs outside of inference. In practice, we use this equivalence to construct an online estimator for approximating the preconditioner and we propose an online, matrix-free learning algorithm with adaptive step sizes. The algorithm is applicable whenever autodifferentiation is available, including convolutional networks and transformers, and it is simple to implement for both the local and distributed training settings. We demonstrate fast convergence both in terms of epochs and wall clock time on a variety of tasks and networks.
title Simple Linear Neuron Boosting
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01131