VeLO: Training Versatile Learned Optimizers by Scaling Up

Author(s): Luke Metz, James Harrison, C. Daniel Freeman, Amil Merchant, Lucas Beyer, James Bradbury, Naman Agrawal, Ben Poole, Igor Mordatch, Adam Roberts, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein
Venue: arXiv
Year: 2022

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09760

Abstract

While deep learning models have replaced hand-designed features across many domains, these models are still trained with hand-designed optimizers. In this work, we leverage the same scaling approach behind the success of deep learning to learn versatile optimizers. We train an optimizer for deep learning which is itself a small neural network that ingests gradients and outputs parameter updates. Meta-trained with approximately four thousand TPU-months of compute on a wide variety of optimization tasks, our optimizer not only exhibits compelling performance, but optimizes in interesting and unexpected ways. It requires no hyperparameter tuning, instead automatically adapting to the specifics of the problem being optimized.

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