Optimization and training methods

9 articles

General

Cosine annealing

Cosine annealing is a learning rate schedule for training neural networks that decays the rate along half a cosine curve, introduced by Loshchilov and Hutter in 2016.

General

Differential privacy SGD

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is a privacy-preserving variant of stochastic gradient descent, introduced by Abadi et al. in 2016 and the standard method for private neural network training.

General

Gradient clipping

Gradient clipping is a modification to gradient descent that caps the gradient's norm at a chosen threshold each iteration, used to stabilize training and enforce differential privacy.

General

Group robustness optimization

Group robustness optimization, or group DRO, is a machine learning training method that minimizes worst-case loss over pre-defined groups rather than average loss, improving worst-group accuracy.

General

Momentum method

The momentum method is an optimization technique in machine learning that adds a fraction of the previous update to each gradient step, dampening oscillations and speeding convergence.

General

Nadam

Nadam, short for Nesterov-accelerated Adaptive Moment Estimation, is an optimization algorithm for training neural networks that combines Adam with Nesterov momentum, introduced by Timothy Dozat in 2016.

General

Sharpness-aware minimization

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is a training procedure that perturbs model weights toward higher loss before each descent step, favoring flat minima; introduced by Foret and colleagues in 2020.

General

Variational neural annealing

Variational neural annealing (VNA) is an optimization method combining annealing with variational training of an autoregressive neural network, introduced in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2021.

General

Weight decay

Weight decay is a regularization technique for training neural networks in which weights are multiplicatively shrunk toward zero each step, traditionally by adding an L2 penalty to the loss function.