Abstract

Several recent advances to the state of the art in image classification benchmarks have come from better configurations of existing techniques rather than novel ap-proaches to feature learning. Traditionally, hyper-parameter optimization has been the job of humans because they can be very efficient in regimes where only a few trials are possible. Presently, computer clusters and GPU processors make it pos-sible to run more trials and we show that algorithmic approaches can find better results. We present hyper-parameter optimization results on tasks of training neu-ral networks and deep belief networks (DBNs). We optimize hyper-parameters using random search and two new greedy sequential methods based on the ex-pected improvement criterion. Random search has been shown to be sufficiently efficient for learning neural networks for several datasets, but we show it is unreli-able for training DBNs. The sequential algorithms are applied to the most difficult DBN learning problems from [1] and find significantly better results than the best previously reported. This work contributes novel techniques for making response surface models P (y|x) in which many elements of hyper-parameter assignment (x) are known to be irrelevant given particular values of other elements. 1

Keywords

Computer scienceArtificial neural networkArtificial intelligenceMachine learningDeep learningFeature (linguistics)AlgorithmRandom search

Affiliated Institutions

Related Publications

Publication Info

Year
2016
Type
preprint
Citations
3180
Access
Closed

External Links

Citation Metrics

3180
OpenAlex

Cite This

James Bergstra, R. Bardenet, Yoshua Bengio et al. (2016). Algorithms for hyper-parameter optimization. .