Algorithms for hyper-parameter optimization

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

Affiliated Institutions

• Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique FR
• Rowland Foundation US
• Département d'Informatique FR
• GANIL FR

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