μLO: Compute-Efficient Meta-Generalization of Learned Optimizers

Benjamin Therien, Charles-Étienne Joseph, Boris Knyazev, Edouard Oyallon, Irina Rish, Eugene Belilovsky

μLO: Compute-Efficient Meta-Generalization of Learned Optimizers: 12 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #6 of 6 papers on 2024-06-04. Day-by-day upvote history.

Learned optimizers (LOs) can significantly reduce the wall-clock training time of neural networks, substantially reducing training costs. However, they often suffer from poor meta-generalization, especially when training networks larger than those seen during meta-training. To address this, we use the recently proposed Maximal Update Parametrization (muP), which allows zero-shot generalization of optimizer hyperparameters from smaller to larger models. We extend muP theory to learned optimizers, treating the meta-training problem as finding the learned optimizer under muP. Our evaluation shows that LOs meta-trained with muP substantially improve meta-generalization as compared to LOs trained under standard parametrization (SP). Notably, when applied to large-width models, our best muLO, trained for 103 GPU-hours, matches or exceeds the performance of VeLO, the largest publicly available learned optimizer, meta-trained with 4000 TPU-months of compute. Moreover, muLOs demonstrate better generalization than their SP counterparts to deeper networks and to much longer training horizons (25 times longer) than those seen during meta-training.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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