Posts tagged with: stochastic gradient descent

Automatic differentiation for machine learning in Julia

Automatic differentiation is a term I first heard of while working on (as it turns out now, a bit cumbersome) implementation of backpropagation algorithm – after all it caused lots of headaches as I had to handle all derivatives myself with almost pen-and-paper like approach. Obviously I made many mistakes until I got my final solution working.

At that time, I was aware some libraries like Theano or Tensorflow handle derivatives in a certain “magical” way for free. I never knew exactly what happens deep in the guts of these libraries though and I somehow suspected it is rather painful than fun to grasp (apparently, I was wrong!).

I decided to take a shot and directed my first steps towards TensorFlow official documentation to quickly find out what the magic is. The term I was looking for was automatic differentiation.

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Optimization techniques comparison in Julia: SGD, Momentum, Adagrad, Adadelta, Adam

In today’s post we will compare five popular optimization techniques: SGD, SGD+momentum, Adagrad, Adadelta and Adam – methods for finding local optimum (global when dealing with convex problem) of certain differentiable functions. In case of experiments conducted later in this post, these functions will all be error functions of feed forward neural networks of various architectures for the problem of multi-label classification of MNIST (dataset of handwritten digits). In our considerations we will refer to what we know from previous posts. We will also extend the existing code.

Stochastic gradient descent and momentum optimization techniques

Let’s recall stochastic gradient descent optimization technique that was presented in one of the last posts. Last time we pointed out its speed as a main advantage over batch gradient descent (when full training set is used). There is one more advantage though. Stochastic gradient descent tends to escape from local minima. It is because error function changes from mini-batch to mini-batch pushing solution to be continuously updated (local minimum for error function given by one mini-batch may not be present for other mini-batch implying non-zero gradient).

Traversing through error differentiable functions’ surfaces efficiently is a big research area today. Some of the recently popular techniques (especially in application to NN) take the gradient history into account such that each “move” on the error function surface relies on previous ones a bit. An example of childish intuition of that phenomenom might involve a snow ball rolling down the mountain. Snow keeps on attaching to it increasing its mass and making it resistant to stuck in small holes on the way down (because of both the speed and mass). Such snow ball does not teleport from one point to another but rather rolls down within certain process. This infantile snowy intuition may be applied to gradient descent method too.

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Backpropagation from scratch in Julia (part II: derivation and implementation)

get the code from here

This is the second post of the series describing backpropagation algorithm applied to feed forward neural network training. In the last post we described what neural network is and we concluded it is a parametrized mathematical function. We implemented neural network initialization (meaning creating a proper entity representing the network – not weight initialization) and inference routine but we never made any connection to the data itself. In this post we will make such a connection and we will express meaning of parametrization “goodness” in terms of training data and network output.

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