SING: A Plug-and-Play DNN Learning Technique
Adrien Courtois Damien Scieur Jean-Michel Morel Pablo Arias Thomas Eboli
We propose SING (StabIlized and Normalized Gradient), a plug-and-play
technique that improves the stability and generalization of the Adam(W)
optimizer. SING is straightforward to implement and has minimal computational
overhead, requiring only a layer-wise standardization of the gradients fed to
Adam(W) without introducing additional hyper-parameters. We support the
effectiveness and practicality of the proposed approach by showing improved
results on a wide range of architectures, problems (such as image
classification, depth estimation, and natural language processing), and in
combination with other optimizers. We provide a theoretical analysis of the
convergence of the method, and we show that by virtue of the standardization,
SING can escape local minima narrower than a threshold that is inversely
proportional to the network's depth.