Temperature Balancing, Layer-wise Weight Analysis, and Neural Network
  Training
Yefan Zhou Tianyu Pang Keqin Liu Charles H. Martin Michael W. Mahoney Yaoqing Yang
Regularization in modern machine learning is crucial, and it can take various
forms in algorithmic design: training set, model family, error function,
regularization terms, and optimizations. In particular, the learning rate,
which can be interpreted as a temperature-like parameter within the statistical
mechanics of learning, plays a crucial role in neural network training. Indeed,
many widely adopted training strategies basically just define the decay of the
learning rate over time. This process can be interpreted as decreasing a
temperature, using either a global learning rate (for the entire model) or a
learning rate that varies for each parameter. This paper proposes TempBalance,
a straightforward yet effective layer-wise learning rate method. TempBalance is
based on Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HT-SR) Theory, an approach which
characterizes the implicit self-regularization of different layers in trained
models. We demonstrate the efficacy of using HT-SR-motivated metrics to guide
the scheduling and balancing of temperature across all network layers during
model training, resulting in improved performance during testing. We implement
TempBalance on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, SVHN, and TinyImageNet datasets using
ResNets, VGGs, and WideResNets with various depths and widths. Our results show
that TempBalance significantly outperforms ordinary SGD and carefully-tuned
spectral norm regularization. We also show that TempBalance outperforms a
number of state-of-the-art optimizers and learning rate schedulers.