Careful With That Scalpel: Improving Gradient Surgery With an EMA
Beyond minimizing a single training loss, many deep learning estimation pipelines rely on an auxiliary objective to quantify and encourage desirable properties of the model (e.g. performance on another dataset, robustness, agreement with a prior). Although the simplest approach to incorporating an auxiliary loss is to sum it with the training loss as a regularizer, recent works have shown that one can improve performance by blending the gradients beyond a simple sum; this is known as gradient surgery. We cast the problem as a constrained minimization problem where the auxiliary objective is…
This paper was accepted at the Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP) workshop at NeurIPS 2024. Speculative decoding is a prominent technique to speed up the inference of a large target language model based on predictions of an auxiliary draft model. While effective, in application-specific settings, it often involves…
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are crucial for scaling model capacity while controlling inference costs. While integrating MoE into multimodal models like CLIP improves performance, training these models is notoriously challenging and expensive. We propose CLIP-Upcycling (CLIP-UP), an efficient alternative training strategy that converts a pre-trained dense CLIP model into a sparse…
The loss metric is very important for neural networks. As all machine learning models are one optimization problem or another, the loss is the objective function to minimize. In neural networks, the optimization is done with gradient descent and backpropagation. But what are loss functions, and how are they affecting…