Addressing the Loss-Metric Mismatch with Adaptive Loss Alignment
AuthorsChen Huang, Shuangfei Zhai, Walter Talbott, Miguel Angel Bautista, Shih-Yu Sun, Carlos Guestrin, Joshua M. Susskind
AuthorsChen Huang, Shuangfei Zhai, Walter Talbott, Miguel Angel Bautista, Shih-Yu Sun, Carlos Guestrin, Joshua M. Susskind
In most machine learning training paradigms a fixed, often handcrafted, loss function is assumed to be a good proxy for an underlying evaluation metric. In this work we assess this assumption by meta-learning an adaptive loss function to directly optimize the evaluation metric. We propose a sample efficient reinforcement learning approach for adapting the loss dynamically during training. We empirically show how this formulation improves performance by simultaneously optimizing the evaluation metric and smoothing the loss landscape. We verify our method in metric learning and classification scenarios, showing considerable improvements over the state-of-the-art on a diverse set of tasks. Importantly, our method is applicable to a wide range of loss functions and evaluation metrics. Furthermore, the learned policies are transferable across tasks and data, demonstrating the versatility of the method.
In spite of the success of deep learning, we know relatively little about the many possible solutions to which a trained network can converge. Networks generally converge to some local minima—a region in space where the loss function increases in every direction—of their loss function during training. Our research explores why local minima outperforms others when a trained network is evaluated on a held-out test set.