Description:

torchlars 0.1.2

torchlars


A LARS implementation in PyTorch.
from torchlars import LARS
optimizer = LARS(optim.SGD(model.parameters(), lr=0.1))

What is LARS?
LARS (Layer-wise Adaptive Rate Scaling) is an optimization algorithm designed
for large-batch training published by You, Gitman, and Ginsburg, which
calculates the local learning rate per layer at each optimization step.
According to the paper, when training ResNet-50 on ImageNet ILSVRC (2016)
classification task with LARS, the learning curve and the best top-1 accuracy
stay similar to that of the baseline (training with batch size 256 without
LARS) even if the batch size is scaled up to 32K.
Large Batch Training of Convolutional Networks
Originally, LARS is formulated in terms of SGD optimizer and extension to other
optimizers was not mentioned in the paper. In contrast, torchlars implements
LARS as a wrapper which can take any optimizers including SGD as the base.
Additionally, LARS of torchlars is designed to more consider operation in the
CUDA environment compared to existing implementations. Thanks to this, you can
see only the little speed loss appears compared to just using SGD, in an
environment where CPU to GPU synchronization does not occur.
Usage
Currently, torchlars requires the following environments:

Linux
Python 3.6+
PyTorch 1.1+
CUDA 10+

To use torchlars, install it via PyPI:
$ pip install torchlars

To use LARS, simply wrap your base optimizer with torchlars.LARS. LARS
inherits torch.optim.Optimizer, so you can simply use LARS as optimizer on
your code. After then, when you call step method of LARS, LARS automatically
calculates local learning rate before running base optimizer such as SGD or
Adam
The example code below shows how to use LARS using SGD as base optimizer.
from torchlars import LARS

base_optimizer = optim.SGD(model.parameters(), lr=0.1)
optimizer = LARS(optimizer=base_optimizer, eps=1e-8, trust_coef=0.001)

output = model(input)
loss = loss_fn(output, target)
loss.backward()

optimizer.step()

Benchmarking
ResNet-50 on ImageNet classification



Batch Size
LR policy
lr
warm-up
epoch
Best Top-1 accuracy, %




256
poly(2)
0.2
N/A
90
73.79


8k
LARS+poly(2)
12.8
5
90
73.78


16K
LARS+poly(2)
25.0
5
90
73.36


32K
LARS+poly(2)
29.0
5
90
72.26




Above image and table show the reproduced performance benchmark on ResNet-50,
as reported in Table 4 and Figure 5 of the paper.
The cyan line represents the baseline result, which is training result with
batch size 256, and others represent training result of 8K, 16K, 32K
respectively. As you see, every result shows a similar learning curve and best
top-1 accuracy.
Most experimental conditions are similar to used in the paper, but we slightly
change some conditions like learning rate to observe comparable results as
proposed by the LARS paper.
Note: We refer
log file
provided by paper to obtain above hyper-parameters.
Authors and Licensing
torchlars project is developed by Chunmyong Park at Kakao Brain, with
Heungsub Lee, Myungryong Jeong, Woonhyuk Baek, and Chiheon Kim's help.
It is distributed under Apache License 2.0.
Citation
If you apply this library to any project and research, please cite our code:
@misc{torchlars,
author = {Park, Chunmyong and Lee, Heungsub and Jeong, Myungryong and
Baek, Woonhyuk and Kim, Chiheon},
title = {torchlars, {A} {LARS} implementation in {PyTorch}},
howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/kakaobrain/torchlars}},
year = {2019}
}

License

For personal and professional use. You cannot resell or redistribute these repositories in their original state.

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