Flux.jl/docs/src/training/optimisers.md
Mike J Innes 187fddc11c doc fixes
2017-11-21 12:29:02 +01:00

63 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
Raw Blame History

This file contains ambiguous Unicode characters

This file contains Unicode characters that might be confused with other characters. If you think that this is intentional, you can safely ignore this warning. Use the Escape button to reveal them.

# Optimisers
Consider a [simple linear regression](../models/basics.md). We create some dummy data, calculate a loss, and backpropagate to calculate gradients for the parameters `W` and `b`.
```julia
W = param(rand(2, 5))
b = param(rand(2))
predict(x) = W*x .+ b
loss(x, y) = sum((predict(x) .- y).^2)
x, y = rand(5), rand(2) # Dummy data
l = loss(x, y) # ~ 3
back!(l)
```
We want to update each parameter, using the gradient, in order to improve (reduce) the loss. Here's one way to do that:
```julia
function update()
η = 0.1 # Learning Rate
for p in (W, b)
p.data .-= η .* p.grad # Apply the update
p.grad .= 0 # Clear the gradient
end
end
```
If we call `update`, the parameters `W` and `b` will change and our loss should go down.
There are two pieces here: one is that we need a list of trainable parameters for the model (`[W, b]` in this case), and the other is the update step. In this case the update is simply gradient descent (`x .-= η .* Δ`), but we might choose to do something more advanced, like adding momentum.
In this case, getting the variables is trivial, but you can imagine it'd be more of a pain with some complex stack of layers.
```julia
m = Chain(
Dense(10, 5, σ),
Dense(5, 2), softmax)
```
Instead of having to write `[m[1].W, m[1].b, ...]`, Flux provides a params function `params(m)` that returns a list of all parameters in the model for you.
For the update step, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with writing the loop above it'll work just fine but Flux provides various *optimisers* that make it more convenient.
```julia
opt = SGD([W, b], 0.1) # Gradient descent with learning rate 0.1
opt() # Carry out the update, modifying `W` and `b`.
```
An optimiser takes a parameter list and returns a function that does the same thing as `update` above. We can pass either `opt` or `update` to our [training loop](training.md), which will then run the optimiser after every mini-batch of data.
## Optimiser Reference
All optimisers return a function that, when called, will update the parameters passed to it.
```@docs
SGD
Momentum
Nesterov
ADAM
```