Meta-Learning with Hessian-Free Approach in Deep Neural Nets Training

Abstract: Meta-learning is a promising method to achieve efficient training method towards deep neural net and has been attracting increases interests in recent years. But most of the current methods are still not capable to train complex neuron net model with long-time training process. In this paper, a novel second-order meta-optimizer, named Meta-learning with Hessian-Free(MLHF) approach, is proposed based on the Hessian-Free approach. Two recurrent neural networks are established to generate the damping and the precondition matrix of this Hessian-Free framework. A series of techniques to meta-train the MLHF towards stable and reinforce the meta-training of this optimizer, including the gradient calculation of $H$. Numerical experiments on deep convolution neural nets, including CUDA-convnet and ResNet18(v2), with datasets of CIFAR10 and ILSVRC2012, indicate that the MLHF shows good and continuous training performance during the whole long-time training process, i.e., both the rapid-decreasing early stage and the steadily-deceasing later stage, and so is a promising meta-learning framework towards elevating the training efficiency in real-world deep neural nets.