Learning to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 29 (NIPS 2016)

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Authors

Marcin Andrychowicz, Misha Denil, Sergio Gómez, Matthew W. Hoffman, David Pfau, Tom Schaul, Brendan Shillingford, Nando de Freitas

Abstract

The move from hand-designed features to learned features in machine learning has been wildly successful. In spite of this, optimization algorithms are still designed by hand. In this paper we show how the design of an optimization algorithm can be cast as a learning problem, allowing the algorithm to learn to exploit structure in the problems of interest in an automatic way. Our learned algorithms, implemented by LSTMs, outperform generic, hand-designed competitors on the tasks for which they are trained, and also generalize well to new tasks with similar structure. We demonstrate this on a number of tasks, including simple convex problems, training neural networks, and styling images with neural art.