Faster & More Reliable Tuning of Neural Networks: Bayesian Optimization with Importance Sampling

Many contemporary machine learning models require extensive tuning of hyperparameters to perform well. A variety of methods, such as Bayesian optimization, have been developed to automate and expedite this process. However, tuning remains costly as it typically requires repeatedly fully training models. To address this issue, Bayesian optimization has been extended to use cheap, partially trained models to extrapolate to expensive complete models. This approach enlarges the set of explored hyperparameters, but including many low-fidelity observations adds to the intrinsic randomness of the procedure and makes extrapolation challenging. We propose to accelerate tuning of neural networks in a robust way by taking into account the relative amount of information contributed by each training example. To do so, we leverage importance sampling (IS); this significantly increases the quality of the function evaluations, but also their runtime, and so must be done carefully. Casting hyperparameter search as a multi-task Bayesian optimization problem over both hyperparameters and IS design achieves the best of both worlds. By learning a parameterization of IS that tradeso↵ evaluation complexity and quality, our method improves upon validation error, in the average and worst-case, while using higher fidelity observations with less data. We show that this results in more reliable performance of our method in less wall-clock time across a variety of datasets and neural architectures. ⇤Work done while at Northeastern University. Proceedings of the 24 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2021, San Diego, California, USA. PMLR: Volume 130. Copyright 2021 by the author(s).