Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track
Krishnateja Killamsetty, Guttu Sai Abhishek, Aakriti Lnu, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Alexandre Evfimievski, Lucian Popa, Rishabh Iyer
Deep neural networks have seen great success in recent years; however, training a deep model is often challenging as its performance heavily depends on the hyper-parameters used. In addition, finding the optimal hyper-parameter configuration, even with state-of-the-art (SOTA) hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) algorithms, can be time-consuming, requiring multiple training runs over the entire datasetfor different possible sets of hyper-parameters. Our central insight is that using an informative subset of the dataset for model training runs involved in hyper-parameter optimization, allows us to find the optimal hyper-parameter configuration significantly faster. In this work, we propose AUTOMATA, a gradient-based subset selection framework for hyper-parameter tuning. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of AUTOMATA in hyper-parameter tuning through several experiments on real-world datasets in the text, vision, and tabular domains. Our experiments show that using gradient-based data subsets for hyper-parameter tuning achieves significantly faster turnaround times and speedups of 3×-30× while achieving comparable performance to the hyper-parameters found using the entire dataset.