MADA: Meta-Adaptive Optimizers Through Hyper-Gradient Descent

Following the introduction of Adam, several novel adaptive optimizers for deep learning have been proposed. These optimizers typically excel in some tasks but may not outperform Adam uniformly across all tasks. In this work, we introduce Meta-Adaptive Optimizers (MADA), a unified optimizer framework that can generalize several known optimizers and dynamically learn the most suitable one during training. The key idea in MADA is to parameterize the space of optimizers and dynamically search through it using hyper-gradient descent during training. We empirically compare MADA to other popular optimizers on vision and language tasks, and find that MADA consistently outperforms Adam and other popular optimizers, and is robust against sub-optimally tuned hyper-parameters. MADA achieves a greater validation performance improvement over Adam compared to other popular optimizers during GPT-2 training and fine-tuning. We also propose AVGrad, a modification of AMSGrad that replaces the maximum operator with averaging, which is more suitable for hyper-gradient optimization. Finally, we provide a convergence analysis to show that parameterized interpolations of optimizers can improve their error bounds (up to constants), hinting at an advantage for meta-optimizers. The work of KO was done while interning at Amazon Web Services. SS, MH, and VC hold concurrent appointments as an Amazon Scholar and as a faculty at Technion, University of Minnesota, and EPFL, respectively. This paper describes their work performed at Amazon.