Lab Meeting 8 October (Atwood): Accelerated Training of CRFs with Stochastic Gradient Methods

Title: Accelerated Training of CRFs with Stochastic Gradient Methods
Author: S.V. N. Vishwanathan, Nicol N. Schraudolph, Mark W. Schmidt, Kevin P. Murphy

Abstract:
We apply Stochastic Meta-Descent (SMD), a stochastic gradient optimization method with gain vector adaptation, to the training of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). On several large data sets, the resulting optimizer converges to the same quality of solution over an order of magnitude faster than limited-memory BFGS, the leading method reported to date. We report results for both exact and inexact inference techniques.


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