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Automatic Hyperparameter Optimization

A Demo on Automatic Hyperparameter Optimization algorithms like Grid search, Random search, Hyperband AND BOHB.

Tuning is performed for topic classification task on AG News dataset. The examples news belong to any of the four classes,

  • World
  • Sports
  • Business
  • Science-Technology

The dataset has 127600 examples, which is preprocessed and split into 3 for training(96000), validation(20000) and testing(7600). For more information, please refer to the link http://www.di.unipi.it/~gulli/AG_corpus_of_news_articles.html .

The AG's news topic classification dataset is constructed by Xiang Zhang ([email protected]) from the dataset above. It is used as a text classification benchmark in the following paper: Xiang Zhang, Junbo Zhao, Yann LeCun. Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28 (NIPS 2015).

Demo includes LSTM and BiLSTM architectures for topic classification. GloVe word vectors are used as dense word embeddings.

Each run of any search algorithm is called an Experiment, and each experiment involves multiple Trials. A single hyperparameter configuration is evaluated in one Trial by measuring accuracy on validation set. The demo is built using ray.tune library and the terminologies are adopted from the library.

Getting Started

The demo is designed to be used with docker. Build a docker container with the command docker build -t demo .

To create a container with gpu access, do docker run -it --gpus all -v /path-to-embeddings/embeddings:/ahpo/embeddings --name demo-image demo

To create a container without gpu access, do docker run -it -v /path-to-embeddings/embeddings:/ahpo/embeddings --name demo-image demo

By default, the demo uses Hyperband search algorithm. To run the demo, use the following command:

python3 main.py

To tune using other algorithms use option -s or --search with arguments grid, random, hyperband or bohb.

python3 main.py -s grid

The demo output status of tuning every few seconds (if execution takes longer then status is delayed) and finally the configuration that maximizes accuracy: CLI output

Hyperparamters being tuned

Here is a list of hyperparameters that may be tuned in demo

  1. embedding_dim The dimension of GloVe word embeddings to use. Allowed values include 50, 100, 200 and 300.
  2. hidden_dim The number of features in the LSTM hidden state.
  3. num_layers The number of recurrent layers of LSTMs.
  4. bidirectional A flag to specify the use of Bidirectional LSTM. Takes boolean value (True or False)
  5. dropout Probability of excluding input and recurrent connections of LSTM units.
  6. batch_size Number of training examples utilized in one iteration of Adam optimizer
  7. learning_rate A quantity to control step size towards a minima of loss function at each iteration of Adam optimizer.

Configuring Search Space

A default minimal hyperparameter search space has already been defined on the config.yaml file in outermost project directory for the purpose of demo. To find the default search space used in the demo for a search algorithm, try: make help-<algorithm>

Replace <algorithm> with grid, random, hyperband or bohb.

Custom Search Space

Each tunable hyperparameter is listed under HYPERPARAMETERS section in config.yaml. Each hyperparameter has 3 keys distribution, args and grid which can be used to define a custom search space. Here is how to provide values to the keys.

  1. Grid Search Grid search only uses the grid key. It takes a scalar or a list as value. The given value will be used to construct a set of values that a hyperparameter may take.

    An example for scalar value

    embedding_dim:
    grid: 50

    An example for proving a list as value

    embedding_dim:
    grid: [50, 100, 200, 300]

  2. Random, Hyperband and BOHB Unlike Grid Search, other search algorithms checks the distribution and args key. The distribution key is used to define a distribution over the domain of a hyperparameter for random sampling. Based on the characteristics of the distribution, the arguments ie. args changes. Given below are the list of distributions accepted and their corresponding argument formats.

    distribution argument description
    uniform [lower, upper] Sample a float uniformly between lower and upper
    loguniform [lower, upper] Sample a float uniformly between lower and upper, while sampling in log space
    randn [mean, std] Sample a random float from a normal distribution with mean and std
    randint [lower, upper] Sample a integer uniformly between lower (inclusive) and upper (exclusive).
    choice [a, b, [c,[d,...]]] Sample a value uniformly from the specified list of choices
    grid [a, b, [c,[d,...]]] Do a grid search over these values for every random sample of other hyperparameters.
    quniform [lower, upper, increment] Sample a float uniformly between lower and upper, rounding to increments of increment
    qloguniform [lower, upper, increment] Sample a float uniformly between lower and upper, while sampling in log space, rounding to increments of increment
    qrandn [mean, std, increment] Sample a random float from a normal distribution with mean and std, rounding to increments of increment
    qrandint [lower, upper, increment] Sample a integer uniformly between lower (inclusive) and upper (exclusive), rounding to increments of increment

    Argument of any distribution is a list with length of 2 atleast. If a scalar is provided the distribution is ignored and the hyperparameter is simply initialized with the provided scalar. Example for configuring search space looks like,

    learning_rate:
    distribution: loguniform
    args: [0.001, 0.01]

Configuring Experiment

Similar to the search space, the experiment settings can also be customized. By default, the number of random sampling, num_samples is set to 5 for the purpose of demo. The metrics collected for every trial are validation 'accuracy' and validation 'loss', but the best configuration is selected using only the validation accuracy.

The maximum number of epochs, max_epoch is set to 2 by default. Random Search will always execute every trial till max_epoch. But Hyperband and BOHB uses its early stopping feature to prune configurations based on performance metrics and resource allocation. The maximum resource per trial is automatically set by the program based on max_epoch.

Configuring Hyperband and BOHB

Hyperband first runs every trial a minimum number of epochs before early stopping, which is set by grace_period. The grace_period by default is set to 1. The rate of downsampling, reduction_factor is set to to 3, ie 1/3rd of trials are stopped at each round of downsampling. Behind the scenes, the actual algorithm used for hyperband search in demo is Asynchronous Hyperband for its better parallelism and masks as a scheduler managing trials based on resources.

For BOHB as well the reduction_factor is set to 3. BOHB doesn't include the feature to incorporate grace_period. This is because BOHB is implemented leveraging standard Hyperband (masking as a resource scheduler) coupled with TPE(a variant of Bayesian Optimization) for sampling.