In plain words: Instead of using only the newest weights, this trick averages the weights from the last few checkpoints saved at each epoch's end. Training then reaches the same loss and accuracy dozens of epochs sooner, saving up to about 68 GPU hours.
Abstract · Stop Wasting My Time! Saving Days of ImageNet and BERT Training with Latest Weight Averaging
Training vision or language models on large datasets can take days, if not weeks. We show that averaging the weights of the k latest checkpoints, each collected at the end of an epoch, can speed up the training progression in terms of loss and accuracy by dozens of epochs, corresponding to time savings up to ~68 and ~30 GPU hours when training a ResNet50 on ImageNet and RoBERTa-Base model on WikiText-103, respectively. We also provide the code and model checkpoint trajectory to reproduce the results and facilitate research on reusing historical weights for faster convergence.
Jean Kaddour
arXiv:2209.14981 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Sep 29, 2022 · updated Oct 6, 2022
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