arXiv:2503.04242cs.LG2025-03NeurIPS被引 8

用梯度范数正则化提升离线优化器的泛化能力,避免模型在未见数据上失效。

Incorporating Surrogate Gradient Norm to Improve Offline Optimization Techniques

  • 将模型尖锐度作为正则项加入代理模型训练损失,实现与模型无关的优化改进。
  • 在多个任务上实验表明,该方法可带来最高9.6%的性能提升。
  • 适合希望提升离线优化稳定性的研究人员和工程实践者。

离线优化近年来成为缓解在线实验高成本的热门方法,其核心是利用历史输入输出数据学习目标黑箱函数的代理模型。然而,该方法常面临分布外问题,即代理模型在离线数据范围外表现失准。现有方法虽提出多种条件化策略以抑制代理模型的剧烈波动,但这些策略通常依赖特定代理或搜索模型,缺乏通用性。为此,本文提出一种模型无关的方法,将模型尖锐度纳入代理模型训练损失作为正则项。理论分析表明,在离线数据上降低代理模型尖锐度,可证明性地减少其在未见数据上的泛化尖锐度。该分析扩展了现有理论,从用损失尖锐度界定泛化预测误差,延伸至用训练数据上的经验尖锐度界定最坏情况下的泛化尖锐度,为尖锐度正则化提供了新视角。大量实验在多样化的优化任务中验证,减小代理模型尖锐度可显著提升性能,最高达9.6%。代码已公开于https://github.com/cuong-dm/IGNITE。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Offline optimization has recently emerged as an increasingly popular approach to mitigate the prohibitively expensive cost of online experimentation. The key idea is to learn a surrogate of the black-box function that underlines the target experiment using a static (offline) dataset of its previous input-output queries. Such an approach is, however, fraught with an out-of-distribution issue where the learned surrogate becomes inaccurate outside the offline data regimes. To mitigate this, existing offline optimizers have proposed numerous conditioning techniques to prevent the learned surrogate from being too erratic. Nonetheless, such conditioning strategies are often specific to particular surrogate or search models, which might not generalize to a different model choice. This motivates us to develop a model-agnostic approach instead, which incorporates a notion of model sharpness into the training loss of the surrogate as a regularizer. Our approach is supported by a new theoretical analysis demonstrating that reducing surrogate sharpness on the offline dataset provably reduces its generalized sharpness on unseen data. Our analysis extends existing theories from bounding generalized prediction loss (on unseen data) with loss sharpness to bounding the worst-case generalized surrogate sharpness with its empirical estimate on training data, providing a new perspective on sharpness regularization. Our extensive experimentation on a diverse range of optimization tasks also shows that reducing surrogate sharpness often leads to significant improvement, marking (up to) a noticeable 9.6% performance boost. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/cuong-dm/IGNITE

离线优化代理模型尖锐度正则泛化能力

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。