用训练时的梯度平方累加器近似费雪信息矩阵,省下计算开销。
Fishers for Free? Approximating the Fisher Information Matrix by Recycling the Squared Gradient Accumulator
- 复用训练中已有的梯度平方累加器,无需额外计算
- 在五类任务中表现接近真实费雪信息对角线
- 适合需要参数敏感性分析但资源受限的研究者
模型费雪信息矩阵的对角线(即“费雪对角线”)常被用来衡量参数敏感性。传统方法通过平均数百至数千个样本的模型似然关于参数的平方梯度来估计,计算成本较高。而自适应优化器如Adam在训练过程中已计算了梯度平方的移动平均值。本文探索是否可“免费”复用该累加器来近似费雪对角线。通过涵盖五种应用场景的全面实验,我们证明所提方法(称作Squisher,即梯度平方累加器对费雪信息的近似)在性能上与真实费雪对角线相当,并优于基准方法。同时,本文厘清了Squisher与费雪对角线的精确差异,并实证量化了二者各自的影响。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The diagonal of a model's Fisher Information Matrix (the "Fisher diagonal") has frequently been used as a way to measure parameter sensitivity. Typically, the Fisher diagonal is estimated via squared sampled gradients of the model's likelihood with respect to its parameters, averaged over a few hundred or thousand examples -- a process which incurs nontrivial computational costs. At the same time, adaptive gradient methods like the ubiquitous Adam optimizer compute a moving average of the squared gradient over the course of training. This paper therefore explores whether an approximation of the Fisher diagonal can be obtained "for free" by recycling the squared gradient accumulator that has already been computed over the course of training. Through a comprehensive set of experiments covering five applications of the Fisher diagonal, we demonstrate that the "Squisher" (SQUared gradient accumulator as an approximation of the FISHER) consistently performs similarly to the Fisher diagonal while outperforming baseline methods. Additionally, we clarify the exact differences between the Squisher and the Fisher diagonal and provide empirical quantification of their respective impact.
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。