You Lu


2017

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Why ADAGRAD Fails for Online Topic Modeling
You Lu | Jeffrey Lund | Jordan Boyd-Graber
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Online topic modeling, i.e., topic modeling with stochastic variational inference, is a powerful and efficient technique for analyzing large datasets, and ADAGRAD is a widely-used technique for tuning learning rates during online gradient optimization. However, these two techniques do not work well together. We show that this is because ADAGRAD uses accumulation of previous gradients as the learning rates’ denominators. For online topic modeling, the magnitude of gradients is very large. It causes learning rates to shrink very quickly, so the parameters cannot fully converge until the training ends