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Population Based Training (PBT) is a recent approach that jointly optimizes neural network weights and hyperparameters which periodically copies weights of the best performers and mutates hyperparameters during training. Previous PBT implementations have been synchronized glass-box systems. We propose a general, black-box PBT framework that distributes many asynchronous "trials" (a small number of training steps with warm-starting) across a cluster, coordinated by the PBT controller. The black-box design does not make assumptions on model architectures, loss functions or training procedures. Our system supports dynamic hyperparameter schedules to optimize both differentiable and non-differentiable metrics. We apply our system to train a state-of-the-art WaveNet generative model for human voice synthesis. We show that our PBT system achieves better accuracy and faster convergence compared to existing methods, given the same computational resource. KEYWORDSneural networks, black-box optimization, population based training, speech synthesis, evolutionary algorithms, wavenet.

Using an extended and formalized version of the Q/C map analysis of Poole et al. (2016), along with Neural Tangent Kernel theory, we identify the main pathologies present in deep networks that prevent them from training fast and generalizing to unseen data, and show how these can be avoided by carefully controlling the "shape" of the network's initializationtime kernel function. We then develop a method called Deep Kernel Shaping (DKS), which accomplishes this using a combination of precise parameter initialization, activation function transformations, and small architectural tweaks, all of which preserve the model class.In our experiments we show that DKS enables SGD training of residual networks without normalization layers on Imagenet and CIFAR-10 classification tasks at speeds comparable to standard ResNetV2 and Wide-ResNet models, with only a small decrease in generalization performance. And when using K-FAC as the optimizer, we achieve similar results for networks without skip connections. Our results apply for a large variety of activation functions, including those which traditionally perform very badly, such as the logistic sigmoid. In addition to DKS, we contribute a detailed analysis of skip connections, normalization layers, special activation functions like RELU and SELU, and various initialization schemes, explaining their effectiveness as alternative (and ultimately incomplete) ways of "shaping" the network's initialization-time kernel.

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Learning effective configurations in computer systems without hand-crafting models for every parameter is a long-standing problem. This paper investigates the use of deep reinforcement learning for runtime parameters of cloud databases under latency constraints. Cloud services serve up to thousands of concurrent requests per second and can adjust critical parameters by leveraging performance metrics. In this work, we use continuous deep reinforcement learning to learn optimal cache expirations for HTTP caching in content delivery networks. To this end, we introduce a technique for asynchronous experience management called delayed experience injection, which facilitates delayed reward and next-state computation in concurrent environments where measurements are not immediately available. Evaluation results show that our approach based on normalized advantage functions and asynchronous CPU-only training outperforms a statistical estimator.

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