Neural networks are notoriously difficult to train. They can completely diverge on one set of parameters and get state-of-the-art results on a slightly different set of parameters. Over the years I’ve learned several tricks to training neural networks. A lot of these tricks are well kept secrets in industry and academics and I think it’s time the rest of the world learned how neural networks are really trained. So at the risk of being excommunicated from the deep learning community, here is my write up of the peculiarities of training neural networks.

While the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has led neural networks closer to obtaining human intelligence, not all networks have moved towards this path in a straight line. Some networks have also attained more undesirable human attributes. These are often little discussed and even brushed under the rug for fear of embarrassment to the deep learning community. But here, I finally present a formal discussion of some of these abnormalities of training neural networks.

Cat Images

It’s been well known in the deep learning community for a long time that training neural networks on cat images actually improves performance. Like many other oddities of neural networks, researchers have absolutely no clue why this is the case but has been well documented in many amateur papers posted on arxiv. Some have attributed to happier gradient flows, which have an easier time updating the weights than say melancholy gradient flows, or gradient flows that haven’t had their morning coffee. In some instances, researchers have posted accuracy gains up to 2% on ImageNet. In more recent work, researchers have also found that feeding the network pictures of Donald Trump led to a whopping 5% decrease in accuracy. When researchers investigated further, they found that the network predicted “baboon” about 5% of the time.

“Humbling” Your Network

Some of the more recent networks achieving state-of-the-art results have become very large and require a lot of hardware to train them. This has led to these networks developing a slight ego which leads to many issues during test time. For example Google’s GNMT is known to be an arrogant network because it requires $500,000 of equipment to train. You might ask it to translate “The duck says quack.” to German, to which it either outputs “…” or “Really? You want me to translate that?”. One way to fix this is by humbling your network. You can do this by feeding it sentences such as, “You’re not that good.” or “You could get replaced by a linear model and no one would know the difference.” or even “I could not anneal the learning rate and watch you diverge at any minute.”. For most people though arrogant networks are not an issue, since only Google runs their models on half a million dollars of equipment for a month to get state-of-the-art.

Ritual Sacrifice

Ever wonder how deep learning researchers find those obscure hyperparameters? In school they’ll tell you it’s random searching but there’s a much darker secret behind them. One way to accomplish this is to sacrifice a GPU before you run your random hyperparameter search. You can do this by creating a fire sigil on the ground in the shape of the Nvidia logo and then burning a GPU in the middle of it. The better the GPU, the better the hyperparameters. It’s rumored that Google sacrificed 3 Titan X’s to obtain their hyperparameters for “Google’s Neural Machine Translation System” paper. Since a typical run takes 6 days to train on 96 NVIDIA K80 GPUs these would have been near impossible to find otherwise.

Home Field Advantage

Another well kept secret at Google is that the closer Jeff Dean is to your GPU cluster, the faster it runs. This is the real reason Google started developing the TPU, as an insurance policy for when Jeff Dean leaves. Other large companies also have their own in house advantage. Yann Lecun gives +3 BLEU score to French translation models when sitting near the GPUs.