Neural network hyperparameter tuning - is setting random seed a good idea? [closed]

Question

I am trying to tune a basic neural network as practice. (Based on an example from a coursera course: Neural Networks and Deep Learning - DeepLearning.AI) I face the issue of the random weight initialization. Lets say I try to tune the number of layers in the network. I have two options:

• 1.: set the random seed to a fixed value
• 2.: run my experiments more times without setting the seed

Both version has pros and cons. My biggest concern is that if I use a random seed (e.g.: tf.random.set_seed(1)) then the determined values can be "over-fitted" to the seed and may not work well without the seed or if the value is changed (e.g.: tf.random.set_seed(1) -> tf.random.set_seed(2). On the other hand, if I run my experiments more times without random seed then I can inspect less option (due to limited computing capacity) and still only inspect a subset of possible random weight initialization. In both cases I feel that luck is a strong factor in the process.

Is there a best practice how to handle this topic?

Has TensorFlow built in tools for this purpose? I appreciate any source of descriptions or tutorials. Thanks in advance!

Evslin

I’m voting to close this question because it is not about programming as defined in the help center but about ML theory and/or methodology. – Magenmagena

Answer 1

There is no an absolute right or wrong answer to your question. You are almost answered your own question already. In what follows, however, I will try to expand more, via the following points:

1. The purpose of random initialization is to break the symmetry that makes neural networks fail to learn:

... the only property known with complete certainty is that the initial parameters need to “break symmetry” between different units. If two hidden units with the same activation function are connected to the same inputs, then these units must have different initial parameters. If they have the same initial parameters, then a deterministic learning algorithm applied to a deterministic cost and model will constantly update both of these units in the same way... Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series)

2. Hence, we need the neural network components (especially weights) to be initialized by different values. There are some rules of thumb of how to choose those values, such as the Xavier initialization, which samples from normal distribution with mean of 0 and special variance based on the number of the network layer. This is a very interesting article to read.

3. Having said so, the initial values are important but not extremely critical "if" proper rules are followed, as per mentioned in point 2. They are important because large or improper ones may lead to vanishing or exploding gradient problems. On the other hand, different "proper" weights shall not hugely change the final results, unless they are making the aforementioned problems, or getting the neural network stuck at some local maxima. Please note, however, the the latter depends also on many other aspects, such as the learning rate, the activation functions used (some explode/vanish more than others: this is a great comparison), the architecture of the neural network (e.g. fully connected, convolutional ..etc: this is a cool paper) and the optimizer.

4. In addition to point 2, bringing a good learning optimizer into the bargain, other than the standard stochastic one, shall in theory not let a huge influence of the initial values to affect the final results quality, noticeably. A good example is Adam, which provides a very adaptive learning technique.

5. If you still get a noticeably-different results, with different "proper" initialized weights, there are some ways that "might help" to make neural network more stable, for example: use a Train-Test split, use a GridSearchCV for best parameters, and use k-fold cross validation...etc.

6. At the end, obviously the best scenario is to train the same network with different random initial weights many times then get the average results and variance, for more specific judgement on the overall performance. How many times? Well, if can do it hundreds of times, it will be better, yet that clearly is almost impractical (unless you have some Googlish hardware capability and capacity). As a result, we come to the same conclusion that you had in your question: There should be a tradeoff between time & space complexity and reliability on using a seed, taking into considerations some of the rules of thumb mentioned in previous points. Personally, I am okay to use the seed because I believe that, "It’s not who has the best algorithm that wins. It’s who has the most data". (Banko and Brill, 2001). Hence, using a seed with enough (define enough: it is subjective, but the more the better) data samples, shall not cause any concerns.

Odel

Answer 2

Tuning hyperparameters in deep learning (generally in machine learning) is a common issue. Setting the random seed to a fixed number ensures reproducibility and fair comparison. Repeating the same experiment will lead to the same outcomes. As you probably know, best practice to avoid over-fitting is to do a train-test split of your data and then use k-fold cross-validation to select optimal hyperparameters. If you test multiple values for a hyperparameter, you want to make sure other circumstances that might influence the performance of your model (e.g. train-test-split or weight initialization) are the same for each hyperparameter in order to have a fair comparison of the performance. Therefore I would always recommend to fix the seed.

Now, the problem with this is, as you already pointed out, the performance for each model will still depend on the random seed, like the particular data split or weight initialization in your case. To avoid this, one can do repeated k-fold-cross validation. That means you repeat the k-fold cross-validation multiple times, each time with a different seed, select best parameters of that run, test on test data and average the final results to get a good estimate of performance + variance and therefore eliminate the influence the seed has in the validation process. Alternatively you can perform k-fold cross validation a single time and train each split n-times with a different random seed (eliminating the effect of weight initialization, but still having the effect of the train-test-split).

Finally TensorFlow has no build-in tool for this purpose. You as practitioner have to take care of this.

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