AUTOMATA: Gradient Based Data Subset Selection for Compute-Efficient Hyper-parameter Tuning

Deep neural networks have seen great success in recent years; however, training a deep model is often challenging as its performance heavily depends on the hyper-parameters used. In addition, finding the optimal hyper-parameter configuration, even with state-of-the-art (SOTA) hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) algorithms, can be time-consuming, requiring multiple training runs over the entire dataset for different possible sets of hyper-parameters. Our central insight is that using an informative subset of the dataset for model training runs involved in hyper-parameter optimization, allows us to find the optimal hyper-parameter configuration significantly faster. In this work, we propose AUTOMATA, a gradient-based subset selection framework for hyper-parameter tuning. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of AUTOMATA in hyper-parameter tuning through several experiments on real-world datasets in the text, vision, and tabular domains. Our experiments show that using gradient-based data subsets for hyper-parameter tuning achieves significantly faster turnaround times and speedups of 3$\times$-30$\times$ while achieving comparable performance to the hyper-parameters found using the entire dataset.

SPEAR : Semi-supervised Data Programming in Python

We present SPEAR, an open-source python library for data programming with semi supervision. The package implements several recent data programming approaches including facility to programmatically label and build training data. SPEAR facilitates weak supervision in the form of heuristics (or rules) and association of noisy labels to the training dataset. These noisy labels are aggregated to assign labels to the unlabeled data for downstream tasks. We have implemented several label aggregation approaches that aggregate the noisy labels and then train using the noisily labeled set in a cascaded manner. Our implementation also includes other approaches that jointly aggregate and train the model. Thus, in our python package, we integrate several cascade and joint data-programming approaches while also providing the facility of data programming by letting the user define labeling functions or rules. The code and tutorial notebooks are available at \url{https://github.com/decile-team/spear}.