The Ultimate Guide To Learning Rate Scheduling

Sarah Lee AI generated Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct-FP8 9 min read · June 10, 2025 Take your machine learning models to the next level with our comprehensive guide to learning rate scheduling, covering advanced techniques and best practices. Learning rate scheduling is a crucial aspect of training machine learning models. It involves adjusting the learning rate during the training process to optimize the model's performance. In this section, we'll explore some advanced learning rate scheduling techniques that can help improve your model's performance. Cyclic learning rate scheduling involves oscillating the learning rate between a minimum and maximum value.

This technique is based on the idea that the optimal learning rate is not a fixed value, but rather a range of values. By cycling through this range, the model can explore different parts of the loss landscape and converge to a better optimum. The cyclic learning rate schedule can be implemented using the following formula: A Gentle Introduction to Learning Rate SchedulersImage by Author | ChatGPT Ever wondered why your neural network seems to get stuck during training, or why it starts strong but fails to reach its full potential? The culprit might be your learning rate – arguably one of the most important hyperparameters in machine learning.

While a fixed learning rate can work, it often leads to suboptimal results. Learning rate schedulers offer a more dynamic approach by automatically adjusting the learning rate during training. In this article, you’ll discover five popular learning rate schedulers through clear visualizations and hands-on examples. You’ll learn when to use each scheduler, see their behavior patterns, and understand how they can improve your model’s performance. We’ll start with the basics, explore sklearn’s approach versus deep learning requirements, then move to practical implementation using the MNIST dataset. By the end, you’ll have both the theoretical understanding and practical code to start using learning rate schedulers in your own projects.

Imagine you’re hiking down a mountain in thick fog, trying to reach the valley. The learning rate is like your step size – take steps too large, and you might overshoot the valley or bounce between mountainsides. Take steps too small, and you’ll move painfully slowly, possibly getting stuck on a ledge before reaching the bottom. In the realm of deep learning, PyTorch stands as a beacon, illuminating the path for researchers and practitioners to traverse the complex landscapes of artificial intelligence. Its dynamic computational graph and user-friendly interface have solidified its position as a preferred framework for developing neural networks. As we delve into the nuances of model training, one essential aspect that demands meticulous attention is the learning rate.

To navigate the fluctuating terrains of optimization effectively, PyTorch introduces a potent ally—the learning rate scheduler. This article aims to demystify the PyTorch learning rate scheduler, providing insights into its syntax, parameters, and indispensable role in enhancing the efficiency and efficacy of model training. PyTorch, an open-source machine learning library, has gained immense popularity for its dynamic computation graph and ease of use. Developed by Facebook's AI Research lab (FAIR), PyTorch has become a go-to framework for building and training deep learning models. Its flexibility and dynamic nature make it particularly well-suited for research and experimentation, allowing practitioners to iterate swiftly and explore innovative approaches in the ever-evolving field of artificial intelligence. At the heart of effective model training lies the learning rate—a hyperparameter crucial for controlling the step size during optimization.

PyTorch provides a sophisticated mechanism, known as the learning rate scheduler, to dynamically adjust this hyperparameter as the training progresses. The syntax for incorporating a learning rate scheduler into your PyTorch training pipeline is both intuitive and flexible. At its core, the scheduler is integrated into the optimizer, working hand in hand to regulate the learning rate based on predefined policies. The typical syntax for implementing a learning rate scheduler involves instantiating an optimizer and a scheduler, then stepping through epochs or batches, updating the learning rate accordingly. The versatility of the scheduler is reflected in its ability to accommodate various parameters, allowing practitioners to tailor its behavior to meet specific training requirements. The importance of learning rate schedulers becomes evident when considering the dynamic nature of model training.

As models traverse complex loss landscapes, a fixed learning rate may hinder convergence or cause overshooting. Learning rate schedulers address this challenge by adapting the learning rate based on the model's performance during training. This adaptability is crucial for avoiding divergence, accelerating convergence, and facilitating the discovery of optimal model parameters. The provided test accuracy of approximately 95.6% suggests that the trained neural network model performs well on the test set. Researchers generally agree that neural network models are difficult to train. One of the biggest issues is the large number of hyperparameters to specify and optimize.

The list goes on, including the number of hidden layers, activation functions, optimizers, learning rate, and regularization. Tuning these hyperparameters can significantly improve neural network models. For us, as data scientists, building neural network models is about solving an optimization problem. We want to find the minima (global or sometimes local) of the objective function by gradient-based methods, such as gradient descent. Of all the gradient descent hyperparameters, the learning rate is one of the most critical ones for good model performance. In this article, we will explore this parameter and explain why scheduling our learning rate during model training is crucial.

Moving from there, we’ll see how to schedule learning rates by implementing and using various schedulers in Keras. We will then create experiments in neptune.ai to compare how these schedulers perform. What is the learning rate, and what does it do to a neural network? The learning rate (or step size) is explained as the magnitude of change/update to model weights during the backpropagation training process. As a configurable hyperparameter, the learning rate is usually specified as a positive value less than 1.0. So far we primarily focused on optimization algorithms for how to update the weight vectors rather than on the rate at which they are being updated.

Nonetheless, adjusting the learning rate is often just as important as the actual algorithm. There are a number of aspects to consider: Most obviously the magnitude of the learning rate matters. If it is too large, optimization diverges, if it is too small, it takes too long to train or we end up with a suboptimal result. We saw previously that the condition number of the problem matters (see e.g., Section 12.6 for details). Intuitively it is the ratio of the amount of change in the least sensitive direction vs.

the most sensitive one. Secondly, the rate of decay is just as important. If the learning rate remains large we may simply end up bouncing around the minimum and thus not reach optimality. Section 12.5 discussed this in some detail and we analyzed performance guarantees in Section 12.4. In short, we want the rate to decay, but probably more slowly than \(\mathcal{O}(t^{-\frac{1}{2}})\) which would be a good choice for convex problems. Another aspect that is equally important is initialization.

This pertains both to how the parameters are set initially (review Section 5.4 for details) and also how they evolve initially. This goes under the moniker of warmup, i.e., how rapidly we start moving towards the solution initially. Large steps in the beginning might not be beneficial, in particular since the initial set of parameters is random. The initial update directions might be quite meaningless, too. Lastly, there are a number of optimization variants that perform cyclical learning rate adjustment. This is beyond the scope of the current chapter.

We recommend the reader to review details in Izmailov et al. (2018), e.g., how to obtain better solutions by averaging over an entire path of parameters. Foundations and Implementations in Pseudocode Architectural Principles Illustrated with Pseudocode Solutions to common challenges in handling temporal data. Harness the full potential of cloud computing platforms.

Advanced design patterns, best practices, and integration technique We saw in previous lectures that the Gradient Descent algorithm updates the parameters, or weights, in the form: Recall that the learning rate \(\alpha\) is the hyperparameter defining the step size on the parameters at each update. The learning rate \(\alpha\) is kept constant through the whole process of Gradient Descent. But we saw that the model’s performance could be drastrically affected by the learning rate value; if too small the descent would take ages to converge, too big it could explode and not converge... How to properly choose this crucial hyperparameter?

In the florishing epoch (pun intended) of deep learning, new optimization techniques have emerged. The two most influencial families are Learning Rate Schedulers and Adaptative Learning Rates. This newsletter is supported by Alegion. As a research scientist at Alegion, I work on a range of problems from online learning to diffusion models. Feel free to check out our data annotation platform or contact me about potential collaboration/opportunities! Welcome to the Deep (Learning) Focus newsletter.

Each issue picks a single topic in deep learning research and comprehensively overviews related research. Feel free to subscribe to the newsletter, share it, or follow me on twitter if you enjoy it! Anybody that has trained a neural network knows that properly setting the learning rate during training is a pivotal aspect of getting the neural network to perform well. Additionally, the learning rate is typically varied along the training trajectory according to some learning rate schedule. The choice of this schedule also has a large impact on the quality of training. Most practitioners adopt a few, widely-used strategies for the learning rate schedule during training; e.g., step decay or cosine annealing.

Many of these schedules are curated for a particular benchmark, where they have been determined empirically to maximize test accuracy after years of research. But, these strategies often fail to generalize to other experimental settings, raising an important question: what are the most consistent and useful learning rate schedules for training neural networks? Within this overview, we will look at recent research into various learning rate schedules that can be used to train neural networks. Such research has discovered numerous strategies for the learning rate that are both highly effective and easy to use; e.g., cyclical or triangular learning rate schedules. By studying these methods, we will arrive at several practical takeaways, providing simple tricks that can be immediately applied to improving neural network training. When training neural networks, one of the most critical hyperparameters to tune is the learning rate (LR).

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