Title: Towards Learned Optimization Free Lunch
Primary area: transfer learning, meta learning, and lifelong learning
Keywords: learned optimization, meta-learning

Abstract: Learned optimizers are powerful alternatives to hand-designed rules like Adam, yet they have seen limited practical adoption since they often fail to meta-generalize beyond their training distribution and incur high meta-training cost. For instance, prior work, VeLO, scaled meta-training to 4,000 TPU months ($\sim$10$\times$ GPT-3 compute) to meta-train a general-purpose optimizer but it failed to generalize beyond 600M parameters tasks. In this work, we present a surprising finding: by crafting a simple normalized optimizer architecture, and augmenting meta-training, it becomes feasible to meta-train a performant general-purpose learned update rule on a tiny fraction of VeLO compute, 4.5 GPU hours to be precise. Our learned update rule scales stably to a billion-scale pretraining task (GPT-3 XL 1.3B) which is six orders of magnitude larger than its meta-training distribution. Furthermore, it shows strong performance across diverse out-of-distribution ML workloads and is compatible with modern optimization harness that includes orthogonalization, distinct update rules for input-output and hidden weights, and decoupled weight decay. In all, this work paves the way for practically applicable _learnable_ optimization algorithms, allowing future work to explore richer meta-training and data curation recipes to further improve performance.