In this paper, we propose a new approach to learned optimization. As common
in the literature, we represent the computation of the update step of the
optimizer with a neural network. The parameters of the optimizer are then
learned on a set of training optimization tasks, in order to perform
minimisation efficiently. Our main innovation is to propose a new neural
network architecture for the learned optimizer inspired by the classic BFGS
algorithm. As in BFGS, we estimate a preconditioning matrix as a sum of
rank-one updates but use a transformer-based neural network to predict these
updates jointly with the step length and direction. In contrast to several
recent learned optimization approaches, our formulation allows for conditioning
across different dimensions of the parameter space of the target problem while
remaining applicable to optimization tasks of variable dimensionality without
retraining. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach on a benchmark
composed of objective functions traditionally used for evaluation of
optimization algorithms, as well as on the real world-task of physics-based
reconstruction of articulated 3D human motion.
Authors
Erik Gärtner, Luke Metz, Mykhaylo Andriluka, C. Daniel Freeman, Cristian Sminchisescu