This is a newer version of the code for: Sashank J. Reddi, Ahmed Hefny, Suvrit Sra, Barnabas Poczos and Alexander Smola "On Variance Reduction in Stochastic Gradient Descent and its Asynchronous Variants", NIPS 2015 (Also: http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06840)
To compile the code, simply run "make". A static library will be produced in "lib/opt". Executables will be produced "bin/opt". Use "make clean" to remove output files. Use "make rebuild" as a shortcut for "make clean all"
To compile without optimizations, run "make CONFIG=dbg". A static library will be produced in "lib/dbg". Executables will be produced "bin/dbg".
- bin/opt/svm2bin - Converts the data from LIBSVM format to binary format used by this package. The program assumes binary labels (1/+1 for positive, 0/-1 for negative). To run use:
bin/opt/svm2bin <input_svm_file> <output_binary_file>
NOTE: You might get "Insufficient buffer size" error message if you have very large examples. That is because the program assumes that any single example fits into the I/O buffer whose size is defined in DataReader.h. You can try increasing this value.
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bon/opt/bin2svm - Converts a binary data file to LIBSVM format.
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bin/opt/train_lr - Trains a logistic regression model (it does not actually save the model, just print the objective and gradient square norm across time). To run use:
bin/opt/train_lr --train_file=<binray training file> <optional arguments>
Optional arguments include:
--num_threads= (default 1)
--solver=<sgd/svrg> (default sgd)
--max_epochs= (default 1000) Maximum number of epochs (-1 for infinity).
--nupd= (default 1) Number of updates for each epoch specified in multiples of number of examples. Use negative numbers to specify fractions (i.e. -k is interpreted as 1/k).
--step= (default 1e-4) Step size.
--alpha= (default -1) When greater than 0, step at iteration t is given by step * sqrt(al pha/(t+alpha)), otherwise a constant step size is used.
--l2_reg= (default 0.0) L2 Regularization (set to 1.0 to use \lambda=1/n in the paper).
--test_file= (default "") Specifies test examples.
--split_train_test=<1/0> (default 0) If 0, the input training file is entirely used for training. If 1, 20% of the training examples are used for testing. Has no effect if a test file is provided.
--pmode= (default FREE_FOR_ALL) Specifies parallel execution mode which can be:
- LOCKED: A thread needs to hold a lock before updating parameters. The lock covers the entire paramter vector.
- LOCK_FREE: A thread can update the parameter vector without software locks using atomic additions (using compare and swap instruction).
- FREE_FOR_ALL: Same as LOCK_FREE but without using atomic additions. We have observed that for sparse data and small number of threads, this mode still converges but in more epochs compared to LOCK_FREE. However, it can still take less wall clock time since it avoids the overhead of using atomic additions.
This code was intened for demonstration so it does not save the parameters.