Symbolic DNN-Tuner

Hyper-Parameter Optimization (HPO) occupies a fundamental role in Deep Learning systems due to the number of hyper-parameters (HPs) to be set. The state-of-the-art of HPO methods are Grid Search, Random Search and Bayesian Optimization. The first two methods try all possible combinations and random combination of the HPs values, respectively. This is performed in a blind manner, without any information for choosing the new set of HPs values. Bayesian Optimization (BO), instead, keeps track of past results and uses them to build a probabilistic model mapping HPs into a probability density of the objective function. Bayesian Optimization builds a surrogate probabilistic model of the objective function, finds the HPs values that perform best on the surrogate model and updates it with new results. In this paper, we improve BO applied to Deep Neural Network (DNN) by adding an analysis of the results of the network on training and validation sets. This analysis is performed by exploiting rule-based programming, and in particular by using Probabilistic Logic Programming. The resulting system, called Symbolic DNN-Tuner, logically evaluates the results obtained from the training and the validation phase and, by applying symbolic tuning rules, fixes the network architecture, and its HPs, therefore improving performance. We also show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, by an experimental evaluation on literature and real-life datasets.