Timezone: »

Poster
Learning to Teach with Dynamic Loss Functions
Lijun Wu · Fei Tian · Yingce Xia · Yang Fan · Tao Qin · Lai Jian-Huang · Tie-Yan Liu

Thu Dec 06 07:45 AM -- 09:45 AM (PST) @ Room 517 AB #155

Teaching is critical to human society: it is with teaching that prospective students are educated and human civilization can be inherited and advanced. A good teacher not only provides his/her students with qualified teaching materials (e.g., textbooks), but also sets up appropriate learning objectives (e.g., course projects and exams) considering different situations of a student. When it comes to artificial intelligence, treating machine learning models as students, the loss functions that are optimized act as perfect counterparts of the learning objective set by the teacher. In this work, we explore the possibility of imitating human teaching behaviors by dynamically and automatically outputting appropriate loss functions to train machine learning models. Different from typical learning settings in which the loss function of a machine learning model is predefined and fixed, in our framework, the loss function of a machine learning model (we call it student) is defined by another machine learning model (we call it teacher). The ultimate goal of teacher model is cultivating the student to have better performance measured on development dataset. Towards that end, similar to human teaching, the teacher, a parametric model, dynamically outputs different loss functions that will be used and optimized by its student model at different training stages. We develop an efficient learning method for the teacher model that makes gradient based optimization possible, exempt of the ineffective solutions such as policy optimization. We name our method as `learning to teach with dynamic loss functions'' (L2T-DLF for short). Extensive experiments on real world tasks including image classification and neural machine translation demonstrate that our method significantly improves the quality of various student models.

#### Author Information

##### Tie-Yan Liu (Microsoft Research Asia)

Tie-Yan Liu is an assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, leading the machine learning research area. He is very well known for his pioneer work on learning to rank and computational advertising, and his recent research interests include deep learning, reinforcement learning, and distributed machine learning. Many of his technologies have been transferred to Microsoft’s products and online services (such as Bing, Microsoft Advertising, Windows, Xbox, and Azure), and open-sourced through Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK), Microsoft Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK), and Microsoft Graph Engine. He has also been actively contributing to academic communities. He is an adjunct/honorary professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), University of Nottingham, and several other universities in China. He has published 200+ papers in refereed conferences and journals, with over 17000 citations. He has won quite a few awards, including the best student paper award at SIGIR (2008), the most cited paper award at Journal of Visual Communications and Image Representation (2004-2006), the research break-through award (2012) and research-team-of-the-year award (2017) at Microsoft Research, and Top-10 Springer Computer Science books by Chinese authors (2015), and the most cited Chinese researcher by Elsevier (2017). He has been invited to serve as general chair, program committee chair, local chair, or area chair for a dozen of top conferences including SIGIR, WWW, KDD, ICML, NIPS, IJCAI, AAAI, ACL, ICTIR, as well as associate editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, ACM Transactions on the Web, and Neurocomputing. Tie-Yan Liu is a fellow of the IEEE, and a distinguished member of the ACM.