When to restart? Exploring escalating restarts on convergence

Ayush K. Varshney

Keywords: Deep Learning, Optimizers, Learning rate scheduler, Restarts

TL;DR: A strategy to get machine learning models out of local optima by exploring escalating restarts with linearly increasing learning rates.

Abstract: Learning rate scheduling plays a critical role in the optimization of deep neural networks, directly influencing convergence speed, stability, and generalization. While existing schedulers such as cosine annealing, cyclical learning rates, and warm restarts have shown promise, they often rely on fixed or periodic triggers that are agnostic to the training dynamics, such as stagnation or convergence behavior. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective strategy, which we call Stochastic Gradient Descent with Escalating Restarts (SGD-ER). It adaptively increases the learning rate upon convergence. Our method monitors training progress and triggers restarts when stagnation is detected, linearly escalating the learning rate to escape sharp local minima and explore flatter regions of the loss landscape. We evaluate SGD-ER across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet on a range of architectures including ResNet-18/34/50, VGG-16, and DenseNet-101. Compared to standard schedulers, SGD-ER improves test accuracy by 0.5–4.5\%, demonstrating the benefit of convergence-aware escalating restarts for better local optima.

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Submission Number: 54