Machine learning is essentially the sciences of playing with data. An adaptive data selection strategy, enabling to dynamically choose different data at various training stages, can reach a more effective model in a more efficient way. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework, which we call \emph{\textbf{N}eural \textbf{D}ata \textbf{F}ilter} (\textbf{NDF}), to explore automatic and adaptive data selection in the training process. In particular, NDF takes advantage of a deep neural network to adaptively select and filter important data instances from a sequential stream of training data, such that the future accumulative reward (e.g., the convergence speed) is maximized. In contrast to previous studies in data selection that is mainly based on heuristic strategies, NDF is quite generic and thus can be widely suitable for many machine learning tasks. Taking neural network training with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) as an example, comprehensive experiments with respect to various neural network modeling (e.g., multi-layer perceptron networks, convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks) and several applications (e.g., image classification and text understanding) demonstrate that NDF powered SGD can achieve comparable accuracy with standard SGD process by using less data and fewer iterations.
Does the Model Say What the Data Says? A Simple Heuristic for Model Data Alignment
Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA（计算机科学系，德克萨斯理工大学埃尔帕索分校）；Department of Engineering Education and Leadership, The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA（工程教育与领导力系，德克萨斯理工大学埃尔帕索分校）
