Generalizable Symbolic Optimizer Learning

Existing automated symbolic optimizer design methods necessitate the use of proxies, often resulting in significant performance degradation when transferring to a target domain. In this paper, we propose a learning based model called Symbolic Optimizer Learner (SOL) that can discover high-performance symbolic optimizers directly on the target. SOL is integrated with symbols and can be directly transformed into a symbolic optimizer. In addition, an unrolled optimization approach is introduced for SOL training. SOL can be embedded into the training process of neural networks, optimizing the target directly without any proxies. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the good performance and high generalizability of SOL through diverse tasks, ranging from classifications to adversarial attacks, from GNN to NLP tasks. On image classification, SOL achieved ~5x speedup and ~3\% accuracy gain. On adversarial attacks, SOL achieved the best attack success rate across seven SOTA defense models. On GNN training, SOL discovered optimizers can outperform Adam on three different datasets. On BERT fine-tuning, SOL also outperformed AdamW on five benchmarks.