While developing v2.1, I ran a bunch of hyper-parameter search
experiments to find settings that performed well for spaCy's NER and
parser. I ended up changing the default Adam settings from beta1=0.9,
beta2=0.999, eps=1e-8 to beta1=0.8, beta2=0.8, eps=1e-5. This was giving
a small improvement in accuracy (like, 0.4%).
Months later, I run the models with Prodigy, which uses beam-search
decoding even when the model has been trained with a greedy objective.
The new models performed terribly...So, wtf? After a couple of days
debugging, I figured out that the new optimizer settings was causing the
model to converge to solutions where the top-scoring class often had
a score of like, -80. The variance on the weights had gone up
enormously. I guess I needed to update the L2 regularisation as well?
Anyway. Let's just revert the change --- if the optimizer is finding
such extreme solutions, that seems bad, and not nearly worth the small
improvement in accuracy.
Currently training a slate of models, to verify the accuracy change is minimal.
Once the training is complete, we can merge this.
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Add and document CLI options for batch size, max doc length, min doc length for `spacy pretrain`.
Also improve CLI output.
Closes#3216
## Checklist
<!--- Before you submit the PR, go over this checklist and make sure you can
tick off all the boxes. [] -> [x] -->
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