Pro tip: I stopped hand-tuning my neural net and let the optimizer do it, and my accuracy went up 4 points

James Price · 2026-09-11T09:05:03.940289+00:00

Three weeks ago I was at my desk in Chicago fighting a small image classifier for a side project, and I kept messing with the learning rate by hand like it was 2019. My training runs took about 40 minutes each on my old GPU, and I did that dance maybe 11 times, tweaking a number here and there and getting nowhere. Then a friend at a meetup asked why I wasn't just using a schedule search, and I felt dumb. I set up a basic sweep over 3 values, let it run overnight, and the thing hit 91% accuracy by morning versus the 87% I kept getting on my own. The part that kills me is I spent two whole weekends being a human grid search. If you're still turning knobs by hand on small models, what is actually stopping you from handing it off?

Guest Forum

Loading…

Pro tip: I stopped hand-tuning my neural net and let the optimizer do it, and my accuracy went up 4 points | AI Innovations - Guest Forum