# Using a thousand optimization tasks to learn hyperparameter search strategies Source: [Using a thousand optimization tasks to learn hyperparameter search strategies]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:11:14.110Z Authors: Luke Metz, Niru Maheswaranathan, Ruoxi Sun, C. Daniel Freeman, Ben Poole, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein Published: 2020-02-27T02:49:10.000Z ## Abstract We present TaskSet, a dataset of tasks for use in training and evaluating optimizers. TaskSet is unique in its size and diversity, containing over a thousand tasks ranging from image classification with fully connected or convolutional neural networks, to variational autoencoders, to non-volume preserving flows on a variety of datasets. As an example application of such a dataset we explore meta-learning an ordered list of hyperparameters to try sequentially. By learning this hyperparameter list from data generated using TaskSet we achieve large speedups in sample efficiency over random search. Next we use the diversity of the TaskSet and our method for learning hyperparameter lists to empirically explore the generalization of these lists to new optimization tasks in a variety of settings including ImageNet classification with Resnet50 and LM1B language modeling with transformers. As part of this work we have opensourced code for all tasks, as well as ~29 million training curves for these problems and the corresponding hyperparameters. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()