  Restart techniques are common in gradient-free optimization to deal with
multimodal functions. Partial warm restarts are also gaining popularity in
gradient-based optimization to improve the rate of convergence in accelerated
gradient schemes to deal with ill-conditioned functions. In this paper, we
propose a simple warm restart technique for stochastic gradient descent to
improve its anytime performance when training deep neural networks. We
empirically study its performance on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, where
we demonstrate new state-of-the-art results at 3.14% and 16.21%, respectively.
We also demonstrate its advantages on a dataset of EEG recordings and on a
downsampled version of the ImageNet dataset. Our source code is available at
https://github.com/loshchil/SGDR
