ageron/handson-mlp

[bug] OneCycleLR scheduler should be called after every batch

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#28 opened on Mar 2, 2026

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Description

Enter the chapter number

Chapter 11. Training Deep Neural Networks

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What is the cell's number in the notebook

Cells 105-106 in 11_training_deep_neural_networks.ipynb

Enter the environment you are using to run the notebook

Jupyter on MacOS

Describe your issue

The last step of Exercise 8 reads:

Step 7: Retrain your model using 1cycle scheduling and see if it improves training speed and model accuracy.

Solution code in cells 105 and 106:

n_epochs = 60
optimizer = torch.optim.NAdam(model.parameters(), lr=1e-3)
scheduler = torch.optim.lr_scheduler.OneCycleLR(
    optimizer, epochs=n_epochs, steps_per_epoch=len(train_loader), max_lr=1e-2)
criterion = nn.CrossEntropyLoss()
accuracy = torchmetrics.Accuracy(task="multiclass", num_classes=10).to(device)
history = train_with_early_stopping(model, optimizer, criterion, accuracy,
                                    train_loader, valid_loader, n_epochs,
                                    patience=20, scheduler=scheduler)

train_with_early_stopping() function (defined earlier in the notebook) calls scheduler.step() at the end of every epoch. This seems to work, however, the documentation of OneCycleLR scheduler mentions that it should be called at the end of every batch.

Also, using NAdam optimizer resulted in validation accuracy consistently dropping to ~0.10 after a few epochs and training diverging, although this might be an issue with my environment. I resolved this by replacing NAdam with SGD optimizer.

Enter what you expected to happen

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If you found a workaround, describe it here

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