   Metric embeddings are   immensely useful representations of associations between entities   (images, users, search queries, words, and more).   Embeddings are learned by  optimizing a loss objective of the general form of a sum over example associations. Typically, the optimization uses stochastic gradient updates over minibatches of examples that are arranged  independently at random. In this work, we propose the use of {\em structured arrangements} through randomized {\em microbatches} of examples that are more likely to include similar ones. We make a principled argument for the properties of our arrangements  that accelerate the training and present efficient algorithms to generate microbatches that respect the marginal  distribution of training examples.   Finally, we observe experimentally that our structured arrangements accelerate training by 3-20\%. Structured arrangements emerge as a powerful and novel performance knob for SGD that is independent and complementary to other SGD  hyperparameters and thus is a candidate for wide deployment.
Accelerating SGD by arranging examples differently The paper presents a method for improving the convergence rate of Stochastic Gradient Descent for learning embeddings by grouping similar training samples together. Proposes a non-uniform sampling strategy to construct minibatches in SGD for the task of learning embeddings for object associations.