Probably even if not completely by hand, MNIST is so simple that hybrid human-machine optimization could be possible, maybe with a UI where you can see the effect on validation loss in (almost) real time of changing a particular weight with a slider. I do not know if it would be possible to improve the final score by changing the weights one by one. Or maybe the human can use instinctual vision knowledge to improve the convolutional filters.
On Cifar this looks very hard to do manually given that the dataset is much harder than Mnist.
I think that a too large choice of lambda is better than a too small one because if lambda is too big the results will still be interesting (which model architecture is the best under extremely strong regularization?) while if it is too small you will just get a normal architecture slightly more regularized.
Probably even if not completely by hand, MNIST is so simple that hybrid human-machine optimization could be possible, maybe with a UI where you can see the effect on validation loss in (almost) real time of changing a particular weight with a slider. I do not know if it would be possible to improve the final score by changing the weights one by one. Or maybe the human can use instinctual vision knowledge to improve the convolutional filters.
On Cifar this looks very hard to do manually given that the dataset is much harder than Mnist.
I think that a too large choice of lambda is better than a too small one because if lambda is too big the results will still be interesting (which model architecture is the best under extremely strong regularization?) while if it is too small you will just get a normal architecture slightly more regularized.