Word.ws English Dictionary

graduate student descent

graduate student descent noun: the process of choosing hyperparameters manually and in an ad-hoc manner, typical of work assigned to a graduate student.

Noun

graduate student descent (uncountable)

  1. (humorous, machine learning) The process of choosing hyperparameters manually and in an ad-hoc manner, typical of work assigned to a graduate student.
    • Phrase of the day, "Graduate Student Descent." Optimization through graduate student tweaking.[2011 April 6, Kat Scott, Twitter, archived from the original on 04 Jul 2022
    • […] people without real-world experience often ignore systematic approaches to hyperparameter tuning in favor of manual, gut-feeling approach. The most popular method is arguably 'Graduate Student Descent (GSD) […]2019, Chip Huyen, “Design a machine learning system”, in Chip Huyen [personal website], retrieved 27 Sep 2021

Origin of graduate student descent

Modeled on gradient descent. Attributed to David A. McAllester.

Questions about graduate student descent

What does graduate student descent mean?
Graduate student descent means the process of choosing hyperparameters manually and in an ad-hoc manner, typical of work assigned to a graduate student.
What part of speech is graduate student descent?
Graduate student descent is a noun.

Words near graduate student descent in the dictionary

  1. graduate nurse
  2. graduate nurses
  3. graduate school
  4. graduate schools
  5. graduate student
  6. graduate student descent
  7. graduate students
  8. graduate tax
  9. graduate taxes
  10. graduate theses
  11. graduate thesis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: graduate student descent (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “graduate student descent.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/graduate_student_descent. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.