No, the main contribution was the idea of continuously moving the LR both down and up. Previously people had generally only decreased LR.
The idea of the “LR finder” was an additional contribution, but is largely orthogonal.
So I used an idea from the CLR paper (the idea of the LR finder), not the idea. 
The SGDR paper shows very impressive SoTA results, especially along with snapshot ensembling.
Hope that clarifies a bit…