Related papers: Online Learning, Stability, and Stochastic Gradien…
Recent experiments have shown that, often, when training a neural network with gradient descent (GD) with a step size $\eta$, the operator norm of the Hessian of the loss grows until it approximately reaches $2/\eta$, after which it…
Asynchronous reinforcement learning has become increasingly central to scaling LLM post-training, delivering major throughput gains by decoupling rollout generation from policy updates. However, widely used policy-gradient objectives such…
In this paper some methods to use the empirical bootstrap approach for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to minimize the empirical risk over a separable Hilbert space are investigated from the view point of algorithmic stability and…
This work investigates the problem of estimating the weight matrices of a stable time-invariant linear dynamical system from a single sequence of noisy measurements. We show that if the unknown weight matrices describing the system are in…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…
We showcase important features of the dynamics of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the training of neural networks. We present empirical observations that commonly used large step sizes (i) lead the iterates to jump from one side of…
We study online convex optimization in the random order model, recently proposed by \citet{garber2020online}, where the loss functions may be chosen by an adversary, but are then presented to the online algorithm in a uniformly random…
The overall performance or expected excess risk of an iterative machine learning algorithm can be decomposed into training error and generalization error. While the former is controlled by its convergence analysis, the latter can be tightly…
While flow matching is elegant, its reliance on single-sample conditional velocities leads to high-variance training targets that destabilize optimization and slow convergence. By explicitly characterizing this variance, we identify 1) a…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…
Due to the massive size of the neural network models and training datasets used in machine learning today, it is imperative to distribute stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by splitting up tasks such as gradient evaluation across multiple…
Stochastic descent methods (of the gradient and mirror varieties) have become increasingly popular in optimization. In fact, it is now widely recognized that the success of deep learning is not only due to the special deep architecture of…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the workhorse algorithm of deep learning technology. At each step of the training phase, a mini batch of samples is drawn from the training dataset and the weights of the neural network are adjusted…
We study the asynchronous stochastic gradient descent algorithm for distributed training over $n$ workers which have varying computation and communication frequency over time. In this algorithm, workers compute stochastic gradients in…
Machine learning algorithms with empirical risk minimization are vulnerable under distributional shifts due to the greedy adoption of all the correlations found in training data. Recently, there are robust learning methods aiming at this…
We study the generalization performance of gradient methods in the fundamental stochastic convex optimization setting, focusing on its dimension dependence. First, for full-batch gradient descent (GD) we give a construction of a learning…
We present a model of a basic recurrent neural network (or bRNN) that includes a separate linear term with a slightly "stable" fixed matrix to guarantee bounded solutions and fast dynamic response. We formulate a state space viewpoint and…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…