Related papers: Global Convergence of Non-Convex Gradient Descent …
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often…
For strongly convex objectives that are smooth, the classical theory of gradient descent ensures linear convergence relative to the number of gradient evaluations. An analogous nonsmooth theory is challenging. Even when the objective is…
Optimization problems occurring in a wide variety of physical design problems, including but not limited to optical engineering, quantum control, structural engineering, involve minimization of a simple cost function of the state of the…
Gradient descent (GD) is a collection of continuous optimization methods that have achieved immeasurable success in practice. Owing to data science applications, GD with diminishing step sizes has become a prominent variant. While this…
Optimization problems with rank constraints arise in many applications, including matrix regression, structured PCA, matrix completion and matrix decomposition problems. An attractive heuristic for solving such problems is to factorize the…
Gradient descent dynamics on the deep matrix factorization problem is extensively studied as a simplified theoretical model for deep neural networks. Although the convergence theory for two-layer matrix factorization is well-established, no…
In this paper, we examine the time it takes for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to reach the global minimum of a general, non-convex loss function. We approach this question through the lens of randomly perturbed dynamical systems and…
The distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by a sum of $n$ local cost functions by using local information exchange is considered. This problem is an important component of many machine…
This paper investigates the asymmetric low-rank matrix completion problem, which can be formulated as an unconstrained non-convex optimization problem with a nonlinear least-squares objective function, and is solved via gradient descent…
We study the convergence rate of first-order methods for rectangular matrix factorization, which is a canonical nonconvex optimization problem. Specifically, given a rank-$r$ matrix $\mathbf{A}\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$, we prove that…
Numerous empirical evidences have corroborated the importance of noise in nonconvex optimization problems. The theory behind such empirical observations, however, is still largely unknown. This paper studies this fundamental problem through…
In this paper, we theoretically prove that gradient descent can find a global minimum of non-convex optimization of all layers for nonlinear deep neural networks of sizes commonly encountered in practice. The theory developed in this paper…
We study the overparametrization bounds required for the global convergence of stochastic gradient descent algorithm for a class of one hidden layer feed-forward neural networks, considering most of the activation functions used in…
Extrapolation is a well-known technique for solving convex optimization and variational inequalities and recently attracts some attention for non-convex optimization. Several recent works have empirically shown its success in some machine…
Nonconvex minimax problems appear frequently in emerging machine learning applications, such as generative adversarial networks and adversarial learning. Simple algorithms such as the gradient descent ascent (GDA) are the common practice…
In this paper we propose a distributed dual gradient algorithm for minimizing linearly constrained separable convex problems and analyze its rate of convergence. In particular, we prove that under the assumption of strong convexity and…
Although stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants (e.g., stochastic momentum methods, AdaGrad) are the choice of algorithms for solving non-convex problems (especially deep learning), there still remain big gaps between the…
A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…