Related papers: Poor starting points in machine learning
While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the settings of…
The training of modern machine learning models often consists in solving high-dimensional non-convex optimisation problems that are subject to large-scale data. In this context, momentum-based stochastic optimisation algorithms have become…
While the traditional formulation of machine learning tasks is in terms of performance on average, in practice we are often interested in how well a trained model performs on rare or difficult data points at test time. To achieve more…
Recent focus on robustness to adversarial attacks for deep neural networks produced a large variety of algorithms for training robust models. Most of the effective algorithms involve solving the min-max optimization problem for training…
Machine learning problems such as neural network training, tensor decomposition, and matrix factorization, require local minimization of a nonconvex function. This local minimization is challenged by the presence of saddle points, of which…
The reinforcement learning algorithms that focus on how to compute the gradient and choose next actions, are effectively improved the performance of the agents. However, these algorithms are environment-agnostic. This means that the…
It is known that training deep neural networks, in particular, deep convolutional networks, with aggressively reduced numerical precision is challenging. The stochastic gradient descent algorithm becomes unstable in the presence of noisy…
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…
Recent analyses of certain gradient descent optimization methods have shown that performance can degrade in some settings - such as with stochasticity or implicit momentum. In deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), such optimization methods…
Training neural networks requires optimizing a loss function that may be highly irregular, and in particular neither convex nor smooth. Popular training algorithms are based on stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for which…
One approach for reducing run time and improving efficiency of machine learning is to reduce the convergence rate of the optimization algorithm used. Shuffling is an algorithm technique that is widely used in machine learning, but it only…
Neural networks are usually trained by some form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD)). A number of strategies are in common use intended to improve SGD optimization, such as learning rate schedules, momentum, and batching. These are…
We propose to optimize neural networks with a uniformly-distributed random learning rate. The associated stochastic gradient descent algorithm can be approximated by continuous stochastic equations and analyzed within the Fokker-Planck…
The importance of an adequate inner loop starting point (as opposed to a sufficient inner loop stopping rule) is discussed in the context of a numerical optimization algorithm consisting of nested primal-dual proximal-gradient iterations.…
Gradient descent (GD) methods for the training of artificial neural networks (ANNs) belong nowadays to the most heavily employed computational schemes in the digital world. Despite the compelling success of such methods, it remains an open…
With increasing scale in model and dataset size, the training of deep neural networks becomes a massive computational burden. One approach to speed up the training process is Selective Backprop. For this approach, we perform a forward pass…
In recent years, deep learning has achieved remarkable success in various fields such as image recognition, natural language processing, and speech recognition. The effectiveness of deep learning largely depends on the optimization methods…
Incorporating second order curvature information in gradient based methods have shown to improve convergence drastically despite its computational intensity. In this paper, we propose a stochastic (online) quasi-Newton method with…
We extend the Longstaff-Schwartz algorithm for approximately solving optimal stopping problems on high-dimensional state spaces. We reformulate the optimal stopping problem for Markov processes in discrete time as a generalized statistical…
In many real-world deployments of machine learning systems, data arrive piecemeal. These learning scenarios may be passive, where data arrive incrementally due to structural properties of the problem (e.g., daily financial data) or active,…