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Many relevant problems in the area of systems and control, such as controller synthesis, observer design and model reduction, can be viewed as optimization problems involving dynamical systems: for instance, maximizing performance in the…

An algorithm is said to be adaptive to a certain parameter (of the problem) if it does not need a priori knowledge of such a parameter but performs competitively to those that know it. This dissertation presents our work on adaptive…

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…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are the most used algorithms in machine learning applications. In particular, SGD with adaptive learning rates and momentum is the industry standard to train deep networks. Despite the…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an out-of-equilibrium algorithm used extensively to train artificial neural networks. However very little is known on to what extent SGD is crucial for to the success of this technology and, in…

In this paper we investigate how gradient-based algorithms such as gradient descent, (multi-pass) stochastic gradient descent, its persistent variant, and the Langevin algorithm navigate non-convex loss-landscapes and which of them is able…

Previous works on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) often focus on its success. In this work, we construct worst-case optimization problems illustrating that, when not in the regimes that the previous works often assume, SGD can exhibit…

We study the problem of finding the best linear model that can minimize least-squares loss given a data-set. While this problem is trivial in the low dimensional regime, it becomes more interesting in high dimensions where the population…

This paper proposes SplitSGD, a new dynamic learning rate schedule for stochastic optimization. This method decreases the learning rate for better adaptation to the local geometry of the objective function whenever a stationary phase is…

In this paper, we investigate a general class of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms, called Conditioned SGD, based on a preconditioning of the gradient direction. Using a discrete-time approach with martingale tools, we establish…

We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization: the problem of minimizing the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex loss functions. A recent work of Bassily et al. (2019)…

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…

A framework is introduced for sequentially solving convex stochastic minimization problems, where the objective functions change slowly, in the sense that the distance between successive minimizers is bounded. The minimization problems are…

In this paper, we explore a general Aggregated Gradient Langevin Dynamics framework (AGLD) for the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. We investigate the nonasymptotic convergence of AGLD with a unified analysis for different data…

We propose a new algorithm---Stochastic Proximal Langevin Algorithm (SPLA)---for sampling from a log concave distribution. Our method is a generalization of the Langevin algorithm to potentials expressed as the sum of one stochastic smooth…

We introduce adaptive, tuning-free step size schedules for gradient-based sampling algorithms obtained as time-discretizations of Wasserstein gradient flows. The result is a suite of tuning-free sampling algorithms, including tuning-free…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is commonly modeled as a Langevin process, assuming that minibatch noise acts as Brownian motion. However, this approximation relies on a continuous-time limit and a sqrt(eta) noise scaling that does not…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…

We study the mixing properties of an important optimization algorithm of machine learning: the stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) with a fixed step size. The data stream is not assumed to be independent hence the SGLD is not a…

We consider stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for least-squares regression with potentially several passes over the data. While several passes have been widely reported to perform practically better in terms of predictive performance on…