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Many modern learning tasks involve fitting nonlinear models to data which are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Due to this overparameterization, the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Samet Oymak , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

Adversarial neural networks solve many important problems in data science, but are notoriously difficult to train. These difficulties come from the fact that optimal weights for adversarial nets correspond to saddle points, and not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-12 Abhay Yadav , Sohil Shah , Zheng Xu , David Jacobs , Tom Goldstein

The performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) depends critically on how learning rates are tuned and decreased over time. We propose a method to automatically adjust multiple learning rates so as to minimize the expected error at any…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-02-19 Tom Schaul , Sixin Zhang , Yann LeCun

Any gradient descent optimization requires to choose a learning rate. With deeper and deeper models, tuning that learning rate can easily become tedious and does not necessarily lead to an ideal convergence. We propose a variation of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-10 Mathieu Ravaut , Satya Gorti

Factorization-based gradient descent is a scalable and efficient algorithm for solving low-rank matrix completion. Recent progress in structured non-convex optimization has offered global convergence guarantees for gradient descent under…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-09 Trung Vu , Raviv Raich

We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function over a closed convex set, with Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). We propose a fully parameter-free version of AdaGrad, which is adaptive to the distance between the initialization and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-01 Evgenii Chzhen , Christophe Giraud , Gilles Stoltz

We introduce a new sequential subspace optimization method for large-scale saddle-point problems. It solves iteratively a sequence of auxiliary saddle-point problems in low-dimensional subspaces, spanned by directions derived from…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-24 Yoni Choukroun , Michael Zibulevsky , Pavel Kisilev

The performance of a deep neural network is highly dependent on its training, and finding better local optimal solutions is the goal of many optimization algorithms. However, existing optimization algorithms show a preference for descent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Huangxing Lin , Weihong Zeng , Xinghao Ding , Yue Huang , Chenxi Huang , John Paisley

In this paper, we propose and analyze a fast two-point gradient algorithm for solving nonlinear ill-posed problems, which is based on the sequential subspace optimization method. A complete convergence analysis is provided under the…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2019-11-06 Guangyu Gao , Bo Han , Shanshan Tong

It is known that gradient descent (GD) on a $C^2$ cost function generically avoids strict saddle points when using a small, constant step size. However, no such guarantee existed for GD with a line-search method. We provide one for a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-17 Andreea-Alexandra Muşat , Nicolas Boumal

Fitting a function by using linear combinations of a large number $N$ of `simple' components is one of the most fruitful ideas in statistical learning. This idea lies at the core of a variety of methods, from two-layer neural networks to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-08-20 Adel Javanmard , Marco Mondelli , Andrea Montanari

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-21 Harsh Vardhan , Sebastian U. Stich

In this paper, we focus on solving a class of constrained non-convex non-concave saddle point problems in a decentralized manner by a group of nodes in a network. Specifically, we assume that each node has access to a summand of a global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-01 Weijie Liu , Aryan Mokhtari , Asuman Ozdaglar , Sarath Pattathil , Zebang Shen , Nenggan Zheng

This paper considers the problem of understanding the behavior of a general class of accelerated gradient methods on smooth nonconvex functions. Motivated by some recent works that have proposed effective algorithms, based on Polyak's heavy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Rishabh Dixit , Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Waheed U. Bajwa

Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large scale optimization of machine learning objective functions. Yet, its performance is greatly variable and heavily depends on the choice of the stepsizes. This has motivated a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-28 Xiaoyu Li , Francesco Orabona

We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-30 David Kozak , Stephen Becker , Alireza Doostan , Luis Tenorio

The goal of policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) is to search the maximal point of its objective. However, due to the inherent non-concavity of its objective, convergence to a first-order stationary point (FOSP) can not guarantee the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Long Yang , Qian Zheng , Gang Pan

In this paper we consider solving saddle point problems using two variants of Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithms, Extra-gradient (EG) and Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent (OGDA) methods. We show that both of these algorithms admit a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-06 Aryan Mokhtari , Asuman Ozdaglar , Sarath Pattathil

First order policy optimization has been widely used in reinforcement learning. It guarantees to find the optimal policy for the state-feedback linear quadratic regulator (LQR). However, the performance of policy optimization remains…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-05 Yang Zheng , Yue Sun , Maryam Fazel , Na Li

Adaptive gradient methods have attracted much attention of machine learning communities due to the high efficiency. However their acceleration effect in practice, especially in neural network training, is hard to analyze, theoretically. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-15 Xunpeng Huang , Hao Zhou , Runxin Xu , Zhe Wang , Lei Li