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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a key ingredient in the training of deep neural networks and yet its geometrical significance appears elusive. We study a deterministic model in which the trajectories of our dynamical systems are…
Understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants is essential for machine learning. However, most of the preceding analyses are conducted under amenable conditions such as unbiased gradient estimator and bounded objective…
We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of \emph{heterogeneous} functions distributed across several machines with a focus on communication efficiency. In such settings, naively using the classical stochastic…
We present a convergence rate analysis for biased stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where individual gradient updates are corrupted by computation errors. We develop stochastic quadratic constraints to formulate a small linear matrix…
When maximum likelihood estimation is infeasible, one often turns to score matching, contrastive divergence, or minimum probability flow to obtain tractable parameter estimates. We provide a unifying perspective of these techniques as…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…
We study a mini-batch diversification scheme for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). While classical SGD relies on uniformly sampling data points to form a mini-batch, we propose a non-uniform sampling scheme based on the Determinantal Point…
We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for composite optimization problems with $N$ sequential operators subject to perturbations in both the forward and backward passes. Unlike classical analyses that treat gradient noise as additive…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
Variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods have gained popularity in recent times. Several variants exist with different strategies for the storing and sampling of gradients and this work concerns the interactions between these two…
One of the most common methods to train machine learning algorithms today is the stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In a distributed setting, SGD-based algorithms have been shown to converge theoretically under specific circumstances. A…
We study convergence properties of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for convex objectives without assumptions on smoothness or strict convexity. We consider the question of establishing that with high probability the objective evaluated at…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a central tool in machine learning. We prove that SGD converges to zero loss, even with a fixed (non-vanishing) learning rate - in the special case of homogeneous linear classifiers with smooth monotone…
Stochastic gradient descent (\textsc{Sgd}) methods are the most powerful optimization tools in training machine learning and deep learning models. Moreover, acceleration (a.k.a. momentum) methods and diagonal scaling (a.k.a. adaptive…
In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original SVRG, called variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Unlike the choices of snapshot and starting points in SVRG and its proximal variant, Prox-SVRG, the two vectors…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still is the workhorse for many practical problems. However, it converges slow, and can be difficult to tune. It is possible to precondition SGD to accelerate its convergence remarkably. But many attempts…
We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…