Related papers: Gradient Descent Can Take Exponential Time to Esca…

Satisfaction of the strict saddle property has become a standard assumption in non-convex optimization, and it ensures that many first-order optimization algorithms will almost always escape saddle points. However, functions exist in…

We empirically demonstrate that full-batch gradient descent on neural network training objectives typically operates in a regime we call the Edge of Stability. In this regime, the maximum eigenvalue of the training loss Hessian hovers just…

Gradient descent prevails in artificial neural network training, but seems inept for spiking neural networks as small parameter changes can cause sudden, disruptive (dis-)appearances of spikes. Here, we demonstrate exact gradient descent…

It is believed that Gradient Descent (GD) induces an implicit bias towards good generalization in training machine learning models. This paper provides a fine-grained analysis of the dynamics of GD for the matrix sensing problem, whose goal…

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…

Motivated by the pursuit of a systematic computational and algorithmic understanding of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), we present a simple yet unified non-asymptotic local convergence theory for smooth two-player games, which…

The convergence speed of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) can be improved by actively selecting mini-batches. We explore sampling schemes where similar data points are less likely to be selected in the same mini-batch. In particular, we…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a workhorse algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems in data science and machine learning. Understanding the convergence of SGD is hence of fundamental importance. In this work we examine…

The simplicity of gradient descent (GD) made it the default method for training ever-deeper and complex neural networks. Both loss functions and architectures are often explicitly tuned to be amenable to this basic local optimization. In…

We consider in this work small random perturbations (of multiplicative noise type) of the gradient flow. We prove that under mild conditions, when the potential function is a Morse function with additional strong saddle condition, the…

We consider gradient descent (GD) with a constant stepsize applied to logistic regression with linearly separable data, where the constant stepsize $\eta$ is so large that the loss initially oscillates. We show that GD exits this initial…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…

Recent studies have shown that gradient descent (GD) can achieve improved generalization when its dynamics exhibits a chaotic behavior. However, to obtain the desired effect, the step-size should be chosen sufficiently large, a task which…

We investigate the problem of finding second-order stationary points (SOSP) in differentially private (DP) stochastic non-convex optimization. Existing methods suffer from two key limitations: (i) inaccurate convergence error rate due to…

We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…

We introduce data structures for solving robust regression through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by sampling gradients with probability proportional to their norm, i.e., importance sampling. Although SGD is widely used for large scale…

The problem of stopping stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in an online manner, based solely on the observed trajectory, is a challenging theoretical problem with significant consequences for applications. While SGD is routinely monitored as…

In this paper, we show that under over-parametrization several standard stochastic optimization algorithms escape saddle-points and converge to local-minimizers much faster. One of the fundamental aspects of over-parametrized models is that…

We provide a detailed study on the implicit bias of gradient descent when optimizing loss functions with strictly monotone tails, such as the logistic loss, over separable datasets. We look at two basic questions: (a) what are the…

We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…