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Related papers: Convergence of Gradient Descent on Separable Data

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A new loss function is proposed for neural networks on classification tasks which extends the hinge loss by assigning gradients to its critical points. We will show that for a linear classifier on linearly separable data with fixed step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Justin Lizama

We study gradient descent (GD) with a constant stepsize for $\ell_2$-regularized logistic regression with linearly separable data. Classical theory suggests small stepsizes to ensure monotonic reduction of the optimization objective,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-04 Jingfeng Wu , Pierre Marion , Peter Bartlett

We study $\textit{gradient descent}$ (GD) for logistic regression on linearly separable data with stepsizes that adapt to the current risk, scaled by a constant hyperparameter $\eta$. We show that after at most $1/\gamma^2$ burn-in steps,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-21 Ruiqi Zhang , Jingfeng Wu , Licong Lin , Peter L. Bartlett

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-19 Mor Shpigel Nacson , Nathan Srebro , Daniel Soudry

The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-19 Xiaoyu Wang , Sindri Magnússon , Mikael Johansson

We study the fundamental optimization principles of self-attention, the defining mechanism of transformers, by analyzing the implicit bias of gradient-based optimizers in training a self-attention layer with a linear decoder in binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Bhavya Vasudeva , Puneesh Deora , Christos Thrampoulidis

In this paper, we study the implicit regularization of the gradient descent algorithm in homogeneous neural networks, including fully-connected and convolutional neural networks with ReLU or LeakyReLU activations. In particular, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Kaifeng Lyu , Jian Li

Adversarial training is a principled approach for training robust neural networks. Despite of tremendous successes in practice, its theoretical properties still remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we provide new theoretical insights…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-29 Yan Li , Ethan X. Fang , Huan Xu , Tuo Zhao

A prevalent belief among optimization specialists is that linear convergence of gradient descent is contingent on the function growing quadratically away from its minimizers. In this work, we argue that this belief is inaccurate. We show…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-11 Damek Davis , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy , Liwei Jiang

A vast literature on convergence guarantees for gradient descent and derived methods exists at the moment. However, a simple practical situation remains unexplored: when a fixed step size is used, can we expect gradient descent to converge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Alexandru Crăciun , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar

A line of recent works established that when training linear predictors over separable data, using gradient methods and exponentially-tailed losses, the predictors asymptotically converge in direction to the max-margin predictor. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-11 Ohad Shamir

The momentum acceleration technique is widely adopted in many optimization algorithms. However, there is no theoretical answer on how the momentum affects the generalization performance of the optimization algorithms. This paper studies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Bohan Wang , Qi Meng , Huishuai Zhang , Ruoyu Sun , Wei Chen , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

Gradient descent (GD) on logistic regression has many fascinating properties. When the dataset is linearly separable, it is known that the iterates converge in direction to the maximum-margin separator regardless of how large the step size…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Si Yi Meng , Baptiste Goujaud , Antonio Orvieto , Christopher De Sa

We study the gradient descent (GD) dynamics of a depth-2 linear neural network with a single input and output. We show that GD converges at an explicit linear rate to a global minimum of the training loss, even with a large stepsize --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Pierfrancesco Beneventano , Blake Woodworth

In this work, we study the convergence \emph{in high probability} of clipped gradient methods when the noise distribution has heavy tails, ie., with bounded $p$th moments, for some $1<p\le2$. Prior works in this setting follow the same…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-05 Ta Duy Nguyen , Alina Ene , Huy L. Nguyen

Based on a result by Taylor, Hendrickx, and Glineur (J. Optim. Theory Appl., 178(2):455--476, 2018) on the attainable convergence rate of gradient descent for smooth and strongly convex functions in terms of function values, an elementary…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-25 André Uschmajew , Bart Vandereycken

The generalization mystery of overparametrized deep nets has motivated efforts to understand how gradient descent (GD) converges to low-loss solutions that generalize well. Real-life neural networks are initialized from small random values…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Kaifeng Lyu , Zhiyuan Li , Runzhe Wang , Sanjeev Arora

We study gradient descent (GD) dynamics on logistic regression problems with large, constant step sizes. For linearly-separable data, it is known that GD converges to the minimizer with arbitrarily large step sizes, a property which no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Si Yi Meng , Antonio Orvieto , Daniel Yiming Cao , Christopher De Sa

We prove linear convergence of gradient descent to a global optimum for the training of deep residual networks with constant layer width and smooth activation function. We show that if the trained weights, as a function of the layer index,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Rama Cont , Alain Rossier , RenYuan Xu

Many neural networks deployed in the real world scenarios are trained using cross entropy based loss functions. From the optimization perspective, it is known that the behavior of first order methods such as gradient descent crucially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-09 Zhu Wang , Praveen Raj Veluswami , Harsh Mishra , Sathya N. Ravi