Related papers: Escaping Saddles with Stochastic Gradients
A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…
Stochastic gradient algorithms are the main focus of large-scale optimization problems and led to important successes in the recent advancement of the deep learning algorithms. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…
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…
In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…
We present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of first-order methods for escaping strict saddle points in smooth non-convex optimization. Our main contribution is a Perturbed Saddle-escape Descent (PSD) algorithm with fully explicit…
In this paper, we provide a theoretical study of noise geometry for minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a phenomenon where noise aligns favorably with the geometry of local landscape. We propose two metrics, derived from analyzing…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…
Symmetries are prevalent in deep learning and can significantly influence the learning dynamics of neural networks. In this paper, we examine how exponential symmetries -- a broad subclass of continuous symmetries present in the model…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a frequently used optimization technique in classical machine learning and Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE). For the implementation of VQE on quantum hardware, the results are always affected by…
Convergence detection of iterative stochastic optimization methods is of great practical interest. This paper considers stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate and momentum. We show that there exists a transient…
We consider stochastic optimization problems where the objective depends on some parameter, as commonly found in hyperparameter optimization for instance. We investigate the behavior of the derivatives of the iterates of Stochastic Gradient…
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…
High-dimensional non-convex optimization problems in engineering design, control, and learning are often hindered by saddle points, flat plateaus, and strongly anisotropic curvature. This paper develops a unified, curvature-adaptive…
Gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are the workhorses of large-scale machine learning. While classical theory focused on analyzing the performance of these methods in convex optimization problems, the most notable…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has become a cornerstone of neural network optimization due to its computational efficiency and generalization capabilities. However, the gradient noise introduced by SGD is often assumed to be uncorrelated…
We present a theoretical analysis of some popular adaptive Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods in the small learning rate regime. Using the stochastic modified equations framework introduced by Li et al., we derive effective…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
Adaptive methods such as Adam and RMSProp are widely used in deep learning but are not well understood. In this paper, we seek a crisp, clean and precise characterization of their behavior in nonconvex settings. To this end, we first…