Related papers: Escaping Saddles with Stochastic Gradients
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 stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is most widely used for deep neural network (DNN) training. However, the method does not always converge to a flat minimum of the loss surface that can demonstrate high generalization capability.…
Stochastic gradients for deep neural networks exhibit strong correlations along the optimization trajectory, and are often aligned with a small set of Hessian eigenvectors associated with outlier eigenvalues. Recent work shows that…
We consider a class of stochastic smooth convex optimization problems under rather general assumptions on the noise in the stochastic gradient observation. As opposed to the classical problem setting in which the variance of noise is…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the algorithm we use to train neural networks. However, it remains poorly understood how the SGD navigates the highly nonlinear and degenerate loss landscape of a neural network. In this…
Escaping saddle points is a central research topic in nonconvex optimization. In this paper, we propose a simple gradient-based algorithm such that for a smooth function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^n\to\mathbb{R}$, it outputs an…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are mainstream methods to train deep neural networks. Since neural networks are non-convex, more and more works study the dynamic behavior of SGD and the impact to its generalization,…
In this paper, we propose a variant of Riemannian stochastic recursive gradient method that can achieve second-order convergence guarantee and escape saddle points using simple perturbation. The idea is to perturb the iterates when gradient…
Inverse problems in scientific computing often require optimization over infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. A commonly used solver in such settings is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where gradients are approximated using randomly…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for optimization problems arising in high-dimensional inference tasks. Here one produces an estimator of an unknown parameter from independent samples of data by iteratively…
Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…
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 study the convergence properties and escape dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in one-dimensional landscapes, separately considering infinite- and finite-variance noise. Our main focus is to identify the time scales on which…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…
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…
We study the iteration complexity of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for minimizing the gradient norm of smooth, possibly nonconvex functions. We provide several results, implying that the $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$ upper bound of…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based training of neural networks with a large learning rate or a small batch-size typically ends in well-generalizing, flat regions of the weight space, as indicated by small eigenvalues of the Hessian of…
The gradient noise of SGD is considered to play a central role in the observed strong generalization abilities of deep learning. While past studies confirm that the magnitude and the covariance structure of gradient noise are critical for…
In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of…
Gradient clipping is a popular modification to standard (stochastic) gradient descent, at every iteration limiting the gradient norm to a certain value $c >0$. It is widely used for example for stabilizing the training of deep learning…