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Related papers: Escaping Saddles with Stochastic Gradients

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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 R. Fioresi , P. Chaudhari , S. Soatto

This paper considers a class of distributed resource allocation problems where each agent privately holds a smooth, potentially non-convex local objective, subject to a globally coupled equality constraint. Built upon the existing method,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-12 Lei Qin , Ye Pu

We study the learning dynamics of a multi-pass, mini-batch Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) procedure for empirical risk minimization in high-dimensional multi-index models with isotropic random data. In an asymptotic regime where the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-19 Zhou Fan , Leda Wang

Deep linear networks (DLNs) are used as an analytically tractable model of the training dynamics of deep neural networks. While gradient descent in DLNs is known to exhibit saddle-to-saddle dynamics, the impact of stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Guillaume Corlouer , Avi Semler , Alexander Strang , Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel

The learning rate is an important tuning parameter for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and can greatly influence its performance. However, appropriate selection of a learning rate schedule across all iterations typically requires a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Nikola Surjanovic , Alexandre Bouchard-Côté , Trevor Campbell

We interpret the variational inference of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) as minimizing a new potential function named the \textit{quasi-potential}. We analytically construct the quasi-potential function in the case when the loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-21 Wenqing Hu , Zhanxing Zhu , Haoyi Xiong , Jun Huan

We give the first polynomial time algorithms for escaping from high-dimensional saddle points under a moderate number of constraints. Given gradient access to a smooth function $f \colon \mathbb R^d \to \mathbb R$ we show that (noisy)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Dmitrii Avdiukhin , Grigory Yaroslavtsev

This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm's convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-22 Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Nadav Hallak , Ali Kavis , Volkan Cevher

Understanding the implicit bias of training algorithms is of crucial importance in order to explain the success of overparametrised neural networks. In this paper, we study the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent over diagonal linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Scott Pesme , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Nicolas Flammarion

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are the most used algorithms in machine learning applications. In particular, SGD with adaptive learning rates and momentum is the industry standard to train deep networks. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-29 Xiaoyu Li , Francesco Orabona

Understanding the algorithmic bias of \emph{stochastic gradient descent} (SGD) is one of the key challenges in modern machine learning and deep learning theory. Most of the existing works, however, focus on \emph{very small or even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Jingfeng Wu , Difan Zou , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used algorithm in deep-learning neural networks has attracted continuing studies for the theoretical principles behind its success. A recent work reports an anomaly (inverse) relation between the…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2023-08-16 Xia Xiong , Yong-Cong Chen , Chunxiao Shi , Ping Ao

Inverse problems are paramount in Science and Engineering. In this paper, we consider the setup of Statistical Inverse Problem (SIP) and demonstrate how Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithms can be used in the linear SIP setting. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-29 Yuri R. Fonseca , Yuri F. Saporito

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-31 Bin Hu , Peter Seiler , Laurent Lessard

Forward Gradients - the idea of using directional derivatives in forward differentiation mode - have recently been shown to be utilizable for neural network training while avoiding problems generally associated with backpropagation gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Louis Fournier , Stéphane Rivaud , Eugene Belilovsky , Michael Eickenberg , Edouard Oyallon

Optimal Transport has sparked vivid interest in recent years, in particular thanks to the Wasserstein distance, which provides a geometrically sensible and intuitive way of comparing probability measures. For computational reasons, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Eloi Tanguy

Stochastic gradient optimization is the dominant learning paradigm for a variety of scenarios, from classical supervised learning to modern self-supervised learning. We consider stochastic gradient algorithms for learning problems whose…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-29 Facheng Yu , Ronak Mehta , Alex Luedtke , Zaid Harchaoui

We consider a variant of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a random learning rate and reveal its convergence properties. SGD is a widely used stochastic optimization algorithm in machine learning, especially deep learning. Numerous…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-09 Naoki Yoshida , Shogo Nakakita , Masaaki Imaizumi

Gradient descent and its variants are widely used in machine learning. However, oracle access of gradient may not be available in many applications, limiting the direct use of gradient descent. This paper proposes a method of estimating…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-07 Qinbo Bai , Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-07-10 Lam M. Nguyen , Phuong Ha Nguyen , Marten van Dijk , Peter Richtárik , Katya Scheinberg , Martin Takáč