Related papers: Escaping Saddles with Stochastic Gradients
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) introduces anisotropic noise that is correlated with the local curvature of the loss landscape, thereby biasing optimization toward flat minima. Prior work often assumes an equivalence between the Fisher…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are the main workhorses for solving large-scale optimization problems with nonconvex objective functions. Although the convergence of SGDs in the (strongly) convex case is well-understood,…
A theoretical, and potentially also practical, problem with stochastic gradient descent is that trajectories may escape to infinity. In this note, we investigate uniform boundedness properties of iterates and function values along the…
Momentum is known to accelerate the convergence of gradient descent in strongly convex settings without stochastic gradient noise. In stochastic optimization, such as training neural networks, folklore suggests that momentum may help deep…
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…
In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants (Polyak Heavy-Ball and Nesterov) for tracking time-varying optima under strong convexity and smoothness. Our…
Recently there are a considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the algorithmic stability and generalization for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the existing stability analysis requires to impose restrictive assumptions…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular tool in training large-scale machine learning models. Its performance, however, is highly variable, depending crucially on the choice of the step sizes. Accordingly, a variety of strategies for…
Stochastic optimization lies at the heart of machine learning, and its cornerstone is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a method introduced over 60 years ago. The last 8 years have seen an exciting new development: variance reduction (VR)…
Most results on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the convex and smooth setting are presented under the form of bounds on the ergodic function value gap. It is an open question whether bounds can be derived directly on the last iterate…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
This paper introduces an iterative algorithm for training nonparametric additive models that enjoys favorable memory storage and computational requirements. The algorithm can be viewed as the functional counterpart of stochastic gradient…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a workhorse in machine learning, yet its slow convergence can be a computational bottleneck. Variance reduction techniques such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA have been proposed to overcome this weakness,…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants enable modern artificial intelligence. However, theoretical understanding lags far behind their empirical success. It is widely believed that SGD has a curious ability to avoid sharp local…
Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a promising method for solving large-scale inverse problems, due to its excellent scalability with respect to data size. In this work, we analyze a new data-driven regularized stochastic gradient descent…
We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…
Deep neural networks (DNN) are typically optimized using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the estimation of the gradient using stochastic samples tends to be noisy and unreliable, resulting in large gradient variance and bad…
Two classes of methods have been proposed for escaping from saddle points with one using the second-order information carried by the Hessian and the other adding the noise into the first-order information. The existing analysis for…
In the machine learning literature stochastic gradient descent has recently been widely discussed for its purported implicit regularization properties. Much of the theory, that attempts to clarify the role of noise in stochastic gradient…