Related papers: SmoothOut: Smoothing Out Sharp Minima to Improve G…
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 the era of large-scale neural network models, optimization algorithms often struggle with generalization due to an overreliance on training loss. One key insight widely accepted in the machine learning community is the idea that wide…
It has long been argued that minibatch stochastic gradient descent can generalize better than large batch gradient descent in deep neural networks. However recent papers have questioned this claim, arguing that this effect is simply a…
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 descent methods (of the gradient and mirror varieties) have become increasingly popular in optimization. In fact, it is now widely recognized that the success of deep learning is not only due to the special deep architecture of…
Generalization is one of the most important problems in deep learning (DL). In the overparameterized regime in neural networks, there exist many low-loss solutions that fit the training data equally well. The key question is which solution…
The noise in stochastic gradient descent (SGD), caused by minibatch sampling, is poorly understood despite its practical importance in deep learning. This work presents the first systematic study of the SGD noise and fluctuations close to a…
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…
We consider the problem of denoising with the help of prior information taken from a database of clean signals or images. Denoising with variational methods is very efficient if a regularizer well adapted to the nature of the data is…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is almost ubiquitously used for training non-convex optimization tasks. Recently, a hypothesis proposed by Keskar et al. [2017] that large batch methods tend to converge to sharp minimizers has received…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has proven to be remarkably effective in optimizing deep neural networks that employ ever-larger numbers of parameters. Yet, improving the efficiency of large-scale optimization remains a vital and highly…
Multi-epoch, small-batch, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been the method of choice for learning with large over-parameterized models. A popular theory for explaining why SGD works well in practice is that the algorithm has an…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
It is not clear yet why ADAM-alike adaptive gradient algorithms suffer from worse generalization performance than SGD despite their faster training speed. This work aims to provide understandings on this generalization gap by analyzing…
Giving up and starting over may seem wasteful in many situations such as searching for a target or training deep neural networks (DNNs). Our study, though, demonstrates that resetting from a checkpoint can significantly improve…
For nonconvex objective functions, including those found in training deep neural networks, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum is said to converge faster and have better generalizability than SGD without momentum. In particular,…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) for supervised learning can be viewed as a pipeline of a feature extractor (i.e. last hidden layer) and a linear classifier (i.e. output layer) that is trained jointly with stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In…
Despite an extensive body of literature on deep learning optimization, our current understanding of what makes an optimization algorithm effective is fragmented. In particular, we do not understand well whether enhanced optimization…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been widely used in machine learning due to its computational efficiency and favorable generalization properties. Recently, it has been empirically demonstrated that the gradient noise in several deep…