English
Related papers

Related papers: Step Size Matters in Deep Learning

200 papers

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants are algorithms of choice for many Deep Learning tasks. These methods operate in a small-batch regime wherein a fraction of the training data, say $32$-$512$ data points, is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-13 Nitish Shirish Keskar , Dheevatsa Mudigere , Jorge Nocedal , Mikhail Smelyanskiy , Ping Tak Peter Tang

This work establishes new convergence guarantees for gradient descent in smooth convex optimization via a computer-assisted analysis technique. Our theory allows nonconstant stepsize policies with frequent long steps potentially violating…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-06 Benjamin Grimmer

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are typically optimized using various forms of mini-batch gradient descent algorithm. A major motivation for mini-batch gradient descent is that with a suitably chosen batch size, available computing resources…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Oyebade K. Oyedotun , Konstantinos Papadopoulos , Djamila Aouada

This paper introduces a coordinate descent version of the V\~u-Condat algorithm. By coordinate descent, we mean that only a subset of the coordinates of the primal and dual iterates is updated at each iteration, the other coordinates being…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-17 Olivier Fercoq , Pascal Bianchi

We study the training dynamics of shallow neural networks, in a two-timescale regime in which the stepsizes for the inner layer are much smaller than those for the outer layer. In this regime, we prove convergence of the gradient flow to a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-26 Pierre Marion , Raphaël Berthier

The dynamical stability of the iterates during training plays a key role in determining the minima obtained by optimization algorithms. For example, stable solutions of gradient descent (GD) correspond to flat minima, which have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Rotem Mulayoff , Sebastian U. Stich

Gradient-based algorithms are a cornerstone of artificial neural network training, yet it remains unclear whether biological neural networks use similar gradient-based strategies during learning. Experiments often discover a diversity of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Hugo Ninou , Jonathan Kadmon , N. Alex Cayco-Gajic

Gradient descent is slow to converge for ill-conditioned problems and non-convex problems. An important technique for acceleration is step-size adaptation. The first part of this paper contains a detailed review of step-size adaptation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Hengshuai Yao

Structured non-convex learning problems, for which critical points have favorable statistical properties, arise frequently in statistical machine learning. Algorithmic convergence and statistical estimation rates are well-understood for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-31 Lu Yu , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Stanislav Volgushev , Murat A. Erdogdu

We show that a variety of modern deep learning tasks exhibit a "double-descent" phenomenon where, as we increase model size, performance first gets worse and then gets better. Moreover, we show that double descent occurs not just as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Preetum Nakkiran , Gal Kaplun , Yamini Bansal , Tristan Yang , Boaz Barak , Ilya Sutskever

Deep learning models are increasingly popular in many machine learning applications where the training data may contain sensitive information. To provide formal and rigorous privacy guarantee, many learning systems now incorporate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Xiangyi Chen , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Mingyi Hong

Modern deep networks are trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) whose key hyperparameters are the number of data considered at each step or batch size $B$, and the step size or learning rate $\eta$. For small $B$ and large $\eta$,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Antonio Sclocchi , Matthieu Wyart

We introduce a machine-learning framework to learn the hyperparameter sequence of first-order methods (e.g., the step sizes in gradient descent) to quickly solve parametric convex optimization problems. Our computational architecture…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-23 Rajiv Sambharya , Bartolomeo Stellato

This paper proposes a novel proximal-gradient algorithm for a decentralized optimization problem with a composite objective containing smooth and non-smooth terms. Specifically, the smooth and nonsmooth terms are dealt with by gradient and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-02 Zhi Li , Wei Shi , Ming Yan

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Hwanwoo Kim , Panos Toulis , Eric Laber

Transformer models have emerged as fundamental tools across various scientific and engineering disciplines, owing to their outstanding performance in diverse applications. Despite this empirical success, the theoretical foundations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zhen Qin , Jinxin Zhou , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu

Current deep learning adaptive optimizer methods adjust the step magnitude of parameter updates by altering the effective learning rate used by each parameter. Motivated by the known inverse relation between batch size and learning rate on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Cristian Simionescu , George Stoica , Robert Herscovici

We propose a new per-layer adaptive step-size procedure for stochastic first-order optimization methods for minimizing empirical loss functions in deep learning, eliminating the need for the user to tune the learning rate (LR). The proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Achraf Bahamou , Donald Goldfarb

Deep neural networks have been used in various machine learning applications and achieved tremendous empirical successes. However, training deep neural networks is a challenging task. Many alternatives have been proposed in place of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Yeonjong Shin

Recently, researchers observed that gradient descent for deep neural networks operates in an ``edge-of-stability'' (EoS) regime: the sharpness (maximum eigenvalue of the Hessian) is often larger than stability threshold $2/\eta$ (where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Xingyu Zhu , Zixuan Wang , Xiang Wang , Mo Zhou , Rong Ge