Related papers: Adaptive Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics: Ta…
Loss functions with a large number of saddle points are one of the major obstacles for training modern machine learning models efficiently. First-order methods such as gradient descent are usually the methods of choice for training machine…
Stochastic-gradient-based optimization has been a core enabling methodology in applications to large-scale problems in machine learning and related areas. Despite the progress, the gap between theory and practice remains significant, with…
The local gradient points to the direction of the steepest slope in an infinitesimal neighborhood. An optimizer guided by the local gradient is often trapped in local optima when the loss landscape is multi-modal. A directional Gaussian…
In reinforcement learning (RL), offline learning decoupled learning from data collection and is useful in dealing with exploration-exploitation tradeoff and enables data reuse in many applications. In this work, we study two offline…
Motivated by broad applications in machine learning, we study the popular accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) algorithm for solving (possibly nonconvex) optimization problems. We characterize the finite-time performance of this…
In recent years, even though Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are well-known for training neural networks, it suffers from limitations such as the lack of theoretical guarantees, vanishing gradients, and excessive…
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are typically highly nonlinear systems which are finely tuned via the optimization of their associated, non-convex loss functions. In many cases, the gradient of any such loss function has superlinear…
In this paper we consider solving saddle point problems using two variants of Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithms, Extra-gradient (EG) and Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent (OGDA) methods. We show that both of these algorithms admit a…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely used algorithm in machine learning, particularly for neural network training. Recent studies on SGD for canonical quadratic optimization or linear regression show it attains well generalization…
We consider distributed optimization under communication constraints for training deep learning models. We propose a new algorithm, whose parameter updates rely on two forces: a regular gradient step, and a corrective direction dictated by…
Stochastic gradient MCMC methods, such as stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD), employ fast but noisy gradient estimates to enable large-scale posterior sampling. Although we can easily extend SGLD to distributed settings, it…
Adaptive optimization methods, which perform local optimization with a metric constructed from the history of iterates, are becoming increasingly popular for training deep neural networks. Examples include AdaGrad, RMSProp, and Adam. We…
This paper shows that a perturbed form of gradient descent converges to a second-order stationary point in a number iterations which depends only poly-logarithmically on dimension (i.e., it is almost "dimension-free"). The convergence rate…
In this paper, we present GASG21 (Grassmannian Adaptive Stochastic Gradient for $L_{2,1}$ norm minimization), an adaptive stochastic gradient algorithm to robustly recover the low-rank subspace from a large matrix. In the presence of column…
We propose a stochastic optimization method for minimizing loss functions, expressed as an expected value, that adaptively controls the batch size used in the computation of gradient approximations and the step size used to move along such…
As one of the most fundamental stochastic optimization algorithms, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been intensively developed and extensively applied in machine learning in the past decade. There have been some modified SGD-type…
In this paper, we provide some analysis on the asymptotic escape of strict saddles in manifold optimization using the projected gradient descent (PGD) algorithm. One of our main contributions is that we extend the current analysis to…
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 Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) algorithms, which add noise to the classic gradient descent, are known to improve the training of neural networks in some cases where the neural network is very deep. In this paper we…
When scaling distributed training, the communication overhead is often the bottleneck. In this paper, we propose a novel SGD variant with reduced communication and adaptive learning rates. We prove the convergence of the proposed algorithm…