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Despite the growing prominence of generative adversarial networks (GANs), optimization in GANs is still a poorly understood topic. In this paper, we analyze the "gradient descent" form of GAN optimization i.e., the natural setting where we…
The high-index saddle dynamics (HiSD) method provides a powerful framework for finding saddle points and constructing solution landscapes. While originally derived for nondegenerate critical points, HiSD has demonstrated empirical success…
While Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient Descent (AGD) efficiently solves constrained problems when the constraint set $X \subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ is simple and easy to project onto, it remains an open question whether function-constrained…
Gradient normalization and soft clipping are two popular techniques for tackling instability issues and improving convergence of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum. In this article, we study these types of methods through the…
Many problems encountered in science and engineering can be formulated as estimating a low-rank object (e.g., matrices and tensors) from incomplete, and possibly corrupted, linear measurements. Through the lens of matrix and tensor…
We present a new microscopic ODE-based model for pedestrian dynamics: the Gradient Navigation Model. The model uses a superposition of gradients of distance functions to directly change the direction of the velocity vector. The velocity is…
Saddle dynamics is a time continuous dynamics to efficiently compute the any-index saddle points and construct the solution landscape. In practice, the saddle dynamics needs to be discretized for numerical computations, while the…
Even for the gradient descent (GD) method applied to neural network training, understanding its optimization dynamics, including convergence rate, iterate trajectories, function value oscillations, and especially its implicit acceleration,…
Adaptive methods such as Adam and RMSProp are widely used in deep learning but are not well understood. In this paper, we seek a crisp, clean and precise characterization of their behavior in nonconvex settings. To this end, we first…
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…
Nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization has received intense attention over the last decade due to its broad applications in machine learning. Most existing algorithms rely on one-sided information, such as the convexity (resp. concavity)…
Efficient computation of min-max problems is a central question in optimization, learning, games, and controls. Arguably the most natural algorithm is gradient-descent-ascent (GDA). However, since the 1970s, conventional wisdom has argued…
A popular method of force-directed graph drawing is multidimensional scaling using graph-theoretic distances as input. We present an algorithm to minimize its energy function, known as stress, by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to…
This paper presents a simple primal dual method named DPD which is a flexible framework for a class of saddle point problem with or without strongly convex component. The presented method has linearized version named LDPD and exact version…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…
We analyze stochastic gradient descent for optimizing non-convex functions. In many cases for non-convex functions the goal is to find a reasonable local minimum, and the main concern is that gradient updates are trapped in saddle points.…
The rapid progress in machine learning in recent years has been based on a highly productive connection to gradient-based optimization. Further progress hinges in part on a shift in focus from pattern recognition to decision-making and…
In this work, we reveal a strong implicit bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that drives overly expressive networks to much simpler subnetworks, thereby dramatically reducing the number of independent parameters, and improving…
Alternating gradient-descent-ascent (AltGDA) is an optimization algorithm that has been widely used for model training in various machine learning applications, which aims to solve a nonconvex minimax optimization problem. However, the…
Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is a recently proposed training method that seeks to find flat minima in deep learning, resulting in state-of-the-art performance across various domains. Instead of minimizing the loss of the current…