Related papers: Simplified Gentlest Ascent Dynamics for Saddle Poi…

A method for locating first order saddle points on the energy surface of a magnetic system is described and several applications presented where the mechanism of various magnetic transitions is identified. The starting point for the…

Stochastic nested optimization, including stochastic compositional, min-max and bilevel optimization, is gaining popularity in many machine learning applications. While the three problems share the nested structure, existing works often…

Minimax problems, such as generative adversarial network, adversarial training, and fair training, are widely solved by a multi-step gradient descent ascent (MGDA) method in practice. However, its convergence guarantee is limited. In this…

Adaptive gradient methods have attracted much attention of machine learning communities due to the high efficiency. However their acceleration effect in practice, especially in neural network training, is hard to analyze, theoretically. The…

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…

This paper studies properties of fixed points of generalised Extra-gradient (GEG) algorithms applied to min-max problems. We discuss connections between saddle points of the objective function of the min-max problem and GEG fixed points. We…

Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) is one of the most prominent algorithms for solving min-max optimization and variational inequalities problems (VIP) appearing in various machine learning tasks. The success of the method led to…

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…

Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear. Here, by analyzing SGD learning dynamics, we identify a nonequilibrium…

We propose a mini-batching scheme for improving the theoretical complexity and practical performance of semi-stochastic gradient descent applied to the problem of minimizing a strongly convex composite function represented as the sum of an…

We present a theoretical analysis of some popular adaptive Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods in the small learning rate regime. Using the stochastic modified equations framework introduced by Li et al., we derive effective…

We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…

Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam), which combines Adaptive Learning Rate and Momentum, would be the most popular stochastic optimizer for accelerating the training of deep neural networks. However, it is empirically known that Adam often…

We propose mS2GD: a method incorporating a mini-batching scheme for improving the theoretical complexity and practical performance of semi-stochastic gradient descent (S2GD). We consider the problem of minimizing a strongly convex function…

Epoch gradient descent method (a.k.a. Epoch-GD) proposed by Hazan and Kale (2011) was deemed a breakthrough for stochastic strongly convex minimization, which achieves the optimal convergence rate of $O(1/T)$ with $T$ iterative updates for…

Without randomization, escaping the saddle points of $f \colon \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}$ requires at least $\Omega(d)$ pieces of information about $f$ (values, gradients, Hessian-vector products). With randomization, this can be reduced…

Recently, saddle point problems have received much attention due to their powerful modeling capability for a lot of problems from diverse domains. Applications of these problems occur in many applied areas, such as robust optimization,…

Gradient descent algorithm is the most utilized method when optimizing machine learning issues. However, there exists many local minimums and saddle points in the loss function, especially for high dimensional non-convex optimization…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…