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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…
We present a theoretical analysis of stochastic optimization methods in terms of their sensitivity with respect to the step size. We identify a key quantity that, for each method, describes how the performance degrades as the step size…
In recent years, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) based techniques has become the standard tools for training neural networks. However, formal theoretical understanding of why SGD can train neural networks in practice is largely missing.…
Gradient clipping is commonly used in training deep neural networks partly due to its practicability in relieving the exploding gradient problem. Recently, \citet{zhang2019gradient} show that clipped (stochastic) Gradient Descent (GD)…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path of the…
Stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) and its variants have been the dominating optimization methods in machine learning. Compared to SGD with small-batch training, SGD with large-batch training can better utilize the computational power of…
Algorithm-dependent generalization error bounds are central to statistical learning theory. A learning algorithm may use a large hypothesis space, but the limited number of iterations controls its model capacity and generalization error.…
The success of deep learning has led to a rising interest in the generalization property of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method, and stability is one popular approach to study it. Existing works based on stability have studied…
Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex…
In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely adopted iterative method for optimizing differentiable objective functions. In this paper, we propose and discuss a novel approach to scale up SGD in applications involving non-convex functions…
We study gradient descent (GD) with a constant stepsize for $\ell_2$-regularized logistic regression with linearly separable data. Classical theory suggests small stepsizes to ensure monotonic reduction of the optimization objective,…
The learning rate is perhaps the single most important parameter in the training of neural networks and, more broadly, in stochastic (nonconvex) optimization. Accordingly, there are numerous effective, but poorly understood, techniques for…
In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…
While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we…
Existing research shows that the batch size can seriously affect the performance of stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) based learning, including training speed and generalization ability. A larger batch size typically results in less…
Stochastic gradient-based descent (SGD), have long been central to training large language models (LLMs). However, their effectiveness is increasingly being questioned, particularly in large-scale applications where empirical evidence…
Distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has attracted considerable recent attention due to its potential for scaling computational resources, reducing training time, and helping protect user privacy in machine learning. However, the…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a workhorse algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems in data science and machine learning. Understanding the convergence of SGD is hence of fundamental importance. In this work we examine…