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Many tasks in machine learning and signal processing can be solved by minimizing a convex function of a measure. This includes sparse spikes deconvolution or training a neural network with a single hidden layer. For these problems, we study…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-30 Lenaic Chizat , Francis Bach

When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi , Sebastian Stich

We analyze recurrent neural networks with diagonal hidden-to-hidden weight matrices, trained with gradient descent in the supervised learning setting, and prove that gradient descent can achieve optimality \emph{without} massive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Semih Cayci , Atilla Eryilmaz

In this note, we observe the behavior of gradient flow and discrete and noisy gradient descent in some simple settings. It is commonly noted that addition of noise to gradient descent can affect the trajectory of gradient descent. Here, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-19 Y. Cooper

This paper investigates the impact of multiscale data on machine learning algorithms, particularly in the context of deep learning. A dataset is multiscale if its distribution shows large variations in scale across different directions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Juncai He , Liangchen Liu , Yen-Hsi Richard Tsai

We explore conditions for when the gradient of a deep declarative node can be approximated by ignoring constraint terms and still result in a descent direction for the global loss function. This has important practical application when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Stephen Gould , Ming Xu , Zhiwei Xu , Yanbin Liu

A vast literature on convergence guarantees for gradient descent and derived methods exists at the moment. However, a simple practical situation remains unexplored: when a fixed step size is used, can we expect gradient descent to converge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Alexandru Crăciun , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar

Classical optimisation theory guarantees monotonic objective decrease for gradient descent (GD) when employed in a small step size, or ``stable", regime. In contrast, gradient descent on neural networks is frequently performed in a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Lachlan Ewen MacDonald , Hancheng Min , Leandro Palma , Salma Tarmoun , Ziqing Xu , René Vidal

As deep learning models and datasets rapidly scale up, network training is extremely time-consuming and resource-costly. Instead of training on the entire dataset, learning with a small synthetic dataset becomes an efficient solution.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Zixuan Jiang , Jiaqi Gu , Mingjie Liu , David Z. Pan

Traditional analyses of gradient descent show that when the largest eigenvalue of the Hessian, also known as the sharpness $S(\theta)$, is bounded by $2/\eta$, training is "stable" and the training loss decreases monotonically. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-12 Alex Damian , Eshaan Nichani , Jason D. Lee

The success of deep learning in high-dimensional settings is often attributed to the presence of low-dimensional structure in real-world data. While standard theoretical models typically assume that this structure lies in the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Elisabetta Cornacchia , Laurent Massoulié

Natural gradient descent is a principled method for adapting the parameters of a statistical model on-line using an underlying Riemannian parameter space to redefine the direction of steepest descent. The algorithm is examined via methods…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2009-10-31 Magnus Rattray , David Saad

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based training of neural networks with a large learning rate or a small batch-size typically ends in well-generalizing, flat regions of the weight space, as indicated by small eigenvalues of the Hessian of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-24 Stanisław Jastrzębski , Zachary Kenton , Nicolas Ballas , Asja Fischer , Yoshua Bengio , Amos Storkey

Previous works on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) often focus on its success. In this work, we construct worst-case optimization problems illustrating that, when not in the regimes that the previous works often assume, SGD can exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Liu Ziyin , Botao Li , James B. Simon , Masahito Ueda

Gradient descent typically converges to a single minimum of the training loss without mechanisms to explore alternative minima that may generalize better. Searching for diverse minima directly in high-dimensional parameter space is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Akshay Vegesna , Samip Dahal

In gradient descent, changing how we parametrize the model can lead to drastically different optimization trajectories, giving rise to a surprising range of meaningful inductive biases: identifying sparse classifiers or reconstructing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-24 Anna Kerekes , Anna Mészáros , Ferenc Huszár

A main puzzle of deep networks revolves around the absence of overfitting despite large overparametrization and despite the large capacity demonstrated by zero training error on randomly labeled data. In this note, we show that the dynamics…

Fine-tuning pretrained models has become a standard approach to adapting pretrained knowledge to improve the accuracy on new sparse, imbalance datasets. However, issues arise when optimization falls into a collapsed state, where the model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Nghia Bui , Lijing Wang

Stochastic gradient descent is an optimisation method that combines classical gradient descent with random subsampling within the target functional. In this work, we introduce the stochastic gradient process as a continuous-time…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-05-11 Jonas Latz

Neural networks trained with standard objectives exhibit behaviors characteristic of probabilistic inference: soft clustering, prototype specialization, and Bayesian uncertainty tracking. These phenomena appear across architectures -- in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Alan Oursland