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In this paper, we aim at providing an introduction to the gradient descent based optimization algorithms for learning deep neural network models. Deep learning models involving multiple nonlinear projection layers are very challenging to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Jiawei Zhang

Gradient-based learning in multi-layer neural networks displays a number of striking features. In particular, the decrease rate of empirical risk is non-monotone even after averaging over large batches. Long plateaus in which one observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Raphaël Berthier , Andrea Montanari , Kangjie Zhou

This paper considers the analysis of continuous time gradient-based optimization algorithms through the lens of nonlinear contraction theory. It demonstrates that in the case of a time-invariant objective, most elementary results on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-23 Patrick M. Wensing , Jean-Jacques E. Slotine

Deep learning models are increasingly popular in many machine learning applications where the training data may contain sensitive information. To provide formal and rigorous privacy guarantee, many learning systems now incorporate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Xiangyi Chen , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Mingyi Hong

Although gradient descent (GD) almost always escapes saddle points asymptotically [Lee et al., 2016], this paper shows that even with fairly natural random initialization schemes and non-pathological functions, GD can be significantly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-07 Simon S. Du , Chi Jin , Jason D. Lee , Michael I. Jordan , Barnabas Poczos , Aarti Singh

One of the most important parts of Artificial Neural Networks is minimizing the loss functions which tells us how good or bad our model is. To minimize these losses we need to tune the weights and biases. Also to calculate the minimum value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Kaustubh Yadav

Recent empirical and theoretical work has shown that the dynamics of the large eigenvalues of the training loss Hessian have some remarkably robust features across models and datasets in the full batch regime. There is often an early period…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Atish Agarwala , Jeffrey Pennington

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Dravyansh Sharma

We prove that stochastic gradient descent efficiently converges to the global optimizer of the maximum likelihood objective of an unknown linear time-invariant dynamical system from a sequence of noisy observations generated by the system.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-12 Moritz Hardt , Tengyu Ma , Benjamin Recht

Despite the fact that the loss functions of deep neural networks are highly non-convex, gradient-based optimization algorithms converge to approximately the same performance from many random initial points. One thread of work has focused on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Charles G. Frye , James Simon , Neha S. Wadia , Andrew Ligeralde , Michael R. DeWeese , Kristofer E. Bouchard

We consider gradient descent like algorithms for Support Vector Machine (SVM) training when the data is in relational form. The gradient of the SVM objective can not be efficiently computed by known techniques as it suffers from the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-05-13 Mahmoud Abo-Khamis , Sungjin Im , Benjamin Moseley , Kirk Pruhs , Alireza Samadian

This paper revisits the so-called vanishing gradient phenomenon, which commonly occurs in deep randomly initialized neural networks. Leveraging an in-depth analysis of neural chains, we first show that vanishing gradients cannot be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Antonio Orvieto , Jonas Kohler , Dario Pavllo , Thomas Hofmann , Aurelien Lucchi

Gradient descent is a popular algorithm in optimization, and its performance in convex settings is mostly well understood. In non-convex settings, it has been shown that gradient descent is able to escape saddle points asymptotically and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-17 Shiliang Zuo

Most stochastic gradient descent algorithms can optimize neural networks that are sub-differentiable in their parameters; however, this implies that the neural network's activation function must exhibit a degree of continuity which limits…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Anastasis Kratsios , Behnoosh Zamanlooy

We study the training dynamics of shallow neural networks, in a two-timescale regime in which the stepsizes for the inner layer are much smaller than those for the outer layer. In this regime, we prove convergence of the gradient flow to a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-26 Pierre Marion , Raphaël Berthier

The random feature model exhibits a kind of resonance behavior when the number of parameters is close to the training sample size. This behavior is characterized by the appearance of large generalization gap, and is due to the occurrence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Chao Ma , Lei Wu , Weinan E

In this paper, we theoretically prove that gradient descent can find a global minimum of non-convex optimization of all layers for nonlinear deep neural networks of sizes commonly encountered in practice. The theory developed in this paper…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-18 Kenji Kawaguchi , Jiaoyang Huang

The remarkable capability of Transformers to do reasoning and few-shot learning, without any fine-tuning, is widely conjectured to stem from their ability to implicitly simulate a multi-step algorithms -- such as gradient descent -- with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Khashayar Gatmiry , Nikunj Saunshi , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka , Sanjiv Kumar

We study a continuous-time approximation of the stochastic gradient descent process for minimizing the population expected loss in learning problems. The main results establish general sufficient conditions for the convergence, extending…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Gabor Lugosi , Eulalia Nualart

Continual learning, the ability of a model to adapt to an ongoing sequence of tasks without forgetting earlier ones, is a central goal of artificial intelligence. To better understand its underlying mechanisms, we study the limitations of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Hossein Taheri , Avishek Ghosh , Arya Mazumdar