Related papers: Overparameterized Nonlinear Learning: Gradient Des…
Neural network optimization remains one of the most consequential yet poorly understood challenges in modern AI research, where improvements in training algorithms can lead to enhanced feature learning in foundation models,…
One of the mysteries in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies…
A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…
Neural networks are trained by optimizing multi-dimensional sets of fitting parameters on non-convex loss landscapes. Low-loss regions of the landscapes correspond to the parameter sets that perform well on the training data. A key issue in…
Most modern learning problems are highly overparameterized, meaning that there are many more parameters than the number of training data points, and as a result, the training loss may have infinitely many global minima (parameter vectors…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been found to be surprisingly effective in training a variety of deep neural networks. However, there is still a lack of understanding on how and why SGD can train these complex networks towards a…
Understanding the algorithmic bias of \emph{stochastic gradient descent} (SGD) is one of the key challenges in modern machine learning and deep learning theory. Most of the existing works, however, focus on \emph{very small or even…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…
Neural networks are usually trained by some form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD)). A number of strategies are in common use intended to improve SGD optimization, such as learning rate schedules, momentum, and batching. These are…
Understanding the implicit bias of training algorithms is of crucial importance in order to explain the success of overparametrised neural networks. In this paper, we study the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent over diagonal linear…
The convergence of GD and SGD when training mildly parameterized neural networks starting from random initialization is studied. For a broad range of models and loss functions, including the most commonly used square loss and cross entropy…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is almost ubiquitously used for training non-convex optimization tasks. Recently, a hypothesis proposed by Keskar et al. [2017] that large batch methods tend to converge to sharp minimizers has received…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated dominating performance in many fields; since AlexNet, networks used in practice are going wider and deeper. On the theoretical side, a long line of works has been focusing on training neural…
Stochastic descent methods (of the gradient and mirror varieties) have become increasingly popular in optimization. In fact, it is now widely recognized that the success of deep learning is not only due to the special deep architecture of…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has proven to be remarkably effective in optimizing deep neural networks that employ ever-larger numbers of parameters. Yet, improving the efficiency of large-scale optimization remains a vital and highly…
The loss surface of an overparameterized neural network (NN) possesses many global minima of zero training error. We explain how common variants of the standard NN training procedure change the minimizer obtained. First, we make explicit…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…
Neural networks trained via gradient descent with random initialization and without any regularization enjoy good generalization performance in practice despite being highly overparametrized. A promising direction to explain this phenomenon…