Related papers: A Deterministic Gradient-Based Approach to Avoid S…
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…
Gradient-related first-order methods have become the workhorse of large-scale numerical optimization problems. Many of these problems involve nonconvex objective functions with multiple saddle points, which necessitates an understanding of…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
Primal-dual gradient dynamics that find saddle points of a Lagrangian have been widely employed for handling constrained optimization problems. Building on existing methods, we extend the augmented primal-dual gradient dynamics (Aug-PDGD)…
Dynamical systems theory has recently been applied in optimization to prove that gradient descent algorithms bypass so-called strict saddle points of the loss function. However, in many modern machine learning applications, the required…
In this paper we consider solving saddle point problems using two variants of Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithms, Extra-gradient (EG) and Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent (OGDA) methods. We show that both of these algorithms admit a…
We introduce a hybrid "Modified Genetic Algorithm-Multilevel Stochastic Gradient Descent" (MGA-MSGD) training algorithm that considerably improves accuracy and efficiency of solving 3D mechanical problems described, in strong-form, by PDEs…
The paper considers distributed gradient flow (DGF) for multi-agent nonconvex optimization. DGF is a continuous-time approximation of distributed gradient descent that is often easier to study than its discrete-time counterpart. The paper…
We prove that various stochastic gradient descent methods, including the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), stochastic heavy-ball (SHB), and stochastic Nesterov's accelerated gradient (SNAG) methods, almost surely avoid any strict saddle…
We study generalized smoothness in nonconvex optimization, focusing on $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness and anisotropic smoothness. The former was empirically derived from practical neural network training examples, while the latter arises naturally…
We develop two compression based stochastic gradient algorithms to solve a class of non-smooth strongly convex-strongly concave saddle-point problems in a decentralized setting (without a central server). Our first algorithm is a…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…
We present local discriminative Gaussian (LDG) dimensionality reduction, a supervised dimensionality reduction technique for classification. The LDG objective function is an approximation to the leave-one-out training error of a local…
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…
Gradient descent is the primary workhorse for optimizing large-scale problems in machine learning. However, its performance is highly sensitive to the choice of the learning rate. A key limitation of gradient descent is its lack of natural…
Gradient-based optimization methods are the most popular choice for finding local optima for classical minimization and saddle point problems. Here, we highlight a systemic issue of gradient dynamics that arise for saddle point problems,…
Interpreting gradient methods as fixed-point iterations, we provide a detailed analysis of those methods for minimizing convex objective functions. Due to their conceptual and algorithmic simplicity, gradient methods are widely used in…
LLM training is resource-intensive. Quantized training improves computational and memory efficiency but introduces quantization noise, which can hinder convergence and degrade model accuracy. Stochastic Rounding (SR) has emerged as a…
Saddle point problems, ubiquitous in optimization, extend beyond game theory to diverse domains like power networks and reinforcement learning. This paper presents novel approaches to tackle saddle point problem, with a focus on…
Many supervised learning tasks have intrinsic symmetries, such as translational and rotational symmetry in image classifications. These symmetries can be exploited to enhance performance. We formulate the symmetry constraints into a concise…