Related papers: Escaping Saddle Points with Adaptive Gradient Meth…

Adaptive gradient algorithm (AdaGrad) and its variants, such as RMSProp, Adam, AMSGrad, etc, have been widely used in deep learning. Although these algorithms are faster in the early phase of training, their generalization performance is…

Despite the vast empirical evidence supporting the efficacy of adaptive optimization methods in deep learning, their theoretical understanding is far from complete. This work introduces novel SDEs for commonly used adaptive optimizers:…

The dynamic behavior of RMSprop and Adam algorithms is studied through a combination of careful numerical experiments and theoretical explanations. Three types of qualitative features are observed in the training loss curve: fast initial…

Most popular optimizers for deep learning can be broadly categorized as adaptive methods (e.g. Adam) and accelerated schemes (e.g. stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum). For many models such as convolutional neural networks…

Layer-wise preconditioning methods are a family of memory-efficient optimization algorithms that introduce preconditioners per axis of each layer's weight tensors. These methods have seen a recent resurgence, demonstrating impressive…

It is known that the standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method, as well as accelerated and adaptive SGD optimization methods such as the Adam optimizer fail to converge if the learning rates do not converge to zero (as,…

Stochastic Gradient Decent (SGD) is one of the core techniques behind the success of deep neural networks. The gradient provides information on the direction in which a function has the steepest rate of change. The main problem with basic…

Adaptive optimization algorithms, such as Adam and RMSprop, have shown better optimization performance than stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in some scenarios. However, recent studies show that they often lead to worse generalization…

We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…

This paper aims to clearly distinguish between Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum (SGDM) and Adam in terms of their convergence rates. We demonstrate that Adam achieves a faster convergence compared to SGDM under the condition of…

A commonly used heuristic in non-convex optimization is Normalized Gradient Descent (NGD) - a variant of gradient descent in which only the direction of the gradient is taken into account and its magnitude ignored. We analyze this heuristic…

In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…

In this paper, we study the convergence of the Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) algorithm under unconstrained non-convex smooth stochastic optimizations. Despite the widespread usage in machine learning areas, its theoretical properties…

Adversarial neural networks solve many important problems in data science, but are notoriously difficult to train. These difficulties come from the fact that optimal weights for adversarial nets correspond to saddle points, and not…

We study Stochastic Gradient Descent with AdaGrad stepsizes: a popular adaptive (self-tuning) method for first-order stochastic optimization. Despite being well studied, existing analyses of this method suffer from various shortcomings:…

Recently, the problem of local minima in very high dimensional non-convex optimization has been challenged and the problem of saddle points has been introduced. This paper introduces a dynamic type of normalization that forces the system to…

This paper studies a class of adaptive gradient based momentum algorithms that update the search directions and learning rates simultaneously using past gradients. This class, which we refer to as the "Adam-type", includes the popular…

A central challenge to using first-order methods for optimizing nonconvex problems is the presence of saddle points. First-order methods often get stuck at saddle points, greatly deteriorating their performance. Typically, to escape from…

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…

Training deep neural networks requires intricate initialization and careful selection of learning rates. The emergence of stochastic gradient optimization methods that use adaptive learning rates based on squared past gradients, e.g.,…