Related papers: Distributed Gradient Descent: Nonconvergence to Sa…
In several experimental reports on nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was observed to prefer minimizers with flat basins in comparison to more deterministic methods, yet there is very…
Characterizing and understanding the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) around saddle points remains an open problem. We first show that saddle points in neural networks can be divided into two types, among which the Type-II…
The first order condition of the constrained minimization problem leads to a saddle point problem. A multigrid method using a multiplicative Schwarz smoother for saddle point problems can thus be interpreted as a successive subspace…
Most algorithms for solving optimization problems or finding saddle points of convex-concave functions are fixed-point algorithms. In this work we consider the generic problem of finding a fixed point of an average of operators, or an…
Recent years have seen a growing interest in understanding deep neural networks from an optimization perspective. It is understood now that converging to low-cost local minima is sufficient for such models to become effective in practice.…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
We consider distributed optimization under communication constraints for training deep learning models. We propose a new algorithm, whose parameter updates rely on two forces: a regular gradient step, and a corrective direction dictated by…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) provides a simple and efficient way to solve a broad range of machine learning problems. Here, we focus on distribution regression (DR), involving two stages of sampling: Firstly, we regress from…
In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm, called Directed-Distributed Gradient Descent (D-DGD), to solve multi-agent optimization problems over directed graphs. Existing algorithms mostly deal with similar problems under the…
Efficient computation of min-max problems is a central question in optimization, learning, games, and controls. Arguably the most natural algorithm is gradient-descent-ascent (GDA). However, since the 1970s, conventional wisdom has argued…
When using stochastic gradient descent to solve large-scale machine learning problems, a common practice of data processing is to shuffle the training data, partition the data across multiple machines if needed, and then perform several…
Loss functions with non-isolated minima have emerged in several machine learning problems, creating a gap between theory and practice. In this paper, we formulate a new type of local convexity condition that is suitable to describe the…
We study the gradient descent (GD) dynamics of a depth-2 linear neural network with a single input and output. We show that GD converges at an explicit linear rate to a global minimum of the training loss, even with a large stepsize --…
We study non-smooth stochastic decentralized optimization problems over time-varying networks, where objective functions are distributed across nodes and network connections may intermittently appear or break. Specifically, we consider two…
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…
Gradient Descent (GD) is a powerful workhorse of modern machine learning thanks to its scalability and efficiency in high-dimensional spaces. Its ability to find local minimisers is only guaranteed for losses with Lipschitz gradients, where…
Gradient Descent (GD) is a ubiquitous algorithm for finding the optimal solution to an optimization problem. For reduced computational complexity, the optimal solution $\mathrm{x^*}$ of the optimization problem must be attained in a minimum…
We analyze the convergence of a nonlocal gradient descent method for minimizing a class of high-dimensional non-convex functions, where a directional Gaussian smoothing (DGS) is proposed to define the nonlocal gradient (also referred to as…
In this work, we consider the problem of a network of agents collectively minimizing a sum of convex functions. The agents in our setting can only access their local objective functions and exchange information with their immediate…