Related papers: The Complexity of Finding Stationary Points with S…
In this work, we study the iteration complexity of gradient methods for minimizing convex quadratic functions regularized by powers of Euclidean norms. We show that, due to the uniform convexity of the objective, gradient methods have…
We give a new separation result between the generalization performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and of full-batch gradient descent (GD) in the fundamental stochastic convex optimization model. While for SGD it is well-known that…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a prevalent optimization technique for large-scale distributed machine learning. While SGD computation can be efficiently divided between multiple machines, communication typically becomes a bottleneck…
In this paper, we investigate the theoretical properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for statistical inference in the context of nonconvex optimization problems, which have been relatively unexplored compared to convex settings.…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
This study investigates leveraging stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to learn operators between general Hilbert spaces. We propose weak and strong regularity conditions for the target operator to depict its intrinsic structure and…
Stochastic gradient method (SGM) has been popularly applied to solve optimization problems with objective that is stochastic or an average of many functions. Most existing works on SGMs assume that the underlying problem is unconstrained or…
Convergence detection of iterative stochastic optimization methods is of great practical interest. This paper considers stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate and momentum. We show that there exists a transient…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used algorithms for large scale optimization problems. While classical theoretical analysis of SGD for convex problems studies (suffix) \emph{averages} of iterates and obtains…
In non-smooth stochastic optimization, we establish the non-convergence of the stochastic subgradient descent (SGD) to the critical points recently called active strict saddles by Davis and Drusvyatskiy. Such points lie on a manifold $M$…
Stopping criteria for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods play important roles from enabling adaptive step size schemes to providing rigor for downstream analyses such as asymptotic inference. Unfortunately, current stopping criteria…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
This paper studies the problem of distributed stochastic optimization in an adversarial setting where, out of the $m$ machines which allegedly compute stochastic gradients every iteration, an $\alpha$-fraction are Byzantine, and can behave…
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
We consider the generalization error associated with stochastic gradient descent on a smooth convex function over a compact set. We show the first bound on the generalization error that vanishes when the number of iterations $T$ and the…
We address the problem of solving strongly convex and smooth minimization problems using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm with a constant step size. Previous works suggested to combine the Polyak-Ruppert averaging procedure with…
We establish lower bounds on the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points of smooth, non-convex high-dimensional functions using first-order methods. We prove that deterministic first-order methods, even applied to arbitrarily…
A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
We analyze the variance of stochastic gradients along negative curvature directions in certain non-convex machine learning models and show that stochastic gradients exhibit a strong component along these directions. Furthermore, we show…