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We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…
Recently, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants have become the dominant methods in the large-scale optimization of machine learning (ML) problems. A variety of strategies have been proposed for tuning the step sizes, ranging…
Large learning rates, when applied to gradient descent for nonconvex optimization, yield various implicit biases including the edge of stability (Cohen et al., 2021), balancing (Wang et al., 2022), and catapult (Lewkowycz et al., 2020).…
We reconsider the stochastic (sub)gradient approach to the unconstrained primal L1-SVM optimization. We observe that if the learning rate is inversely proportional to the number of steps, i.e., the number of times any training pattern is…
Even for the gradient descent (GD) method applied to neural network training, understanding its optimization dynamics, including convergence rate, iterate trajectories, function value oscillations, and especially its implicit acceleration,…
A generalized conditional gradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of them differentiable, is presented. This iterative method relies on two main ingredients: First, the minimization of a partially linearized…
Optimization problem, which is aimed at finding the global minimal value of a given cost function, is one of the central problem in science and engineering. Various numerical methods have been proposed to solve this problem, among which the…
Surprisingly, recent work has shown that gradient descent can be accelerated without using momentum -- just by judiciously choosing stepsizes. An open question raised by several papers is whether this phenomenon of stepsize-based…
In recent times, a variety of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have been proposed for optimal tracking problem of continuous time nonlinear systems with input constraints. Most of these algorithms are based on the notion of uniform…
We propose \textit{Meta-Regularization}, a novel approach for the adaptive choice of the learning rate in first-order gradient descent methods. Our approach modifies the objective function by adding a regularization term on the learning…
Machine unlearning in foundation models (e.g., language and vision transformers) is essential for privacy and safety; however, existing approaches are unstable and unreliable. A widely used strategy, the gradient difference method, applies…
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…
Machine learning models are often learned by minimising a loss function on the training data using a gradient descent algorithm. These models often suffer from overfitting, leading to a decline in predictive performance on unseen data. A…
Gradient descent algorithm is the most utilized method when optimizing machine learning issues. However, there exists many local minimums and saddle points in the loss function, especially for high dimensional non-convex optimization…
Meta-learning offers a principled framework leveraging \emph{task-invariant} priors from related tasks, with which \emph{task-specific} models can be fine-tuned on downstream tasks, even with limited data records. Gradient-based…
Consider the consensus problem of minimizing $f(x)=\sum_{i=1}^n f_i(x)$ where each $f_i$ is only known to one individual agent $i$ out of a connected network of $n$ agents. All the agents shall collaboratively solve this problem and obtain…
We introduce a general method for improving the convergence rate of gradient-based optimizers that is easy to implement and works well in practice. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in a range of optimization problems by…
While classic work in convex-concave min-max optimization relies on average-iterate convergence results, the emergence of nonconvex applications such as training Generative Adversarial Networks has led to renewed interest in last-iterate…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…
In this paper we study the convergence of online gradient descent algorithms in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs) without regularization. We establish a sufficient condition and a necessary condition for the convergence of excess…