Related papers: Choosing the Sample with Lowest Loss makes SGD Rob…
In view of a direct and simple improvement of vanilla SGD, this paper presents a fine-tuning of its step-sizes in the mini-batch case. For doing so, one estimates curvature, based on a local quadratic model and using only noisy gradient…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
Bayesian computation plays an important role in modern machine learning and statistics to reason about uncertainty. A key computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to develop efficient techniques to approximate, or draw samples from…
We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…
Stochastic optimization lies at the heart of machine learning, and its cornerstone is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a method introduced over 60 years ago. The last 8 years have seen an exciting new development: variance reduction (VR)…
We consider the setting where a master wants to run a distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm on $n$ workers, each having a subset of the data. Distributed SGD may suffer from the effect of stragglers, i.e., slow or…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm has been widely used in statistical estimation for large-scale data due to its computational and memory efficiency. While most existing works focus on the convergence of the objective function…
We propose a general yet simple theorem describing the convergence of SGD under the arbitrary sampling paradigm. Our theorem describes the convergence of an infinite array of variants of SGD, each of which is associated with a specific…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a central tool in machine learning. We prove that SGD converges to zero loss, even with a fixed (non-vanishing) learning rate - in the special case of homogeneous linear classifiers with smooth monotone…
We develop a novel and single-loop variance-reduced algorithm to solve a class of stochastic nonconvex-convex minimax problems involving a nonconvex-linear objective function, which has various applications in different fields such as…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…
Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…
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…
In this paper we study the problem of minimizing the average of a large number ($n$) of smooth convex loss functions. We propose a new method, S2GD (Semi-Stochastic Gradient Descent), which runs for one or several epochs in each of which a…
In this paper, we explore techniques centered around periodic sampling of model weights that provide convergence improvements on gradient update methods (vanilla \acs{SGD}, Momentum, Adam) for a variety of vision problems (classification,…
Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex…
We consider the setting where a master wants to run a distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm on $n$ workers each having a subset of the data. Distributed SGD may suffer from the effect of stragglers, i.e., slow or…
Sampling from an unnormalized target distribution is an essential problem with many applications in probabilistic inference. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful method that iteratively updates a set of…
The representation of functions by artificial neural networks depends on a large number of parameters in a non-linear fashion. Suitable parameters of these are found by minimizing a 'loss functional', typically by stochastic gradient…