Related papers: Replica Exchange for Non-Convex Optimization
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been found to be surprisingly effective in training a variety of deep neural networks. However, there is still a lack of understanding on how and why SGD can train these complex networks towards a…
Unlike nonconvex optimization, where gradient descent is guaranteed to converge to a local optimizer, algorithms for nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization can have topologically different solution paths: sometimes converging to a…
In this paper, we examine the time it takes for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to reach the global minimum of a general, non-convex loss function. We approach this question through the lens of randomly perturbed dynamical systems and…
We consider nonconvex-concave minimax problems, $\min_{\mathbf{x}} \max_{\mathbf{y} \in \mathcal{Y}} f(\mathbf{x}, \mathbf{y})$, where $f$ is nonconvex in $\mathbf{x}$ but concave in $\mathbf{y}$ and $\mathcal{Y}$ is a convex and bounded…
This paper considers a distributed stochastic strongly convex optimization, where agents connected over a network aim to cooperatively minimize the average of all agents' local cost functions. Due to the stochasticity of gradient estimation…
Training neural networks requires optimizing a loss function that may be highly irregular, and in particular neither convex nor smooth. Popular training algorithms are based on stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for which…
In machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely deployed to train models using highly non-convex objectives with equally complex noise models. Unfortunately, SGD theory often makes restrictive assumptions that fail to…
A scaled conjugate gradient method that accelerates existing adaptive methods utilizing stochastic gradients is proposed for solving nonconvex optimization problems with deep neural networks. It is shown theoretically that, whether with…
It is well known that adding any skew symmetric matrix to the gradient of Langevin dynamics algorithm results in a non-reversible diffusion with improved convergence rate. This paper presents a gradient algorithm to adaptively optimize the…
Nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization has received intense attention over the last decade due to its broad applications in machine learning. Most existing algorithms rely on one-sided information, such as the convexity (resp. concavity)…
Stochastic gradient descent-ascent (SGDA) is one of the main workhorses for solving finite-sum minimax optimization problems. Most practical implementations of SGDA randomly reshuffle components and sequentially use them (i.e.,…
We study diffusion and consensus based optimization of a sum of unknown convex objective functions over distributed networks. The only access to these functions is through stochastic gradient oracles, each of which is only available at a…
The behavior of the gradient descent (GD) algorithm is analyzed for a deep neural network model with skip-connections. It is proved that in the over-parametrized regime, for a suitable initialization, with high probability GD can find a…
We introduce a new Swarm-Based Gradient Descent (SBGD) method for non-convex optimization. The swarm consists of agents, each is identified with a position, ${\mathbf x}$, and mass, $m$. The key to their dynamics is communication: masses…
We study gradient descent (GD) dynamics on logistic regression problems with large, constant step sizes. For linearly-separable data, it is known that GD converges to the minimizer with arbitrarily large step sizes, a property which no…
We study the global convergence of generative adversarial imitation learning for linear quadratic regulators, which is posed as minimax optimization. To address the challenges arising from non-convex-concave geometry, we analyze the…
Fitting a function by using linear combinations of a large number $N$ of `simple' components is one of the most fruitful ideas in statistical learning. This idea lies at the core of a variety of methods, from two-layer neural networks to…
In this paper, we explore a general Aggregated Gradient Langevin Dynamics framework (AGLD) for the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. We investigate the nonasymptotic convergence of AGLD with a unified analysis for different data…
Modern supervised learning techniques, particularly those using deep nets, involve fitting high dimensional labelled data sets with functions containing very large numbers of parameters. Much of this work is empirical. Interesting phenomena…
In this paper, we study a large-scale multi-agent minimax optimization problem, which models many interesting applications in statistical learning and game theory, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The overall objective is a…