Related papers: The Geometry of Sign Gradient Descent
Adaptive optimization methods (such as Adam) play a major role in LLM pretraining, significantly outperforming Gradient Descent (GD). Recent studies have proposed new smoothness assumptions on the loss function to explain the advantages of…
Communication has been seen as a significant bottleneck in industrial applications over large-scale networks. To alleviate the communication burden, sign-based optimization algorithms have gained popularity recently in both industrial and…
Transformers are difficult to optimize with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and largely rely on adaptive optimizers such as Adam. Despite their empirical success, the reasons behind Adam's superior performance over SGD remain poorly…
Various gradient compression schemes have been proposed to mitigate the communication cost in distributed training of large scale machine learning models. Sign-based methods, such as signSGD, have recently been gaining popularity because of…
Sign Gradient Descent (SignGD) is a simple yet robust optimization method, widely used in machine learning for its resilience to gradient noise and compatibility with low-precision computations. While its empirical performance is well…
Neural networks trained with standard objectives exhibit behaviors characteristic of probabilistic inference: soft clustering, prototype specialization, and Bayesian uncertainty tracking. These phenomena appear across architectures -- in…
Stochastic descent methods (of the gradient and mirror varieties) have become increasingly popular in optimization. In fact, it is now widely recognized that the success of deep learning is not only due to the special deep architecture of…
An influential line of recent work has focused on the generalization properties of unregularized gradient-based learning procedures applied to separable linear classification with exponentially-tailed loss functions. The ability of such…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and adaptive gradient methods, such as Adam and RMSProp, have been widely used in training deep neural networks. We empirically show that while the difference between the standard generalization performance…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) stands as a cornerstone optimization algorithm with proven real-world empirical successes but relatively limited theoretical understanding. Recent research has illuminated a key factor contributing to its…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…
Adam outperforms SGD when training language models. Yet this advantage is not well-understood theoretically -- previous convergence analysis for Adam and SGD mainly focuses on the number of steps $T$ and is already minimax-optimal in…
The simplicity of gradient descent (GD) made it the default method for training ever-deeper and complex neural networks. Both loss functions and architectures are often explicitly tuned to be amenable to this basic local optimization. In…
The ADAM optimizer is exceedingly popular in the deep learning community. Often it works very well, sometimes it doesn't. Why? We interpret ADAM as a combination of two aspects: for each weight, the update direction is determined by the…
Traditional analyses in non-convex optimization typically rely on the smoothness assumption, namely requiring the gradients to be Lipschitz. However, recent evidence shows that this smoothness condition does not capture the properties of…
How does the choice of optimization algorithm shape a model's ability to learn features? To address this question for steepest descent methods --including sign descent, which is closely related to Adam --we introduce steepest mirror flows…
We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…
The gradient descent (GD) method -- is a fundamental and likely the most popular optimization algorithm in machine learning (ML), with a history traced back to a paper in 1847 (Cauchy, 1847). It was studied under various assumptions,…
Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…
Traditional analyses of gradient descent optimization show that, when the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian - often referred to as the sharpness - is below a critical learning-rate threshold, then training is 'stable' and training loss…