English
Related papers

Related papers: On Learning Rates and Schr\"odinger Operators

200 papers

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Dongruo Zhou , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

Learning rate schedules are ubiquitously used to speed up and improve optimisation. Many different policies have been introduced on an empirical basis, and theoretical analyses have been developed for convex settings. However, in many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Stéphane d'Ascoli , Maria Refinetti , Giulio Biroli

Neural networks are typically trained with a single learning rate across all layers. While recent empirical evidence suggests that assigning layer-specific learning rates can accelerate training, a principled understanding of the conditions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Sihan Zeng , Sujay Bhatt , Sumitra Ganesh

The performance of gradient-based optimization methods, such as standard gradient descent (GD), greatly depends on the choice of learning rate. However, it can require a non-trivial amount of user tuning effort to select an appropriate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Nikola Surjanovic , Alexandre Bouchard-Côté , Trevor Campbell

Arguably the biggest challenge in applying neural networks is tuning the hyperparameters, in particular the learning rate. The sensitivity to the learning rate is due to the reliance on backpropagation to train the network. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-08 Francois Fagan , Garud Iyengar

In this work, we investigate the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when training a single-neuron autoencoder with linear or ReLU activation on orthogonal data. We show that for this non-convex problem, randomly initialized SGD…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-08 Nikhil Ghosh , Spencer Frei , Wooseok Ha , Bin Yu

Stochastic gradient descent plays a fundamental role in nearly all applications of deep learning. However its ability to converge to a global minimum remains shrouded in mystery. In this paper we propose to study the behavior of the loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-02 Mark Sandler , Andrey Zhmoginov , Max Vladymyrov , Nolan Miller

We study the convergence of gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for training $L$-hidden-layer linear residual networks (ResNets). We prove that for training deep residual networks with certain linear transformations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Difan Zou , Philip M. Long , Quanquan Gu

Adaptive gradient methods, such as AdaGrad, are among the most successful optimization algorithms for neural network training. While these methods are known to achieve better dimensional dependence than stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-09 Ruichen Jiang , Devyani Maladkar , Aryan Mokhtari

The learning rate (LR) is one of the most important hyper-parameters in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for training deep neural networks (DNN). However, current hand-designed LR schedules need to manually pre-specify a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-14 Jun Shu , Yanwen Zhu , Qian Zhao , Zongben Xu , Deyu Meng

Distributed Deep Learning (DDL) is essential for large-scale Deep Learning (DL) training. Synchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (SSGD) 1 is the de facto DDL optimization method. Using a sufficiently large batch size is critical to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Wei Zhang , Mingrui Liu , Yu Feng , Xiaodong Cui , Brian Kingsbury , Yuhai Tu

Multi-layer neural networks are among the most powerful models in machine learning, yet the fundamental reasons for this success defy mathematical understanding. Learning a neural network requires to optimize a non-convex high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-08 Song Mei , Andrea Montanari , Phan-Minh Nguyen

SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent) is a popular algorithm for large scale optimization problems due to its low iterative cost. However, SGD can not achieve linear convergence rate as FGD (Full Gradient Descent) because of the inherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-05 Aixiang Chen , Bingchuan Chen , Xiaolong Chai , Rui Bian , Hengguang Li

The classical convergence analysis of SGD is carried out under the assumption that the norm of the stochastic gradient is uniformly bounded. While this might hold for some loss functions, it is violated for cases where the objective…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-12 Lam M. Nguyen , Phuong Ha Nguyen , Peter Richtárik , Katya Scheinberg , Martin Takáč , Marten van Dijk

The convergence behavior of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is highly sensitive to the batch size and learning rate settings. Recent theoretical studies have identified the existence of a critical batch size that minimizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Hikaru Umeda , Hideaki Iiduka

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-28 Jerry Chee , Ping Li

In the usual deep neural network optimization process, the learning rate is the most important hyper parameter, which greatly affects the final convergence effect. The purpose of learning rate is to control the stepsize and gradually reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-02 Jiakai Wei

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Da Li , Jingjing Wu , Qingrun Zhang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is often applied to train Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), and research efforts have been devoted to investigate the convergent dynamics of SGD and minima found by SGD. The influencing factors identified in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-25 Victor Luo , Yazhen Wang

Stochastic gradient descent (\textsc{Sgd}) methods are the most powerful optimization tools in training machine learning and deep learning models. Moreover, acceleration (a.k.a. momentum) methods and diagonal scaling (a.k.a. adaptive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-02 Qi Deng , Yi Cheng , Guanghui Lan