Related papers: Escaping Saddle Points Efficiently with Occupation…
Many machine learning applications and tasks rely on the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variants. Effective step length selection is crucial for the success of these algorithms, which has motivated the development of…
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…
This paper considers the decision-dependent optimization problem, where the data distributions react in response to decisions affecting both the objective function and linear constraints. We propose a new method termed repeated projected…
In this paper, we explore the two-point zeroth-order gradient estimator and identify the distribution of random perturbations that minimizes the estimator's asymptotic variance as the perturbation stepsize tends to zero. We formulate it as…
First-order optimization methods, such as SGD and Adam, are widely used for training large-scale deep neural networks due to their computational efficiency and robust performance. However, relying solely on gradient information, these…
The paper studies a distributed gradient descent (DGD) process and considers the problem of showing that in nonconvex optimization problems, DGD typically converges to local minima rather than saddle points. The paper considers…
This paper studies how a stochastic gradient algorithm (SG) can be controlled to hide the estimate of the local stationary point from an eavesdropper. Such problems are of significant interest in distributed optimization settings like…
In this paper, we consider efficient differentially private empirical risk minimization from the viewpoint of optimization algorithms. For strongly convex and smooth objectives, we prove that gradient descent with output perturbation not…
Recent focus on robustness to adversarial attacks for deep neural networks produced a large variety of algorithms for training robust models. Most of the effective algorithms involve solving the min-max optimization problem for training…
Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) has emerged as a robust relaxation of standard Optimal Transport, particularly effective for handling outliers and mass variations. However, scalable algorithms for UOT, specifically those based on…
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…
Policy gradient (PG) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its scalability and good performance. In recent years, several variance-reduced PG methods have been proposed with a theoretical guarantee of converging to an approximate…
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…
This paper focuses on solving a stochastic saddle point problem (SPP) under an overparameterized regime for the case, when the gradient computation is impractical. As an intermediate step, we generalize Same-sample Stochastic Extra-gradient…
Saddle points provide a hierarchical view of the energy landscape, revealing transition pathways and interconnected basins of attraction, and offering insight into the global structure, metastability, and possible collective mechanisms of…
This paper studies the convergence of clipped stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms with decision-dependent data distribution. Our setting is motivated by privacy preserving optimization algorithms that interact with performative…
We give the first polynomial time algorithms for escaping from high-dimensional saddle points under a moderate number of constraints. Given gradient access to a smooth function $f \colon \mathbb R^d \to \mathbb R$ we show that (noisy)…
We initiate the study of quantum algorithms for escaping from saddle points with provable guarantee. Given a function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^{n}\to\mathbb{R}$, our quantum algorithm outputs an $\epsilon$-approximate second-order stationary…
Learning rate adaptation is a popular topic in machine learning. Gradient Descent trains neural nerwork with a fixed learning rate. Learning rate adaptation is proposed to accelerate the training process through adjusting the step size in…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a premium optimization method for training neural networks, especially for learning objectively defined labels such as image objects and events. When a neural network is instead faced with subjectively…