Related papers: Better scalability under potentially heavy-tailed …

Imitation learning algorithms learn viable policies by imitating an expert's behavior when reward signals are not available. Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) is a state-of-the-art algorithm for learning policies when the…

Recent work across many machine learning disciplines has highlighted that standard descent methods, even without explicit regularization, do not merely minimize the training error, but also exhibit an implicit bias. This bias is typically…

Reasoning tasks are crucial in many domains, especially in science and engineering. Although large language models (LLMs) have made progress in reasoning tasks using techniques such as chain-of-thought and least-to-most prompting, these…

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…

We investigate a way of comparing and classifying tails of random variables. Our approach extends the notion of classical indices, such as exponential and moment indices, which are widely used measuring heaviness of tail functions. A…

In reinforcement learning (RL), offline learning decoupled learning from data collection and is useful in dealing with exploration-exploitation tradeoff and enables data reuse in many applications. In this work, we study two offline…

In this paper, we consider the problem of linear regression with heavy-tailed distributions. Different from previous studies that use the squared loss to measure the performance, we choose the absolute loss, which is capable of estimating…

Decision Trees (DTs) are commonly used for many machine learning tasks due to their high degree of interpretability. However, learning a DT from data is a difficult optimization problem, as it is non-convex and non-differentiable.…

In this work we study the robustness to adversarial attacks, of early-stopping strategies on gradient-descent (GD) methods for linear regression. More precisely, we show that early-stopped GD is optimally robust (up to an absolute constant)…

Stochastic gradient-based descent (SGD), have long been central to training large language models (LLMs). However, their effectiveness is increasingly being questioned, particularly in large-scale applications where empirical evidence…

Gradient descent (GD) on logistic regression has many fascinating properties. When the dataset is linearly separable, it is known that the iterates converge in direction to the maximum-margin separator regardless of how large the step size…

Long-tailed data is a special type of multi-class imbalanced data with a very large amount of minority/tail classes that have a very significant combined influence. Long-tailed learning aims to build high-performance models on datasets with…

Recent work has established an empirically successful framework for adapting learning rates for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). This effectively removes all needs for tuning, while automatically reducing learning rates over time on…

Adaptive gradient methods have been widely adopted in training large-scale deep neural networks, especially large foundation models. Despite the huge success in practice, their theoretical advantages over classical gradient methods with…

We consider the problem of high-dimensional heavy-tailed statistical estimation in the streaming setting, which is much harder than the traditional batch setting due to memory constraints. We cast this problem as stochastic convex…

Adaptive stochastic gradient methods such as AdaGrad have gained popularity in particular for training deep neural networks. The most commonly used and studied variant maintains a diagonal matrix approximation to second order information by…

In the real-world setting, data often follows a long-tailed distribution, where head classes contain significantly more training samples than tail classes. Consequently, models trained on such data tend to be biased toward head classes. The…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs), but its performance is highly sensitive to the quality of training problems. This sensitivity stems from the non-stationarity of RL:…

Modern policy gradient algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) rely on an arsenal of heuristics, including loss clipping and gradient clipping, to ensure successful learning. These heuristics are reminiscent of techniques from…