Related papers: The Heavy-Tail Phenomenon in SGD
Heavy-tailed noise is pervasive in modern machine learning applications, arising from data heterogeneity, outliers, and non-stationary stochastic environments. While second-order methods can significantly accelerate convergence in…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…
Theoretically understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in overparameterized models has led to the development of several optimization algorithms that are widely used in practice today. Recent work by~\citet{zou2021benign} provides…
We analyze neural scaling laws in a solvable model of last-layer fine-tuning where targets have intrinsic, instance-heterogeneous difficulty. In our Latent Instance Difficulty (LID) model, each input's target variance is governed by a…
We study large deviation upper bounds and mean-squared error (MSE) guarantees of a general framework of nonlinear stochastic gradient methods in the online setting, in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. Unlike existing works that rely on…
Gaussian noise injections (GNIs) are a family of simple and widely-used regularisation methods for training neural networks, where one injects additive or multiplicative Gaussian noise to the network activations at every iteration of the…
Understanding when the noise in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) affects generalization of deep neural networks remains a challenge, complicated by the fact that networks can operate in distinct training regimes. Here we study how the…
Heavy-tailed noise in nonconvex stochastic optimization has garnered increasing research interest, as empirical studies, including those on training attention models, suggest it is a more realistic gradient noise condition. This paper…
Learning with a {\it convex loss} function has been a dominating paradigm for many years. It remains an interesting question how non-convex loss functions help improve the generalization of learning with broad applicability. In this paper,…
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…
The mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is widely used in training machine learning models, in particular deep learning models. We study SGD dynamics under linear regression and two-layer linear networks, with an easy…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based methods have been widely used for training large-scale machine learning models that also generalize well in practice. Several explanations have been offered for this generalization performance, a…
We study the dynamics of a continuous-time model of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for the least-square problem. Indeed, pursuing the work of Li et al. (2019), we analyze Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) that model SGD either…
We investigate the inherent bias of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) toward learning low-rank weight matrices during the training of deep neural networks. Our results demonstrate that training with mini-batch SGD and weight decay induces a…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…
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…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the algorithm we use to train neural networks. However, it remains poorly understood how the SGD navigates the highly nonlinear and degenerate loss landscape of a neural network. In this…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a ubiquitous algorithm for a variety of machine learning problems. Researchers and industry have developed several techniques to optimize SGD's runtime performance, including asynchronous execution and…
We consider deep neural networks in a Bayesian framework with a prior distribution sampling the network weights at random. Following a recent idea of Agapiou and Castillo (2023), who show that heavy-tailed prior distributions achieve…
Real-world data is laden with outlying values. The challenge for machine learning is that the learner typically has no prior knowledge of whether the feedback it receives (losses, gradients, etc.) will be heavy-tailed or not. In this work,…