Related papers: The Heavy-Tail Phenomenon in SGD
We study scalable alternatives to robust gradient descent (RGD) techniques that can be used when the losses and/or gradients can be heavy-tailed, though this will be unknown to the learner. The core technique is simple: instead of trying to…
We consider a variant of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a random learning rate and reveal its convergence properties. SGD is a widely used stochastic optimization algorithm in machine learning, especially deep learning. Numerous…
The classical statistical learning theory implies that fitting too many parameters leads to overfitting and poor performance. That modern deep neural networks generalize well despite a large number of parameters contradicts this finding and…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
Classical information-theoretic generalization bounds typically control the generalization gap through KL-based mutual information and therefore rely on boundedness or sub-Gaussian tails via the moment generating function (MGF). In many…
We propose a new framework, inspired by random matrix theory, for analyzing the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when both number of samples and dimensions are large. This framework applies to any fixed stepsize and the finite…
While implicit regularization facilitates benign overfitting in low-noise regimes, recent theoretical work predicts a sharp phase transition to harmful overfitting as the noise-to-signal ratio increases. We experimentally isolate the…
We consider stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for least-squares regression with potentially several passes over the data. While several passes have been widely reported to perform practically better in terms of predictive performance on…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is of fundamental importance in deep learning. Despite its simplicity, elucidating its efficacy remains challenging. Conventionally, the success of SGD is ascribed to the stochastic gradient noise (SGN)…
Stochastic first-order methods such as Stochastic Extragradient (SEG) or Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) for solving smooth minimax problems and, more generally, variational inequality problems (VIP) have been gaining a lot of…
We study convergence in high-probability of SGD-type methods in non-convex optimization and the presence of heavy-tailed noise. To combat the heavy-tailed noise, a general black-box nonlinear framework is considered, subsuming…
In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…
In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus…
In this work, we reveal a strong implicit bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that drives overly expressive networks to much simpler subnetworks, thereby dramatically reducing the number of independent parameters, and improving…
Gradient clipping is a commonly used technique to stabilize the training process of neural networks. A growing body of studies has shown that gradient clipping is a promising technique for dealing with the heavy-tailed behavior that emerged…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
Understanding the training dynamics of deep neural networks is challenging due to their high-dimensional nature and intricate loss landscapes. Recent studies have revealed that, along the training trajectory, the gradient approximately…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a workhorse algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems in data science and machine learning. Understanding the convergence of SGD is hence of fundamental importance. In this work we examine…