Related papers: Towards Theoretically Understanding Why SGD Genera…

Accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a workhorse in deep learning and often achieves better generalization performance than SGD. However, existing optimization theory can only explain the faster convergence of ASGD, but cannot…

This paper proposes a new optimization algorithm called Entropy-SGD for training deep neural networks that is motivated by the local geometry of the energy landscape. Local extrema with low generalization error have a large proportion of…

When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…

The study of tail behaviour of SGD-induced processes has been attracting a lot of interest, due to offering strong guarantees with respect to individual runs of an algorithm. While many works provide high-probability guarantees, quantifying…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely believed to perform implicit regularization when used to train deep neural networks, but the precise manner in which this occurs has thus far been elusive. We prove that SGD minimizes an average…

Deep learning optimization relies heavily on the assumption of smooth loss landscapes, a condition systematically violated by modern architectures due to non-smooth components such as ReLU activations and quantization operators. In such…

An algorithm is said to be adaptive to a certain parameter (of the problem) if it does not need a priori knowledge of such a parameter but performs competitively to those that know it. This dissertation presents our work on adaptive…

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…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path 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…

In this paper, we study the implicit regularization of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) through the lens of {\em dynamical stability} (Wu et al., 2018). We start by revising existing stability analyses of SGD, showing how the Frobenius…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise. We analyze preconditioned SGD in the geometry induced by a symmetric positive definite matrix $\mathbf{M}$,…

Recently, sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has attracted much attention because of its surprising effectiveness in improving generalization performance. However, compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), it is more prone to getting…

It has repeatedly been observed that loss minimization by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) leads to heavy-tailed distributions of neural network parameters. Here, we analyze a continuous diffusion approximation of SGD, called homogenized…

Despite the tremendous success of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm in deep learning, little is known about how SGD finds generalizable solutions in the high-dimensional weight space. By analyzing the learning dynamics and loss…

The performance of fully synchronized distributed systems has faced a bottleneck due to the big data trend, under which asynchronous distributed systems are becoming a major popularity due to their powerful scalability. In this paper, we…

We study the SAM (Sharpness-Aware Minimization) optimizer which has recently attracted a lot of interest due to its increased performance over more classical variants of stochastic gradient descent. Our main contribution is the derivation…

It has been experimentally observed that distributed implementations of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms exhibit speedup saturation and decaying generalization ability beyond a particular batch-size. In this work, we…

Recently there are a considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the algorithmic stability and generalization for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the existing stability analysis requires to impose restrictive assumptions…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are mainstream methods for training deep networks in practice. SGD is known to find a flat minimum that often generalizes well. However, it is mathematically unclear how deep learning can…