Related papers: Better scalability under potentially heavy-tailed …
We study a scalable alternative to robust gradient descent (RGD) techniques that can be used when the gradients can be heavy-tailed, though this will be unknown to the learner. The core technique is simple: instead of trying to robustly…
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,…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants enable modern artificial intelligence. However, theoretical understanding lags far behind their empirical success. It is widely believed that SGD has a curious ability to avoid sharp local…
Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD) is widely utilized to preserve training data privacy in deep learning, which first clips the gradients to a predefined norm and then injects calibrated noise into the training…
Gradient compression has surfaced as a key technique to address the challenge of communication efficiency in distributed learning. In distributed deep learning, however, it is observed that gradient distributions are heavy-tailed, with…
Under losses which are potentially heavy-tailed, we consider the task of minimizing sums of the loss mean and standard deviation, without trying to accurately estimate the variance. By modifying a technique for variance-free robust mean…
Low-rank tensor models are widely used in statistics. However, most existing methods rely heavily on the assumption that data follows a sub-Gaussian distribution. To address the challenges associated with heavy-tailed distributions…
Recent empirical evidence indicates that many machine learning applications involve heavy-tailed gradient noise, which challenges the standard assumptions of bounded variance in stochastic optimization. Gradient clipping has emerged as a…
We investigate high-dimensional sparse regression when both the noise and the design matrix exhibit heavy-tailed behavior. Standard algorithms typically fail in this regime, as heavy-tailed covariates distort the empirical risk geometry. We…
While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is still the \emph{de facto} algorithm in deep learning, adaptive methods like Clipped SGD/Adam have been observed to outperform SGD across important tasks, such as attention models. The settings…
Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) is a strong and widely used first-order adversarial attack, yet its computational cost scales poorly, as all training samples undergo identical iterative inner-loop optimization despite contributing…
Long-tailed classification is challenging due to its heavy imbalance in class probabilities. While existing methods often focus on overall accuracy or accuracy for tail classes, they overlook a critical aspect: certain types of errors can…
To improve the off-sample generalization of classical procedures minimizing the empirical risk under potentially heavy-tailed data, new robust learning algorithms have been proposed in recent years, with generalized median-of-means…
We propose GradTail, an algorithm that uses gradients to improve model performance on the fly in the face of long-tailed training data distributions. Unlike conventional long-tail classifiers which operate on converged - and possibly…
We present Re-weighted Gradient Descent (RGD), a novel optimization technique that improves the performance of deep neural networks through dynamic sample re-weighting. Leveraging insights from distributionally robust optimization (DRO)…
High-dimensional data are commonly seen in modern statistical applications, variable selection methods play indispensable roles in identifying the critical features for scientific discoveries. Traditional best subset selection methods are…
We propose statistically robust and computationally efficient linear learning methods in the high-dimensional batch setting, where the number of features $d$ may exceed the sample size $n$. We employ, in a generic learning setting, two…
We consider a first order stochastic optimization framework where, at each iteration, $K$ independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) data point samples are drawn, based on which stochastic gradients can be queried. We allow gradient noise…
Recent studies have shown that gradient descent (GD) can achieve improved generalization when its dynamics exhibits a chaotic behavior. However, to obtain the desired effect, the step-size should be chosen sufficiently large, a task which…
We study high-probability convergence guarantees of learning on streaming data in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. In the proposed scenario, the model is updated in an online fashion, as new information is observed, without storing any…