Related papers: Better scalability under potentially heavy-tailed …
This paper studies distributed estimation and support recovery for high-dimensional linear regression model with heavy-tailed noise. To deal with heavy-tailed noise whose variance can be infinite, we adopt the quantile regression loss…
Gradient clipping has long been considered essential for ensuring the convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the presence of heavy-tailed gradient noise. In this paper, we revisit this belief and explore whether gradient…
Compressed Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithms have been recently proposed to address the communication bottleneck in distributed and decentralized optimization problems, such as those that arise in federated machine learning.…
Many particle-based Bayesian inference methods use a single global step size for all parts of the update. In Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), however, each update combines two qualitatively different effects: attraction toward…
We study the advantages of accelerated gradient methods, specifically based on the Frank-Wolfe method and projected gradient descent, for privacy and heavy-tailed robustness. Our approaches are as follows: For the Frank-Wolfe method, our…
Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a standard way to exploit heterogeneous compute resources in distributed learning: instead of forcing fast workers to wait for slow ones, the server updates the model whenever a gradient…
Deep learning algorithms face great challenges with long-tailed data distribution which, however, is quite a common case in real-world scenarios. Previous methods tackle the problem from either the aspect of input space (re-sampling classes…
Hierarchical methods in reinforcement learning have the potential to reduce the amount of decisions that the agent needs to perform when learning new tasks. However, finding reusable useful temporal abstractions that facilitate fast…
Scaling deep reinforcement learning networks is challenging and often results in degraded performance, yet the root causes of this failure mode remain poorly understood. Several recent works have proposed mechanisms to address this, but…
Fine-tuning pretrained models has become a standard approach to adapting pretrained knowledge to improve the accuracy on new sparse, imbalance datasets. However, issues arise when optimization falls into a collapsed state, where the model…
Randomized coordinate descent (RCD) methods are state-of-the-art algorithms for training linear predictors via minimizing regularized empirical risk. When the number of examples ($n$) is much larger than the number of features ($d$), a…
We propose randomized subspace gradient methods for high-dimensional constrained optimization. While there have been similarly purposed studies on unconstrained optimization problems, there have been few on constrained optimization problems…
We present multiplexed gradient descent (MGD), a gradient descent framework designed to easily train analog or digital neural networks in hardware. MGD utilizes zero-order optimization techniques for online training of hardware neural…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with gradient clipping is a powerful technique for enabling differentially private optimization. Although prior works extensively investigated clipping with a constant threshold, private training remains…
Optimization under heavy-tailed noise has become popular recently, since it better fits many modern machine learning tasks, as captured by empirical observations. Concretely, instead of a finite second moment on gradient noise, a bounded…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a policy evaluation in reinforcement learning whose performance can be enhanced by variance reduction methods. Recently, multiple works have sought to fuse TD learning with Stochastic Variance Reduced…
Legged locomotion has recently achieved remarkable success with the progress of machine learning techniques, especially deep reinforcement learning (RL). Controllers employing neural networks have demonstrated empirical and qualitative…
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…
Randomized coordinate descent (RCD) is a popular optimization algorithm with wide applications in solving various machine learning problems, which motivates a lot of theoretical analysis on its convergence behavior. As a comparison, there…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDm) is one of the most popular optimization algorithms in deep learning. While there is a rich theory of SGDm for convex problems, the theory is considerably less developed in the context of deep…