Related papers: SGD in the Large: Average-case Analysis, Asymptoti…
Neural networks are usually trained by some form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD)). A number of strategies are in common use intended to improve SGD optimization, such as learning rate schedules, momentum, and batching. These are…
The stochastic mirror descent (SMD) algorithm is a general class of training algorithms, which includes the celebrated stochastic gradient descent (SGD), as a special case. It utilizes a mirror potential to influence the implicit bias of…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with adaptive steps is widely used to train deep neural networks and generative models. Most theoretical results assume that it is possible to obtain unbiased gradient estimators, which is not the case in…
This paper proposes a thorough theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with non-increasing step sizes. First, we show that the recursion defining SGD can be provably approximated by solutions of a time inhomogeneous…
Applying standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to large data sets is computationally infeasible. The recently proposed stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) method circumvents this problem in three ways: it generates…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) plays a central role in modern machine learning. While there is extensive work on providing error upper bound for SGD, not much is known about SGD error lower bound. In this paper, we study the convergence…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…
Stochastic gradient methods enable learning probabilistic models from large amounts of data. While large step-sizes (learning rates) have shown to be best for least-squares (e.g., Gaussian noise) once combined with parameter averaging,…
In several experimental reports on nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was observed to prefer minimizers with flat basins in comparison to more deterministic methods, yet there is very…
In this note we give a simple proof for the convergence of stochastic gradient (SGD) methods on $\mu$-convex functions under a (milder than standard) $L$-smoothness assumption. We show that for carefully chosen stepsizes SGD converges after…
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 perform an experimental study of the dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in learning deep neural networks for several real and synthetic classification tasks. We show that in the initial epochs, almost all of the performance…
A framework previously introduced in [3] for solving a sequence of stochastic optimization problems with bounded changes in the minimizers is extended and applied to machine learning problems such as regression and classification. The…
In this work, we propose a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) framework to design data-driven policy gradient descent algorithms for the linear quadratic regulator problem. Two alternative schemes are considered to estimate the policy…
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…
Low-precision training has become crucial for reducing the computational and memory costs of large-scale deep learning. However, quantizing gradients introduces magnitude shrinkage, which can change how stochastic gradient descent (SGD)…
In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of…
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…
In this book chapter, we briefly describe the main components that constitute the gradient descent method and its accelerated and stochastic variants. We aim at explaining these components from a mathematical point of view, including…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithms are key ingredients in a series of machine learning applications. In this article we perform a rigorous strong error analysis for SGD optimization algorithms. In particular, we prove…