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The simplicity of gradient descent (GD) made it the default method for training ever-deeper and complex neural networks. Both loss functions and architectures are often explicitly tuned to be amenable to this basic local optimization. In…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…

Neural networks are trained by optimizing multi-dimensional sets of fitting parameters on non-convex loss landscapes. Low-loss regions of the landscapes correspond to the parameter sets that perform well on the training data. A key issue in…

We consider the dynamics of gradient descent (GD) in overparameterized single hidden layer neural networks with a squared loss function. Recently, it has been shown that, under some conditions, the parameter values obtained using GD achieve…

Many supervised learning tasks have intrinsic symmetries, such as translational and rotational symmetry in image classifications. These symmetries can be exploited to enhance performance. We formulate the symmetry constraints into a concise…

Optimizers that further adjust the scale of gradient, such as Adam, Natural Gradient (NG), etc., despite widely concerned and used by the community, are often found poor generalization performance, compared with Stochastic Gradient Descent…

In the context of over-parameterization, there is a line of work demonstrating that randomly initialized (stochastic) gradient descent (GD) converges to a globally optimal solution at a linear convergence rate for the quadratic loss…

Implicit bias induced by gradient-based algorithms is essential to the generalization of overparameterized models, yet its mechanisms can be subtle. This work leverages the Normalized Steepest Descent} (NSD) framework to investigate how…

A commonly used heuristic in non-convex optimization is Normalized Gradient Descent (NGD) - a variant of gradient descent in which only the direction of the gradient is taken into account and its magnitude ignored. We analyze this heuristic…

In this paper, we revisit and improve the convergence of policy gradient (PG), natural PG (NPG) methods, and their variance-reduced variants, under general smooth policy parametrizations. More specifically, with the Fisher information…

It is known that when the statistical models are singular, i.e., the Fisher information matrix at the true parameter is degenerate, the fixed step-size gradient descent algorithm takes polynomial number of steps in terms of the sample size…

In this paper we introduce two algorithms for neural architecture search (NASGD and NASAGD) following the theoretical work by two of the authors [5] which used the geometric structure of optimal transport to introduce the conceptual basis…

This paper presents a novel algorithm that leverages Stochastic Gradient Descent strategies in conjunction with Random Features to augment the scalability of Conic Particle Gradient Descent (CPGD) specifically tailored for solving sparse…

Predictive models can be particularly helpful for robots to effectively manipulate terrains in construction sites and extraterrestrial surfaces. However, terrain state representations become extremely high-dimensional especially to capture…

We consider the problem of minimizing a functional over a parametric family of probability measures, where the parameterization is characterized via a push-forward structure. An important application of this problem is in training…

We study the convergence of a variant of distributed gradient descent (DGD) on a distributed low-rank matrix approximation problem wherein some optimization variables are used for consensus (as in classical DGD) and some optimization…

With a computationally efficient approximation of the second-order information, natural gradient methods have been successful in solving large-scale structured optimization problems. We study the natural gradient methods for the large-scale…

Natural policy gradient (NPG) and its variants are widely-used policy search methods in reinforcement learning. Inspired by prior work, a new NPG variant coined NPG-HM is developed in this paper, which utilizes the Hessian-aided momentum…

We introduce "AnnealSGD", a regularized stochastic gradient descent algorithm motivated by an analysis of the energy landscape of a particular class of deep networks with sparse random weights. The loss function of such networks can be…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for optimization problems arising in high-dimensional inference tasks. Here one produces an estimator of an unknown parameter from independent samples of data by iteratively…