Related papers: Comment on Stochastic Polyak Step-Size: Performanc…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted enormous research interest due to temporal information processing capability, low power consumption, and high biological plausibility. However, the formulation of efficient and high-performance…
We showcase important features of the dynamics of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the training of neural networks. We present empirical observations that commonly used large step sizes (i) lead the iterates to jump from one side of…
We explore a new perspective on adapting the learning rate (LR) schedule to improve the performance of the ReLU-based network as it is iteratively pruned. Our work and contribution consist of four parts: (i) We find that, as the ReLU-based…
Reinforcement learning is essential for neural architecture search and hyperparameter optimization, but the conventional approaches impede widespread use due to prohibitive time and computational costs. Inspired by DeepSeek-V3 multi-token…
We study convergence rates of AdaGrad-Norm as an exemplar of adaptive stochastic gradient methods (SGD), where the step sizes change based on observed stochastic gradients, for minimizing non-convex, smooth objectives. Despite their…
Learning to walk -- i.e., learning locomotion under performance and energy constraints continues to be a challenge in legged robotics. Methods such as stochastic gradient, deep reinforcement learning (RL) have been explored for bipeds,…
Modern optimization algorithms that incorporate momentum and adaptive step-size offer improved performance in numerous challenging deep learning tasks. However, their effectiveness is often highly sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters,…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…
Approximate dynamic programming (ADP) has proven itself in a wide range of applications spanning large-scale transportation problems, health care, revenue management, and energy systems. The design of effective ADP algorithms has many…
The Once-For-All (OFA) method offers an excellent pathway to deploy a trained neural network model into multiple target platforms by utilising the supernet-subnet architecture. Once trained, a subnet can be derived from the supernet (both…
We introduce new methods for 1) accelerating and 2) stabilizing training for large language-vision models. 1) For acceleration, we introduce SwitchBack, a linear layer for int8 quantized training which provides a speed-up of 13-25% while…
In this work, we propose an adaptive variation on the classical Heavy-ball method for convex quadratic minimization. The adaptivity crucially relies on so-called "Polyak step-sizes", which consists in using the knowledge of the optimal…
In empirical risk optimization, it has been observed that stochastic gradient implementations that rely on random reshuffling of the data achieve better performance than implementations that rely on sampling the data uniformly. Recent works…
Transformers have revolutionized machine learning and deploying attention layers in the model is increasingly standard across a myriad of applications. Further, for large models, it is common to implement Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA), whereby…
In this paper, a novel racing environment for OpenAI Gym is introduced. This environment operates with continuous action- and state-spaces and requires agents to learn to control the acceleration and steering of a car while navigating a…
Stochastic gradient-based descent (SGD), have long been central to training large language models (LLMs). However, their effectiveness is increasingly being questioned, particularly in large-scale applications where empirical evidence…
In scalable machine learning systems, model training is often parallelized over multiple nodes that run without tight synchronization. Most analysis results for the related asynchronous algorithms use an upper bound on the information…
Theoretically understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in overparameterized models has led to the development of several optimization algorithms that are widely used in practice today. Recent work by~\citet{zou2021benign} provides…
Modern deep neural network training is typically based on mini-batch stochastic gradient optimization. While the use of large mini-batches increases the available computational parallelism, small batch training has been shown to provide…
Up to now, the training processes of typical Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are still particularly sensitive to data properties and hyperparameters, which may lead to severe oscillations, difficulties in convergence, or even…