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Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), a widely used optimization algorithm in deep learning, is often limited to converging to local optima due to the non-convex nature of the problem. Leveraging these local optima to improve model performance…
We study the problem of how to distribute the training of large-scale deep learning models in the parallel computing environment. We propose a new distributed stochastic optimization method called Elastic Averaging SGD (EASGD). We analyze…
The vast majority of modern deep learning models are trained with momentum-based first-order optimizers. The momentum term governs the optimizer's memory by determining how much each past gradient contributes to the current convergence…
We show that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) escapes from sharp minima exponentially fast even before SGD reaches stationary distribution. SGD has been a de-facto standard training algorithm for various machine learning tasks. However,…
We propose and analyze several stochastic gradient algorithms for finding stationary points or local minimum in nonconvex, possibly with nonsmooth regularizer, finite-sum and online optimization problems. First, we propose a simple proximal…
Variance reduction has emerged in recent years as a strong competitor to stochastic gradient descent in non-convex problems, providing the first algorithms to improve upon the converge rate of stochastic gradient descent for finding…
In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…
This paper considers the problem of understanding the behavior of a general class of accelerated gradient methods on smooth nonconvex functions. Motivated by some recent works that have proposed effective algorithms, based on Polyak's heavy…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and adaptive gradient methods, such as Adam and RMSProp, have been widely used in training deep neural networks. We empirically show that while the difference between the standard generalization performance…
A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…
The massive size of modern neural networks has motivated substantial recent interest in neural network quantization. We introduce Stochastic Markov Gradient Descent (SMGD), a discrete optimization method applicable to training quantized…
Understanding the algorithmic bias of \emph{stochastic gradient descent} (SGD) is one of the key challenges in modern machine learning and deep learning theory. Most of the existing works, however, focus on \emph{very small or even…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
This paper shows that a perturbed form of gradient descent converges to a second-order stationary point in a number iterations which depends only poly-logarithmically on dimension (i.e., it is almost "dimension-free"). The convergence rate…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based training of neural networks with a large learning rate or a small batch-size typically ends in well-generalizing, flat regions of the weight space, as indicated by small eigenvalues of the Hessian of…
Distributed asynchronous offline training has received widespread attention in recent years because of its high performance on large-scale data and complex models. As data are distributed from cloud-centric to edge nodes, a big challenge…
High-dimensional non-convex optimization problems in engineering design, control, and learning are often hindered by saddle points, flat plateaus, and strongly anisotropic curvature. This paper develops a unified, curvature-adaptive…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…
Stochastic gradient decent~(SGD) and its variants, including some accelerated variants, have become popular for training in machine learning. However, in all existing SGD and its variants, the sample size in each iteration~(epoch) of…
We analyze a class of stochastic gradient algorithms with momentum on a high-dimensional random least squares problem. Our framework, inspired by random matrix theory, provides an exact (deterministic) characterization for the sequence of…