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Neural network compression has been an increasingly important subject, not only due to its practical relevance, but also due to its theoretical implications, as there is an explicit connection between compressibility and generalization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Yijun Wan , Melih Barsbey , Abdellatif Zaidi , Umut Simsekli

In recent years, various notions of capacity and complexity have been proposed for characterizing the generalization properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in deep learning. Some of the popular notions that correlate well with the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-15 Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Umut Şimşekli , Lingjiong Zhu

Recent studies have shown that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic optimization and that the heaviness of the tails have links to the generalization error. While these studies have shed light on interesting aspects of the generalization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 Anant Raj , Melih Barsbey , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu , Umut Şimşekli

It has repeatedly been observed that loss minimization by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) leads to heavy-tailed distributions of neural network parameters. Here, we analyze a continuous diffusion approximation of SGD, called homogenized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-05 Zhe Jiao , Martin Keller-Ressel

While significant theoretical progress has been achieved, unveiling the generalization mystery of overparameterized neural networks still remains largely elusive. In this paper, we study the generalization behavior of shallow neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Yunwen Lei , Rong Jin , Yiming Ying

Recent empirical evidence indicates that many machine learning applications involve heavy-tailed gradient noise, which challenges the standard assumptions of bounded variance in stochastic optimization. Gradient clipping has emerged as a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-10 Florian Hübler , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated dominating performance in many fields; since AlexNet, networks used in practice are going wider and deeper. On the theoretical side, a long line of works has been focusing on training neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-18 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Yuanzhi Li , Zhao Song

Despite its success in a wide range of applications, characterizing the generalization properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in non-convex deep learning problems is still an important challenge. While modeling the trajectories of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-12 Umut Şimşekli , Ozan Sener , George Deligiannidis , Murat A. Erdogdu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants enable modern artificial intelligence. However, theoretical understanding lags far behind their empirical success. It is widely believed that SGD has a curious ability to avoid sharp local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xingyu Wang , Chang-Han Rhee

Recent theoretical studies have shown that heavy-tails can emerge in stochastic optimization due to `multiplicative noise', even under surprisingly simple settings, such as linear regression with Gaussian data. While these studies have…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-06 Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Yuanhan Hu , Umut Simsekli , Kun Yuan , Lingjiong Zhu

Neural networks typically generalize well when fitting the data perfectly, even though they are heavily overparameterized. Many factors have been pointed out as the reason for this phenomenon, including an implicit bias of stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Amit Peleg , Matthias Hein

Gradient compression has surfaced as a key technique to address the challenge of communication efficiency in distributed learning. In distributed deep learning, however, it is observed that gradient distributions are heavy-tailed, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Guangfeng Yan , Tan Li , Yuanzhang Xiao , Hanxu Hou , Linqi Song

The fundamental learning theory behind neural networks remains largely open. What classes of functions can neural networks actually learn? Why doesn't the trained network overfit when it is overparameterized? In this work, we prove that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Yuanzhi Li , Yingyu Liang

There is an increasing realization that algorithmic inductive biases are central in preventing overfitting; empirically, we often see a benign overfitting phenomenon in overparameterized settings for natural learning algorithms, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Difan Zou , Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu , Sham M. Kakade

The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the \emph{classical} central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-03 Umut Şimşekli , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Thanh Huy Nguyen , Gaël Richard , Levent Sagun

The study of tail behaviour of SGD-induced processes has been attracting a lot of interest, due to offering strong guarantees with respect to individual runs of an algorithm. While many works provide high-probability guarantees, quantifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Aleksandar Armacki , Dragana Bajović , Dušan Jakovetić , Soummya Kar , Ali H. Sayed

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.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-21 Adarsh M. Subramaniam , Akshayaa Magesh , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

State-of-the-art training algorithms for deep learning models are based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Recently, many variations have been explored: perturbing parameters for better accuracy (such as in Extragradient), limiting SGD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-23 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi , Sebastian U. Stich

A recent line of empirical studies has demonstrated that SGD might exhibit a heavy-tailed behavior in practical settings, and the heaviness of the tails might correlate with the overall performance. In this paper, we investigate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Krunoslav Lehman Pavasovic , Alain Durmus , Umut Simsekli

While implicit regularization facilitates benign overfitting in low-noise regimes, recent theoretical work predicts a sharp phase transition to harmful overfitting as the noise-to-signal ratio increases. We experimentally isolate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Zice Wang
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