Related papers: Random Shuffling Beats SGD Only After Many Epochs …
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is almost ubiquitously used for training non-convex optimization tasks. Recently, a hypothesis proposed by Keskar et al. [2017] that large batch methods tend to converge to sharp minimizers has received…
Most modern learning problems are highly overparameterized, meaning that there are many more parameters than the number of training data points, and as a result, the training loss may have infinitely many global minima (parameter vectors…
Local SGD is a communication-efficient variant of SGD for large-scale training, where multiple GPUs perform SGD independently and average the model parameters periodically. It has been recently observed that Local SGD can not only achieve…
We study nonconvex finite-sum problems and analyze stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods for them. SVRG and related methods have recently surged into prominence for convex optimization given their edge over stochastic gradient…
In machine learning and neural network optimization, algorithms like incremental gradient, and shuffle SGD are popular due to minimizing the number of cache misses and good practical convergence behavior. However, their optimization…
In this paper, we investigate the non-stationary combinatorial semi-bandit problem, both in the switching case and in the dynamic case. In the general case where (a) the reward function is non-linear, (b) arms may be probabilistically…
We consider stochastic approximation for the least squares regression problem in the non-strongly convex setting. We present the first practical algorithm that achieves the optimal prediction error rates in terms of dependence on the noise…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…
Multi-epoch, small-batch, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been the method of choice for learning with large over-parameterized models. A popular theory for explaining why SGD works well in practice is that the algorithm has an…
Several works have aimed to explain why overparameterized neural networks generalize well when trained by Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The consensus explanation that has emerged credits the randomized nature of SGD for the bias of the…
Conditional stochastic optimization covers a variety of applications ranging from invariant learning and causal inference to meta-learning. However, constructing unbiased gradient estimators for such problems is challenging due to the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibits strong algorithmic regularization effects in practice and plays an important role in the generalization of modern machine learning. However, prior research has revealed instances where the…
It has been experimentally observed that the efficiency of distributed training with stochastic gradient (SGD) depends decisively on the batch size and -- in asynchronous implementations -- on the gradient staleness. Especially, it has been…
Consider a number of workers running SGD independently on the same pool of data and averaging the models every once in a while -- a common but not well understood practice. We study model averaging as a variance-reducing mechanism and…
We consider stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for least-squares regression with potentially several passes over the data. While several passes have been widely reported to perform practically better in terms of predictive performance on…
Data imbalance is a common problem in machine learning that can have a critical effect on the performance of a model. Various solutions exist but their impact on the convergence of the learning dynamics is not understood. Here, we elucidate…
We address the problem of policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes, and provide instance-dependent guarantees on the $\ell_\infty$-error under a generative model. We establish both asymptotic and non-asymptotic versions of…
We study randomized algorithms for constrained optimization, in abstract frameworks that include, in strictly increasing generality: convex programming; LP-type problems; violator spaces; and a setting we introduce, consistent spaces. Such…
This work investigates the performance of the final iterate produced by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) under temporally dependent data. We consider two complementary sources of dependence: $(i)$ martingale-type dependence in both the…
We give a new separation result between the generalization performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and of full-batch gradient descent (GD) in the fundamental stochastic convex optimization model. While for SGD it is well-known that…