Related papers: Shift-Curvature, SGD, and Generalization
Recent studies have demonstrated that noise in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is closely related to generalization: A larger SGD noise, if not too large, results in better generalization. Since the covariance of the SGD noise is…
Although SGD with random reshuffle has been widely-used in machine learning applications, there is a limited understanding of how model characteristics affect the convergence of the algorithm. In this work, we introduce model incoherence to…
In this work, we reveal a strong implicit bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that drives overly expressive networks to much simpler subnetworks, thereby dramatically reducing the number of independent parameters, and improving…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has become a cornerstone of neural network optimization due to its computational efficiency and generalization capabilities. However, the gradient noise introduced by SGD is often assumed to be uncorrelated…
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…
The generalization performance of a machine learning algorithm such as a neural network depends in a non-trivial way on the structure of the data distribution. To analyze the influence of data structure on test loss dynamics, we study an…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise. We analyze preconditioned SGD in the geometry induced by a symmetric positive definite matrix $\mathbf{M}$,…
In this paper, we propose and analyze SQuARM-SGD, a communication-efficient algorithm for decentralized training of large-scale machine learning models over a network. In SQuARM-SGD, each node performs a fixed number of local SGD steps…
Recent empirical work on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) applied to over-parameterized deep learning has shown that most gradient components over epochs are quite small. Inspired by such observations, we rigorously study properties of…
The speed at which one can minimize an expected loss using stochastic methods depends on two properties: the curvature of the loss and the variance of the gradients. While most previous works focus on one or the other of these properties,…
In this paper, we provide a theoretical study of noise geometry for minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a phenomenon where noise aligns favorably with the geometry of local landscape. We propose two metrics, derived from analyzing…
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…
Previous work has examined the ability of larger capacity neural networks to generalize better than smaller ones, even without explicit regularizers, by analyzing gradient based algorithms such as GD and SGD. The presence of noise and its…
The use of low-bit quantization has emerged as an indispensable technique for enabling the efficient training of large-scale models. Despite its widespread empirical success, a rigorous theoretical understanding of its impact on learning…
For nonconvex objective functions, including those found in training deep neural networks, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum is said to converge faster and have better generalizability than SGD without momentum. In particular,…
In this paper, we first present an explanation regarding the common occurrence of spikes in the training loss when neural networks are trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We provide evidence that the spikes in the training loss…
Momentum is known to accelerate the convergence of gradient descent in strongly convex settings without stochastic gradient noise. In stochastic optimization, such as training neural networks, folklore suggests that momentum may help deep…
It is often observed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants implicitly select a solution with good generalization performance; such implicit bias is often characterized in terms of the sharpness of the minima. Kleinberg et…
The gradient noise of SGD is considered to play a central role in the observed strong generalization abilities of deep learning. While past studies confirm that the magnitude and the covariance structure of gradient noise are critical for…
We study trade-offs between the population risk curvature, geometry of the noise, and preconditioning on the generalisation ability of the multipass Preconditioned Stochastic Gradient Descent (PSGD). Many practical optimisation heuristics…