Related papers: Shift-Curvature, SGD, and Generalization
We uncover how SGD interacts with batch normalization and can exhibit undesirable training dynamics such as divergence. More precisely, we study how Single Shuffle (SS) and Random Reshuffle (RR) -- two widely used variants of SGD --…
Mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is state of the art in large scale distributed training. The scheme can reach a linear speedup with respect to the number of workers, but this is rarely seen in practice as the scheme often…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…
When solving finite-sum minimization problems, two common alternatives to stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with theoretical benefits are random reshuffling (SGD-RR) and shuffle-once (SGD-SO), in which functions are sampled in cycles…
Sign-based optimization algorithms, such as SignSGD and Muon, have garnered significant attention for their remarkable performance in training large foundation models. Despite this empirical success, we still lack a theoretical…
Fine-tuning aligned language models on benign tasks unpredictably degrades safety guardrails, even when training data contains no harmful content and developers have no adversarial intent. We show that the prevailing explanation, that…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning problems to efficiently perform empirical risk minimization, yet, in practice, SGD is known to stall before reaching the actual minimizer of the empirical risk. SGD…
We study the convergence properties and escape dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in one-dimensional landscapes, separately considering infinite- and finite-variance noise. Our main focus is to identify the time scales on which…
We study the generalization properties of the popular stochastic optimization method known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for optimizing general non-convex loss functions. Our main contribution is providing upper bounds on the…
Shift invariance is a critical property of CNNs that improves performance on classification. However, we show that invariance to circular shifts can also lead to greater sensitivity to adversarial attacks. We first characterize the margin…
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 Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants form the backbone of deep learning optimization, yet the underlying dynamics of their gradient behavior remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we reinterpret gradient…
We propose a stochastic optimization method for minimizing loss functions, expressed as an expected value, that adaptively controls the batch size used in the computation of gradient approximations and the step size used to move along such…
We study the problem of transfer learning and fine-tuning in linear models for both regression and binary classification. In particular, we consider the use of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a linear model initialized with pretrained…
A machine learning model that generalizes well should obtain low errors on unseen test examples. Thus, if we know how to optimally perturb training examples to account for test examples, we may achieve better generalization performance.…
The empirical success of deep learning is often attributed to SGD's mysterious ability to avoid sharp local minima in the loss landscape, as sharp minima are known to lead to poor generalization. Recently, empirical evidence of heavy-tailed…
We analyze the effect of synchronization on distributed stochastic gradient algorithms. By exploiting an analogy with dynamical models of biological quorum sensing - where synchronization between agents is induced through communication with…
This paper studies a risk minimization problem with decision dependent data distribution. The problem pertains to the performative prediction setting in which a trained model can affect the outcome estimated by the model. Such dependency…
Loss of trainability refers to a phenomenon in continual learning where parameter updates no longer make progress on the optimization objective, so accuracy stalls or degrades as the learning problem changes over time. In this paper, we…
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…