Related papers: Revisiting the Characteristics of Stochastic Gradi…
Continual learning, the ability of a model to adapt to an ongoing sequence of tasks without forgetting earlier ones, is a central goal of artificial intelligence. To better understand its underlying mechanisms, we study the limitations of…
Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…
In this work, we consider a wide two-layer neural network and study the behavior of its empirical weights under a dynamics set by a stochastic gradient descent along the quadratic loss with mini-batches and noise. Our goal is to prove a…
The tuning of stochastic gradient algorithms (SGAs) for optimization and sampling is often based on heuristics and trial-and-error rather than generalizable theory. We address this theory--practice gap by characterizing the large-sample…
Stochastic gradient methods are central to large-scale learning, but they treat mini-batch gradients as unbiased estimators, which classical decision theory shows are inadmissible in high dimensions. We formulate gradient computation as a…
We investigate high-dimensional sparse regression when both the noise and the design matrix exhibit heavy-tailed behavior. Standard algorithms typically fail in this regime, as heavy-tailed covariates distort the empirical risk geometry. We…
Numerous empirical evidence has corroborated that the noise plays a crucial rule in effective and efficient training of neural networks. The theory behind, however, is still largely unknown. This paper studies this fundamental problem…
This article suggests that deterministic Gradient Descent, which does not use any stochastic gradient approximation, can still exhibit stochastic behaviors. In particular, it shows that if the objective function exhibit multiscale…
Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large scale optimization of machine learning objective functions. Yet, its performance is greatly variable and heavily depends on the choice of the stepsizes. This has motivated a…
Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) ensures strong guarantees with regards to convergence in measure for sampling log-concave posterior distributions by adding noise to stochastic gradient iterates. Given the size of many practical…
Heavy-tailed noise is pervasive in modern machine learning applications, arising from data heterogeneity, outliers, and non-stationary stochastic environments. While second-order methods can significantly accelerate convergence in…
Recent works have shown that high probability metrics with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibit informativeness and in some cases advantage over the commonly adopted mean-square error-based ones. In this work we provide a formal…
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…
When training neural networks with full-batch gradient descent (GD) and step size $\eta$, the largest eigenvalue of the Hessian -- the sharpness $S(\boldsymbol{\theta})$ -- rises to $2/\eta$ and hovers there, a phenomenon termed the Edge of…
While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and variants have been surprisingly successful for training deep nets, several aspects of the optimization dynamics and generalization are still not well understood. In this paper, we present new…
Recent years have seen increased interest in performance guarantees of gradient descent algorithms for non-convex optimization. A number of works have uncovered that gradient noise plays a critical role in the ability of gradient descent…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
Adding noises to artificial neural network(ANN) has been shown to be able to improve robustness in previous work. In this work, we propose a new technique to compute the pathwise stochastic gradient estimate with respect to the standard…
Gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent are central to modern machine learning, yet their behavior under large step sizes remains theoretically unclear. Recent work suggests that acceleration often arises near the edge of…
In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants (Polyak Heavy-Ball and Nesterov) for tracking time-varying optima under strong convexity and smoothness. Our…