Related papers: Towards Statistical and Computational Complexities…
This paper revisits the Polyak step size schedule for convex optimization problems, proving that a simple variant of it simultaneously attains near optimal convergence rates for the gradient descent algorithm, for all ranges of strong…
We consider the problem of optimising the expected value of a loss functional over a nonlinear model class of functions, assuming that we have only access to realisations of the gradient of the loss. This is a classical task in statistics,…
In this paper, we revisit a classical adaptive stepsize strategy for gradient descent: the Polyak stepsize (PolyakGD), originally proposed in Polyak (1969). We study the convergence behavior of PolyakGD from two perspectives: tight…
It is known that when the statistical models are singular, i.e., the Fisher information matrix at the true parameter is degenerate, the fixed step-size gradient descent algorithm takes polynomial number of steps in terms of the sample size…
Most prior work on the convergence of gradient descent (GD) for overparameterized neural networks relies on strong assumptions on the step size (infinitesimal), the hidden-layer width (infinite), or the initialization (large, spectral,…
We analyze the complexity of biased stochastic gradient methods (SGD), where individual updates are corrupted by deterministic, i.e. biased error terms. We derive convergence results for smooth (non-convex) functions and give improved rates…
When training neural networks with low-precision computation, rounding errors often cause stagnation or are detrimental to the convergence of the optimizers; in this paper we study the influence of rounding errors on the convergence of the…
In 1963, Polyak proposed a simple condition that is sufficient to show a global linear convergence rate for gradient descent. This condition is a special case of the \L{}ojasiewicz inequality proposed in the same year, and it does not…
This paper develops a comprehensive convergence analysis for generic classes of descent algorithms in nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization under several conditions of the Polyak-\L ojasiewicz-Kurdyka (PLK) type. Along other results, we…
We propose a stochastic variant of the classical Polyak step-size (Polyak, 1987) commonly used in the subgradient method. Although computing the Polyak step-size requires knowledge of the optimal function values, this information is readily…
Policy gradients methods apply to complex, poorly understood, control problems by performing stochastic gradient descent over a parameterized class of polices. Unfortunately, even for simple control problems solvable by standard dynamic…
In large-scale learning algorithms, the momentum term is usually included in the stochastic sub-gradient method to improve the learning speed because it can navigate ravines efficiently to reach a local minimum. However, step-size and…
The Polyak stepsize has been proven to be a fundamental stepsize in convex optimization, giving near optimal gradient descent rates across a wide range of assumptions. The universality of the Polyak stepsize has also inspired many…
Generalization and optimization guarantees on the population loss often rely on uniform convergence based analysis, typically based on the Rademacher complexity of the predictors. The rich representation power of modern models has led to…
Using gradient descent (GD) with fixed or decaying step-size is a standard practice in unconstrained optimization problems. However, when the loss function is only locally convex, such a step-size schedule artificially slows GD down as it…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for strongly convex functions converges at the rate $\bO(1/k)$. However, achieving good results in practice requires tuning the parameters (for example the learning rate) of the algorithm. In this paper we…
Stochastic gradient methods with momentum are widely used in applications and at the core of optimization subroutines in many popular machine learning libraries. However, their sample complexities have not been obtained for problems beyond…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is one of the most widely used optimization algorithms in machine learning. While optimization properties of SGDM have been extensively studied in the literature, it remains insufficiently…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a foundational algorithm for large-scale statistical learning and stochastic optimization. However, statistical inference based on SGD iterates remains challenging when stochastic gradients have infinite…
In this paper we introduce two novel generalizations of the theory for gradient descent type methods in the proximal setting. First, we introduce the proportion function, which we further use to analyze all known (and many new)…