Related papers: How and When Random Feedback Works: A Case Study o…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a recent training method that relies on worst-case weight perturbations which significantly improves generalization in various settings. We argue that the existing justifications for the success of SAM…
This paper presents a novel gradient compression method for federated learning (FL) in wireless systems. The proposed method centers on a low-rank matrix factorization strategy for local gradient compression that is based on one iteration…
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as one of the most effective, computationally tractable fine-tuning approaches for training Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs). LoRA accomplishes this by freezing the…
This work studies approximation based on single-hidden-layer feedforward and recurrent neural networks with randomly generated internal weights. These methods, in which only the last layer of weights and a few hyperparameters are optimized,…
Low-rank approximation techniques have become the de facto standard for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their reduced computational and memory requirements. This paper investigates the effectiveness of these methods in…
A prevalent belief among optimization specialists is that linear convergence of gradient descent is contingent on the function growing quadratically away from its minimizers. In this work, we argue that this belief is inaccurate. We show…
Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is a recently proposed method that minimizes the sharpness of the training loss of a neural network. While its generalization improvement is well-known and is the primary motivation, we uncover an…
We study the implicit bias towards low-rank weight matrices when training neural networks (NN) with Weight Decay (WD). We prove that when a ReLU NN is sufficiently trained with Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and WD, its weight matrix is…
Alternating minimization represents a widely applicable and empirically successful approach for finding low-rank matrices that best fit the given data. For example, for the problem of low-rank matrix completion, this method is believed to…
The brain processes information through many layers of neurons. This deep architecture is representationally powerful, but it complicates learning by making it hard to identify the responsible neurons when a mistake is made. In machine…
Fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained models is prohibitively expensive in terms of computation and memory costs. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a popular Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method, offers an efficient solution by optimizing…
This paper presents a novel optimization method for maximizing generalization over tasks in meta-learning. The goal of meta-learning is to learn a model for an agent adapting rapidly when presented with previously unseen tasks. Tasks are…
Low Rank Approximation is among most fundamental subjects of numerical linear algebra having important applications to various areas of modern computing and %they range from machine learning theory and %neural networks to data mining and…
Preference-based alignment like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) learns from pairwise preferences, yet the labels are often noisy and inconsistent. Existing uncertainty-aware approaches weight preferences, but ignore a more…
Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…
Herein the topics of (natural) gradient descent, data decorrelation, and approximate methods for backpropagation are brought into a common discussion. Natural gradient descent illuminates how gradient vectors, pointing at directions of…
In this note, we investigate how well we can reconstruct the best rank-$r$ approximation of a large matrix from a small number of its entries. We show that even if a data matrix is of full rank and cannot be approximated well by a low-rank…
The brain prepares for learning even before interacting with the environment, by refining and optimizing its structures through spontaneous neural activity that resembles random noise. However, the mechanism of such a process has yet to be…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit a surprising structure in their final layer known as neural collapse (NC), and a growing body of works has currently investigated the propagation of neural collapse to earlier layers of DNNs -- a…
Low-rank structure is a common implicit assumption in many modern reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. For instance, reward-free and goal-conditioned RL methods often presume that the successor measure admits a low-rank representation.…