Related papers: On Large Batch Training and Sharp Minima: A Fokker…

We propose a new framework, inspired by random matrix theory, for analyzing the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when both number of samples and dimensions are large. This framework applies to any fixed stepsize and the finite…

The dynamical stability of optimization methods at the vicinity of minima of the loss has recently attracted significant attention. For gradient descent (GD), stable convergence is possible only to minima that are sufficiently flat w.r.t.…

Previous works on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) often focus on its success. In this work, we construct worst-case optimization problems illustrating that, when not in the regimes that the previous works often assume, SGD can exhibit…

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…

In several experimental reports on nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was observed to prefer minimizers with flat basins in comparison to more deterministic methods, yet there is very…

Inverse problems in scientific computing often require optimization over infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. A commonly used solver in such settings is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where gradients are approximated using randomly…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is commonly modeled as a Langevin process, assuming that minibatch noise acts as Brownian motion. However, this approximation relies on a continuous-time limit and a sqrt(eta) noise scaling that does not…

Generalization is one of the most important problems in deep learning (DL). In the overparameterized regime in neural networks, there exist many low-loss solutions that fit the training data equally well. The key question is which solution…

A theoretical, and potentially also practical, problem with stochastic gradient descent is that trajectories may escape to infinity. In this note, we investigate uniform boundedness properties of iterates and function values along the…

We study the stochastic optimization problem from a continuous-time perspective, with a focus on the Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum (SGDM) method. We show that the trajectory of SGDM, despite its \emph{stochastic} nature,…

Recent findings by Cohen et al., 2021, demonstrate that when training neural networks using full-batch gradient descent with a step size of $\eta$, the largest eigenvalue $\lambda_{\max}$ of the full-batch Hessian consistently stabilizes…

The convergence behavior of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is highly sensitive to the batch size and learning rate settings. Recent theoretical studies have identified the existence of a critical batch size that minimizes…

Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a popular parallel optimization algorithm in machine learning. Most theoretical analysis on ASGD take a discrete view and prove upper bounds for their convergence rates. However, the…

We propose to optimize neural networks with a uniformly-distributed random learning rate. The associated stochastic gradient descent algorithm can be approximated by continuous stochastic equations and analyzed within the Fokker-Planck…

This paper proposes a thorough theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with non-increasing step sizes. First, we show that the recursion defining SGD can be provably approximated by solutions of a time inhomogeneous…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a workhorse algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems in data science and machine learning. Understanding the convergence of SGD is hence of fundamental importance. In this work we examine…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is of fundamental importance in deep learning. Despite its simplicity, elucidating its efficacy remains challenging. Conventionally, the success of SGD is ascribed to the stochastic gradient noise (SGN)…

We analyze the convergence behavior of stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) under dynamic learning-rate and batch-size schedules by introducing a novel and simpler Lyapunov function. We extend the existing theoretical framework…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…

We study the dynamics of a continuous-time model of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for the least-square problem. Indeed, pursuing the work of Li et al. (2019), we analyze Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) that model SGD either…