Related papers: On Large Batch Training and Sharp Minima: A Fokker…
We showcase important features of the dynamics of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the training of neural networks. We present empirical observations that commonly used large step sizes (i) lead the iterates to jump from one side of…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…
While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of large-scale learning, yet classical analyses rely on assumptions that can be either too strong (bounded variance) or too coarse (uniform noise). The expected smoothness (ES) condition…
Structured non-convex learning problems, for which critical points have favorable statistical properties, arise frequently in statistical machine learning. Algorithmic convergence and statistical estimation rates are well-understood for…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…
Recent work has argued that stochastic gradient descent can approximate the Bayesian uncertainty in model parameters near local minima. In this work we develop a similar correspondence for minibatch natural gradient descent (NGD). We prove…
This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm's convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
We analyze in a closed form the learning dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for a single-layer neural network classifying a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture where each cluster is assigned one of two labels. This problem provides…
A popular method of force-directed graph drawing is multidimensional scaling using graph-theoretic distances as input. We present an algorithm to minimize its energy function, known as stress, by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to…
We analyze a batched variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with weighted sampling distribution for smooth and non-smooth objective functions. We show that by distributing the batches computationally, a significant speedup in the…
We present a convergence rate analysis for biased stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where individual gradient updates are corrupted by computation errors. We develop stochastic quadratic constraints to formulate a small linear matrix…
We analyze the variance of stochastic gradients along negative curvature directions in certain non-convex machine learning models and show that stochastic gradients exhibit a strong component along these directions. Furthermore, we show…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of strong approximation of the solutions of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) when the drift coefficient is given in integral form. We investigate its upper error bounds, in terms of the…
Recently, Loizou et al. (2021), proposed and analyzed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic Polyak stepsize (SPS). The proposed SPS comes with strong convergence guarantees and competitive performance; however, it has two main…
In this paper we revisit the DP stochastic convex optimization (SCO) problem. For convex smooth losses, it is well-known that the canonical DP-SGD (stochastic gradient descent) achieves the optimal rate of $O\left(\frac{LR}{\sqrt{n}} +…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been increasingly popular in Bayesian learning due to its ability to deal with large data. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples from a discretized-time Markov chain to…
We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for composite optimization problems with $N$ sequential operators subject to perturbations in both the forward and backward passes. Unlike classical analyses that treat gradient noise as additive…
Mini-batch stochastic gradient descent and variants thereof have become standard for large-scale empirical risk minimization like the training of neural networks. These methods are usually used with a constant batch size chosen by simple…