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Heavy-tailed noise in nonconvex stochastic optimization has garnered increasing research interest, as empirical studies, including those on training attention models, suggest it is a more realistic gradient noise condition. This paper…
In view of solving convex optimization problems with noisy gradient input, we analyze the asymptotic behavior of gradient-like flows under stochastic disturbances. Specifically, we focus on the widely studied class of mirror descent schemes…
Applying Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD) to training modern, large-scale neural networks such as transformer-based models is a challenging task, as the magnitude of noise added to the gradients at each iteration…
We study the convergence of Langevin-Simulated Annealing type algorithms with multiplicative noise, i.e. for $V : \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}$ a potential function to minimize, we consider the stochastic differential equation $dY_t = -…
In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus…
In this work, we consider the problem of a network of agents collectively minimizing a sum of convex functions. The agents in our setting can only access their local objective functions and exchange information with their immediate…
Neural networks, a central tool in machine learning, have demonstrated remarkable, high fidelity performance on image recognition and classification tasks. These successes evince an ability to accurately represent high dimensional…
We are interested in gradient-based Explicit Generative Modeling where samples can be derived from iterative gradient updates based on an estimate of the score function of the data distribution. Recent advances in Stochastic Gradient…
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…
A dynamical system is defined in terms of the gradient of a payoff function. Dynamical variables are of two types, ascent and descent. The ascent variables move in the direction of the gradient, while the descent variables move in the…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is an important alternative to the Langevin-type algorithms for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi(x) \propto \exp(-V(x))$. In the existing theory of Langevin-type algorithms…
In this paper we propose and analyze a novel multilevel version of Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). SVGD is a recent particle based variational inference method. For Bayesian inverse problems with computationally expensive…
Private optimization is a topic of major interest in machine learning, with differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) playing a key role in both theory and practice. Furthermore, DP-SGD is known to be a powerful tool in…
We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes and study the convergence rates of the natural policy gradient (NPG) and the Q-NPG methods with the log-linear policy class. Using the compatible function approximation…
In this paper, we propose a novel optimization algorithm for training machine learning models called Input Normalized Stochastic Gradient Descent (INSGD), inspired by the Normalized Least Mean Squares (NLMS) algorithm used in adaptive…
We propose mS2GD: a method incorporating a mini-batching scheme for improving the theoretical complexity and practical performance of semi-stochastic gradient descent (S2GD). We consider the problem of minimizing a strongly convex function…
It has been observed in a variety of contexts that gradient descent methods have great success in solving low-rank matrix factorization problems, despite the relevant problem formulation being non-convex. We tackle a particular instance of…
In this work, we theoretically investigate the generalization properties of neural networks (NN) trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm with large learning rates. Under such a training regime, our finding is that, the…
Numerous empirical evidences have corroborated the importance of noise in nonconvex optimization problems. The theory behind such empirical observations, however, is still largely unknown. This paper studies this fundamental problem through…
In recent years, even though Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are well-known for training neural networks, it suffers from limitations such as the lack of theoretical guarantees, vanishing gradients, and excessive…