Related papers: Black-Box Generalization: Stability of Zeroth-Orde…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with ordinal feedback has emerged as a fundamental problem in modern machine learning systems, particularly in human-in-the-loop settings such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference…
In this paper, we propose a novel kernel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for large-scale supervised learning with general losses. Compared to traditional kernel SGD, our algorithm improves efficiency and scalability through an…
Despite its empirical success, deep learning still lacks a comprehensive theoretical understanding of model fitting and generalization. This paper proposes the probability distribution (PD) learning framework to analyze the optimization and…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has emerged as a promising alternative to gradient-based backpropagation methods, particularly for black-box optimization and large language model (LLM) fine-tuning. However, ZO methods often suffer from slow…
We study zeroth-order optimization where solutions must minimize a cost $d(s)$ while maintaining high probability under a complex generative prior $L(s)$ (e.g., a parameterized model). This reduces to sampling from a target distribution…
Gradient-free/zeroth-order methods for black-box convex optimization have been extensively studied in the last decade with the main focus on oracle calls complexity. In this paper, besides the oracle complexity, we focus also on iteration…
This paper considers the nonconvex nonsmooth problem in which the objective function is Lipschitz continuous. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access stochastic function value evaluations with heavy-tailed noise,…
We give a new separation result between the generalization performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and of full-batch gradient descent (GD) in the fundamental stochastic convex optimization model. While for SGD it is well-known that…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is one key technique for machine learning problems where gradient calculation is expensive or impossible. Several variance reduced ZO proximal algorithms have been proposed to speed up ZO optimization for…
We investigate the convergence rates and data sample sizes required for training a machine learning model using a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm, where data points are sampled based on either their loss value or uncertainty…
We consider the generalization error associated with stochastic gradient descent on a smooth convex function over a compact set. We show the first bound on the generalization error that vanishes when the number of iterations $T$ and the…
Exponential generalization bounds with near-tight rates have recently been established for uniformly stable learning algorithms. The notion of uniform stability, however, is stringent in the sense that it is invariant to the data-generating…
The generalization performance of a machine learning algorithm such as a neural network depends in a non-trivial way on the structure of the data distribution. To analyze the influence of data structure on test loss dynamics, we study an…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) is an important framework for stochastic optimization when gradients are unavailable or expensive to compute. A potential limitation of existing ZOO methods is the bias inherent in most gradient estimators…
Leveraging algorithmic stability to derive sharp generalization bounds is a classic and powerful approach in learning theory. Since Vapnik and Chervonenkis [1974] first formalized the idea for analyzing SVMs, it has been utilized to study…
We study the complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz objectives which are possibly neither smooth nor convex, using only noisy function evaluations. Recent works proposed several stochastic zero-order…
In this paper, we are concerned with differentially private {stochastic gradient descent (SGD)} algorithms in the setting of stochastic convex optimization (SCO). Most of the existing work requires the loss to be Lipschitz continuous and…
We derive an online learning algorithm with improved regret guarantees for `easy' loss sequences. We consider two types of `easiness': (a) stochastic loss sequences and (b) adversarial loss sequences with small effective range of the…
Generalization analyses of deep learning typically assume that the training converges to a fixed point. But, recent results indicate that in practice, the weights of deep neural networks optimized with stochastic gradient descent often…
Established approaches to obtain generalization bounds in data-driven optimization and machine learning mostly build on solutions from empirical risk minimization (ERM), which depend crucially on the functional complexity of the hypothesis…