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We study learning to learn for regression problems through the lens of hyperparameter tuning. We propose the Langevin Gradient Descent Algorithm (LGD), which approximates the mean of the posterior distribution defined by the loss function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Saumya Goyal , Rohith Rongali , Ritabrata Ray , Barnabás Póczos

In this paper we study the problem of convergence and generalization error bound of stochastic momentum for deep learning from the perspective of regularization. To do so, we first interpret momentum as solving an $\ell_2$-regularized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Ziming Zhang , Wenju Xu , Alan Sullivan

Theoretically understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in overparameterized models has led to the development of several optimization algorithms that are widely used in practice today. Recent work by~\citet{zou2021benign} provides…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Alexandru Meterez , Depen Morwani , Costin-Andrei Oncescu , Jingfeng Wu , Cengiz Pehlevan , Sham Kakade

We study mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints, in which a leader knows their own cost function, but lacks a model of the followers' response. Instead, the leader can only query this response at specific points. While this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Miriam Fischer , Dario Paccagnan

This work presents the convergence rate analysis of stochastic variants of the broad class of direct-search methods of directional type. It introduces an algorithm designed to optimize differentiable objective functions $f$ whose values can…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-09 Kwassi Joseph Dzahini

This paper is devoted to solving a convex stochastic optimization problem in a overparameterization setup for the case where the original gradient computation is not available, but an objective function value can be computed. For this class…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-14 Aleksandr Lobanov , Alexander Gasnikov

Rank-based zeroth-order (ZO) optimization -- which relies only on the ordering of function evaluations -- offers strong robustness to noise and monotone transformations, and underlies many successful algorithms such as CMA-ES, natural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Haishan Ye

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…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2023-06-21 Ning Yang , Chao Tang , Yuhai Tu

We propose a new framework for analyzing zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) from the perspective of \emph{oblivious randomized sketching}.In this framework, commonly used gradient estimators in ZOO-such as finite difference (FD) and random…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Haishan Ye , Xiangyu Chang , Xi Chen

While significant theoretical progress has been achieved, unveiling the generalization mystery of overparameterized neural networks still remains largely elusive. In this paper, we study the generalization behavior of shallow neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Yunwen Lei , Rong Jin , Yiming Ying

This paper is devoted to the study (common in many applications) of the black-box optimization problem, where the black-box represents a gradient-free oracle $\tilde{f} = f(x) + \xi$ providing the objective function value with some…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-08 Aleksandr Lobanov

An important open problem is the theoretically feasible acceleration of mini-batch SGD-type algorithms on quadratic problems with power-law spectrum. In the non-stochastic setting, the optimal exponent $\xi$ in the loss convergence $L_t\sim…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Dmitry Yarotsky , Maksim Velikanov

Zeroth-order optimization, which does not use derivative information, is one of the significant research areas in the field of mathematical optimization and machine learning. Although various studies have explored zeroth-order algorithms,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-16 Ryota Nozawa , Pierre-Louis Poirion , Akiko Takeda

Providing generalization guarantees for modern neural networks has been a crucial task in statistical learning. Recently, several studies have attempted to analyze the generalization error in such settings by using tools from fractal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-11 Benjamin Dupuis , George Deligiannidis , Umut Şimşekli

We study inductive matrix completion (matrix completion with side information) under an i.i.d. subgaussian noise assumption at a low noise regime, with uniform sampling of the entries. We obtain for the first time generalization bounds with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-19 Antoine Ledent , Rodrigo Alves , Yunwen Lei , Yann Guermeur , Marius Kloft

Black box discrete optimization (BBDO) appears in wide range of engineering tasks. Evolutionary or other BBDO approaches have been applied, aiming at automating necessary tuning of system parameters, such as hyper parameter tuning of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-19 Kouhei Nishida , Hernan Aguirre , Shota Saito , Shinichi Shirakawa , Youhei Akimoto

A matrix free and a low rank approximation preconditioner are proposed to accelerate the convergence of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by exploiting curvature information sampled from Hessian-vector products or finite differences of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-09 Xilin Li

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the algorithm we use to train neural networks. However, it remains poorly understood how the SGD navigates the highly nonlinear and degenerate loss landscape of a neural network. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Liu Ziyin , Hongchao Li , Masahito Ueda

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is popular in real-world applications that accessing the gradient information is expensive or unavailable. Recently, adaptive ZO methods that normalize gradient estimators by the empirical standard deviation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Haishan Ye , Luo Luo

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is one of the most widely used optimization algorithms in machine learning. While optimization properties of SGDM have been extensively studied in the literature, it remains insufficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yunwen Lei , Zimeng Wang , Xiaoming Yuan