Related papers: The Directional Bias Helps Stochastic Gradient Des…
We study to what extent may stochastic gradient descent (SGD) be understood as a "conventional" learning rule that achieves generalization performance by obtaining a good fit to training data. We consider the fundamental stochastic convex…
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…
We propose a novel analysis of the Decentralized Stochastic Gradient Descent (DSGD) algorithm with constant step size, interpreting the iterates of the algorithm as a Markov chain. We show that DSGD converges to a stationary distribution,…
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 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…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the most popular of the machine learning methods applied to training deep neural networks (DNN) today. It has recently been demonstrated that SGD can be statistically biased so that certain…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) was recently proposed as a general purpose nonparametric variational inference algorithm [Liu & Wang, NIPS 2016]: it minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the target distribution and its…
The interplay between optimization and privacy has become a central theme in privacy-preserving machine learning. Noisy stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has emerged as a cornerstone algorithm, particularly in large-scale settings. These…
Empirically, it has been observed that adding momentum to Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) accelerates the convergence of the algorithm. However, the literature has been rather pessimistic, even in the case of convex functions, about the…
The gradient descent (GD) method -- is a fundamental and likely the most popular optimization algorithm in machine learning (ML), with a history traced back to a paper in 1847 (Cauchy, 1847). It was studied under various assumptions,…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…
The gradient descent (GD) has been one of the most common optimizer in machine learning. In particular, the loss landscape of a neural network is typically sharpened during the initial phase of training, making the training dynamics hover…
In this paper we introduce a unified analysis of a large family of variants of proximal stochastic gradient descent ({\tt SGD}) which so far have required different intuitions, convergence analyses, have different applications, and which…
This paper proposes a novel approach to adaptive step sizes in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by utilizing quantities that we have identified as numerically traceable -- the Lipschitz constant for gradients and a concept of the local…
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…
In this work, we reveal a strong implicit bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that drives overly expressive networks to much simpler subnetworks, thereby dramatically reducing the number of independent parameters, and improving…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been the method of choice for learning large-scale non-convex models. While a general analysis of when SGD works has been elusive, there has been a lot of recent progress in understanding the…
We consider the optimization of a smooth and strongly convex objective using constant step-size stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and study its properties through the prism of Markov chains. We show that, for unbiased gradient estimates…