Related papers: Chaotic Regularization and Heavy-Tailed Limits for…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
Driven by the empirical success and wide use of deep neural networks, understanding the generalization performance of overparameterized models has become an increasingly popular question. To this end, there has been substantial effort to…
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…
We study large deviation upper bounds and mean-squared error (MSE) guarantees of a general framework of nonlinear stochastic gradient methods in the online setting, in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. Unlike existing works that rely on…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibits strong algorithmic regularization effects in practice, which has been hypothesized to play an important role in the generalization of modern machine learning approaches. In this work, we seek to…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variations have been effectively used to optimize neural network models. However, with the rapid growth of big data and deep learning, SGD is no longer the most suitable choice due to its…
Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) has been widely adopted in deep learning to provide rigorously defined privacy, which requires gradient clipping to bound the maximum norm of individual gradients and additive…
Gradient descent (GD) is a collection of continuous optimization methods that have achieved immeasurable success in practice. Owing to data science applications, GD with diminishing step sizes has become a prominent variant. While this…
Differential privacy (DP) has become a prevalent privacy model in a wide range of machine learning tasks, especially after the debut of DP-SGD. However, DP-SGD, which directly perturbs gradients in the training iterations, fails to mitigate…
Stochastic gradient descent is one of the most successful approaches for solving large-scale problems, especially in machine learning and statistics. At each iteration, it employs an unbiased estimator of the full gradient computed from one…
The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the classical central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made for…
Optimization algorithms are pivotal in advancing various scientific and industrial fields but often encounter obstacles such as trapping in local minima, saddle points, and plateaus (flat regions), which makes the convergence to reasonable…
Multi-epoch, small-batch, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been the method of choice for learning with large over-parameterized models. A popular theory for explaining why SGD works well in practice is that the algorithm has an…
We propose a new framework, inspired by random matrix theory, for analyzing the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when both number of samples and dimensions are large. This framework applies to any fixed stepsize and the finite…
The momentum acceleration technique is widely adopted in many optimization algorithms. However, there is no theoretical answer on how the momentum affects the generalization performance of the optimization algorithms. This paper studies…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used algorithms for large scale optimization problems. While classical theoretical analysis of SGD for convex problems studies (suffix) \emph{averages} of iterates and obtains…
Randomized coordinate descent (RCD) is a popular optimization algorithm with wide applications in solving various machine learning problems, which motivates a lot of theoretical analysis on its convergence behavior. As a comparison, there…
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…
In overparametrized models, the noise in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) implicitly regularizes the optimization trajectory and determines which local minimum SGD converges to. Motivated by empirical studies that demonstrate that training…
Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is known to have poorer training and test performance on large neural networks, compared to ordinary stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In this paper, we perform a detailed study…