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Motivated by broad applications in machine learning, we study the popular accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) algorithm for solving (possibly nonconvex) optimization problems. We characterize the finite-time performance of this…
We investigate the problem of minimizing the expectation of smooth nonconvex functions in a distributed setting with multiple parallel workers that are able to compute stochastic gradients. A significant challenge in this context is the…
The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…
Stochastic gradient algorithms have been the main focus of large-scale learning problems and they led to important successes in machine learning. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of learning rate and the amount of the…
We consider centralized distributed optimization in the classical federated learning setup, where $n$ workers jointly find an $\varepsilon$-stationary point of an $L$-smooth, $d$-dimensional nonconvex function $f$, having access only to…
Asynchronous distributed stochastic gradient descent methods have trouble converging because of stale gradients. A gradient update sent to a parameter server by a client is stale if the parameters used to calculate that gradient have since…
Structured non-convex learning problems, for which critical points have favorable statistical properties, arise frequently in statistical machine learning. Algorithmic convergence and statistical estimation rates are well-understood for…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the standard numerical method used to solve the core optimization problem for the vast majority of machine learning (ML) algorithms. In the context of large scale learning, as utilized by many Big Data…
Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…
We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…
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…
Modern supervised learning techniques, particularly those using deep nets, involve fitting high dimensional labelled data sets with functions containing very large numbers of parameters. Much of this work is empirical. Interesting phenomena…
The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…
We present a coupled system of ODEs which, when discretized with a constant time step/learning rate, recovers Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent algorithm. The same ODEs, when discretized with a decreasing learning rate, leads to novel…
In this work, we investigate the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when training a single-neuron autoencoder with linear or ReLU activation on orthogonal data. We show that for this non-convex problem, randomly initialized SGD…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…
Training time on large datasets for deep neural networks is the principal workflow bottleneck in a number of important applications of deep learning, such as object classification and detection in automatic driver assistance systems (ADAS).…
We establish the O($\frac{1}{k}$) convergence rate for distributed stochastic gradient methods that operate over strongly convex costs and random networks. The considered class of methods is standard each node performs a weighted average of…
In this paper, we focus on approaches to parallelizing stochastic gradient descent (SGD) wherein data is farmed out to a set of workers, the results of which, after a number of updates, are then combined at a central master node. Although…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…