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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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…
Injecting artificial noise into gradient descent (GD) is commonly employed to improve the performance of machine learning models. Usually, uncorrelated noise is used in such perturbed gradient descent (PGD) methods. It is, however, not…
Gradient optimization algorithms using epochs, that is those based on stochastic gradient descent without replacement (SGDo), are predominantly used to train machine learning models in practice. However, the mathematical theory of SGDo and…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
Differentially private learning algorithms inject noise into the learning process. While the most common private learning algorithm, DP-SGD, adds independent Gaussian noise in each iteration, recent work on matrix factorization mechanisms…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the workhorse algorithm of deep learning technology. At each step of the training phase, a mini batch of samples is drawn from the training dataset and the weights of the neural network are adjusted…
Decentralized optimization is typically studied under the assumption of noise-free transmission. However, real-world scenarios often involve the presence of noise due to factors such as additive white Gaussian noise channels or…
Graduated optimization is a global optimization technique that is used to minimize a multimodal nonconvex function by smoothing the objective function with noise and gradually refining the solution. This paper experimentally evaluates the…
Although stochastic optimization is central to modern machine learning, the precise mechanisms underlying its success, and in particular, the precise role of the stochasticity, still remain unclear. Modelling stochastic optimization…
The representation of functions by artificial neural networks depends on a large number of parameters in a non-linear fashion. Suitable parameters of these are found by minimizing a 'loss functional', typically by stochastic gradient…
In the machine learning literature stochastic gradient descent has recently been widely discussed for its purported implicit regularization properties. Much of the theory, that attempts to clarify the role of noise in stochastic gradient…
In this paper, we provide a theoretical study of noise geometry for minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a phenomenon where noise aligns favorably with the geometry of local landscape. We propose two metrics, derived from analyzing…
Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in the context of deep neural networks has raised lots of concerns recently. Along this line, we study a general form of gradient based optimization dynamics with unbiased…
Using quasi-Newton methods in stochastic optimization is not a trivial task given the difficulty of extracting curvature information from the noisy gradients. Moreover, pre-conditioning noisy gradient observations tend to amplify the noise.…
For nonconvex objective functions, including those found in training deep neural networks, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum is said to converge faster and have better generalizability than SGD without momentum. In particular,…
Modern machine learning algorithms aim to extract fine-grained information from data to provide accurate predictions, which often conflicts with the goal of privacy protection. This paper addresses the practical and theoretical importance…
A central issue in machine learning is how to train models on sensitive user data. Industry has widely adopted a simple algorithm: Stochastic Gradient Descent with noise (a.k.a. Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics). However, foundational…
Recent years have seen increased interest in performance guarantees of gradient descent algorithms for non-convex optimization. A number of works have uncovered that gradient noise plays a critical role in the ability of gradient descent…
Understanding the implicit bias of training algorithms is of crucial importance in order to explain the success of overparametrised neural networks. In this paper, we study the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent over diagonal linear…