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Deep learning, in the form of artificial neural networks, has achieved remarkable practical success in recent years, for a variety of difficult machine learning applications. However, a theoretical explanation for this remains a major open…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their action selections so as to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms require solving a nonconvex and…
We revisit the use of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for solving convex optimization problems that serve as highly popular convex relaxations for many important low-rank matrix recovery problems such as \textit{matrix completion},…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
We study the gradient-based training of large-depth residual networks (ResNets) from standard random initializations. We show that infinite-depth ResNets behave as if they were infinitely wide, regardless of their actual width. More…
A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…
In this thesis we develop a novel framework to study smooth and strongly convex optimization algorithms, both deterministic and stochastic. Focusing on quadratic functions we are able to examine optimization algorithms as a recursive…
Deep learning models are often successfully trained using gradient descent, despite the worst case hardness of the underlying non-convex optimization problem. The key question is then under what conditions can one prove that optimization…
Deep learning experiments by Cohen et al. [2021] using deterministic Gradient Descent (GD) revealed an Edge of Stability (EoS) phase when learning rate (LR) and sharpness (i.e., the largest eigenvalue of Hessian) no longer behave as in…
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…
State-of-the-art training algorithms for deep learning models are based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Recently, many variations have been explored: perturbing parameters for better accuracy (such as in Extragradient), limiting SGD…
The loss surface of deep neural networks has recently attracted interest in the optimization and machine learning communities as a prime example of high-dimensional non-convex problem. Some insights were recently gained using spin glass…
Training neural networks requires optimizing a loss function that may be highly irregular, and in particular neither convex nor smooth. Popular training algorithms are based on stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for which…
We propose graph-dependent implicit regularisation strategies for distributed stochastic subgradient descent (Distributed SGD) for convex problems in multi-agent learning. Under the standard assumptions of convexity, Lipschitz continuity,…
Multi-layer neural networks are among the most powerful models in machine learning, yet the fundamental reasons for this success defy mathematical understanding. Learning a neural network requires to optimize a non-convex high-dimensional…
We demonstrate that applying an eventual decay to the learning rate (LR) in empirical risk minimization (ERM), where the mean-squared-error loss is minimized using standard gradient descent (GD) for training a two-layer neural network with…
Explaining the generalization characteristics of deep learning is an emerging topic in advanced machine learning. There are several unanswered questions about how learning under stochastic optimization really works and why certain…
We study the dynamics of optimization and the generalization properties of one-hidden layer neural networks with quadratic activation function in the over-parametrized regime where the layer width $m$ is larger than the input dimension $d$.…
We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with gradient clipping on convex functions under a generalized smoothness assumption called $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness. Using gradient clipping, we establish a high probability convergence rate that…