Related papers: Large deviations rates for stochastic gradient des…
While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…
When using stochastic gradient descent to solve large-scale machine learning problems, a common practice of data processing is to shuffle the training data, partition the data across multiple machines if needed, and then perform several…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely adopted iterative method for optimizing differentiable objective functions. In this paper, we propose and discuss a novel approach to scale up SGD in applications involving non-convex functions…
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…
We study high-probability convergence in online learning, in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. To combat the heavy tails, a general framework of nonlinear SGD methods is considered, subsuming several popular nonlinearities like sign,…
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…
The classical statistical learning theory implies that fitting too many parameters leads to overfitting and poor performance. That modern deep neural networks generalize well despite a large number of parameters contradicts this finding and…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
We study a distributed consensus-based stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and show that the rate of convergence involves the spectral properties of two matrices: the standard spectral gap of a weight matrix from the network…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…
We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…
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 prove quantitative convergence rates at which discrete Langevin-like processes converge to the invariant distribution of a related stochastic differential equation. We study the setup where the additive noise can be non-Gaussian and…
The noise in stochastic gradient descent (SGD), caused by minibatch sampling, is poorly understood despite its practical importance in deep learning. This work presents the first systematic study of the SGD noise and fluctuations close to a…
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 investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method where the step size lies within a banded region instead of being given by a fixed formula. The optimal convergence rate under mild conditions and large initial step size is proved.…
It has long been argued that minibatch stochastic gradient descent can generalize better than large batch gradient descent in deep neural networks. However recent papers have questioned this claim, arguing that this effect is simply a…
Most results on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the convex and smooth setting are presented under the form of bounds on the ergodic function value gap. It is an open question whether bounds can be derived directly on the last iterate…
The performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) depends critically on how learning rates are tuned and decreased over time. We propose a method to automatically adjust multiple learning rates so as to minimize the expected error at any…