Related papers: SketchySGD: Reliable Stochastic Optimization via R…
We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…
Modern machine learning is trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD), whose performance critically depends on how the learning rate (LR) is adjusted and decreased over time. Yet existing LR regimes may be intricate, or need to tune one…
The non-asymptotic analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) typically yields bounds that decompose into a bias term and a variance term. In this work, we focus on the bias component and study the extent to which SGD can match the…
Modern machine learning focuses on highly expressive models that are able to fit or interpolate the data completely, resulting in zero training loss. For such models, we show that the stochastic gradients of common loss functions satisfy a…
It is known that the standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method, as well as accelerated and adaptive SGD optimization methods such as the Adam optimizer fail to converge if the learning rates do not converge to zero (as,…
The existing analysis of asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) degrades dramatically when any delay is large, giving the impression that performance depends primarily on the delay. On the contrary, we prove much better guarantees…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the main approach for training deep networks: it moves towards the optimum of the cost function by iteratively updating the parameters of a model in the direction of the gradient of the loss evaluated on…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
Existing approaches to federated learning suffer from a communication bottleneck as well as convergence issues due to sparse client participation. In this paper we introduce a novel algorithm, called FetchSGD, to overcome these challenges.…
Although stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants (e.g., stochastic momentum methods, AdaGrad) are the choice of algorithms for solving non-convex problems (especially deep learning), there still remain big gaps between the…
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…
Inspired by the structure of spherical harmonics, we propose the truncated kernel stochastic gradient descent (T-kernel SGD) algorithm with a least-square loss function for spherical data fitting. T-kernel SGD introduces a novel…
Stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) is a popular variance reduction technique for accelerating stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We provide a first analysis of the method for solving a class of linear inverse problems in the lens…
Sign-based optimization algorithms, such as SignSGD, have garnered significant attention for their remarkable performance in distributed learning and training large foundation models. Despite their empirical superiority, SignSGD is known to…
We develop the mathematical foundations of the stochastic modified equations (SME) framework for analyzing the dynamics of stochastic gradient algorithms, where the latter is approximated by a class of stochastic differential equations with…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…
In this paper, we investigate the impact of stochasticity and large stepsizes on the implicit regularisation of gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) over diagonal linear networks. We prove the convergence of GD and…
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…
Stochastic nested optimization, including stochastic compositional, min-max and bilevel optimization, is gaining popularity in many machine learning applications. While the three problems share the nested structure, existing works often…
This work characterizes the benefits of averaging schemes widely used in conjunction with stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In particular, this work provides a sharp analysis of: (1) mini-batching, a method of averaging many samples of a…