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In recent years, various notions of capacity and complexity have been proposed for characterizing the generalization properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in deep learning. Some of the popular notions that correlate well with the…
Recent studies have shown that gradient descent (GD) can achieve improved generalization when its dynamics exhibits a chaotic behavior. However, to obtain the desired effect, the step-size should be chosen sufficiently large, a task which…
There is an increasing realization that algorithmic inductive biases are central in preventing overfitting; empirically, we often see a benign overfitting phenomenon in overparameterized settings for natural learning algorithms, such as…
Recent studies have shown that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic optimization and that the heaviness of the tails have links to the generalization error. While these studies have shed light on interesting aspects of the generalization…
We study a scalable alternative to robust gradient descent (RGD) techniques that can be used when the gradients can be heavy-tailed, though this will be unknown to the learner. The core technique is simple: instead of trying to robustly…
Recent theoretical studies have shown that heavy-tails can emerge in stochastic optimization due to `multiplicative noise', even under surprisingly simple settings, such as linear regression with Gaussian data. While these studies have…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been widely used in machine learning due to its computational efficiency and favorable generalization properties. Recently, it has been empirically demonstrated that the gradient noise in several deep…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants enable modern artificial intelligence. However, theoretical understanding lags far behind their empirical success. It is widely believed that SGD has a curious ability to avoid sharp local…
A particular direction of recent advance about stochastic deep-learning algorithms has been about uncovering a rather mysterious heavy-tailed nature of the stationary distribution of these algorithms, even when the data distribution is not…
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…
It has repeatedly been observed that loss minimization by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) leads to heavy-tailed distributions of neural network parameters. Here, we analyze a continuous diffusion approximation of SGD, called homogenized…
The study of tail behaviour of SGD-induced processes has been attracting a lot of interest, due to offering strong guarantees with respect to individual runs of an algorithm. While many works provide high-probability guarantees, quantifying…
Real-world data is laden with outlying values. The challenge for machine learning is that the learner typically has no prior knowledge of whether the feedback it receives (losses, gradients, etc.) will be heavy-tailed or not. In this work,…
Despite its success in a wide range of applications, characterizing the generalization properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in non-convex deep learning problems is still an important challenge. While modeling the trajectories of…
We study scalable alternatives to robust gradient descent (RGD) techniques that can be used when the losses and/or gradients can be heavy-tailed, though this will be unknown to the learner. The core technique is simple: instead of trying to…
Understanding the generalization abilities of modern machine learning algorithms has been a major research topic over the past decades. In recent years, the learning dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) have been related to…
We investigate a way of comparing and classifying tails of random variables. Our approach extends the notion of classical indices, such as exponential and moment indices, which are widely used measuring heaviness of tail functions. A…
While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the major workhorses in machine learning, the learning properties of many practically used variants are poorly understood. In this paper, we consider least squares learning in a…
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…