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When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…
Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular tool in training large-scale machine learning models. Its performance, however, is highly variable, depending crucially on the choice of the step sizes. Accordingly, a variety of strategies for…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…
We consider the minimization of an objective function given access to unbiased estimates of its gradient through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with constant step-size. While the detailed analysis was only performed for quadratic…
The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the classical central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made for…
Heavy-tail phenomena in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have been reported in several empirical studies. Experimental evidence in previous works suggests a strong interplay between the heaviness of the tails and generalization behavior of…
Normalising flows are tractable probabilistic models that leverage the power of deep learning to describe a wide parametric family of distributions, all while remaining trainable using maximum likelihood. We discuss how these methods can be…
Recent research shows that modern deep learning models achieve high predictive accuracy partly by memorizing individual training samples. Such memorization raises serious privacy concerns, motivating the widespread adoption of…
Stochastic-gradient MCMC methods enable scalable Bayesian posterior sampling but often suffer from sensitivity to minibatch size and gradient noise. To address this, we propose Stochastic Gradient Lattice Random Walk (SGLRW), an extension…
The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the \emph{classical} central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made…
The empirical success of deep learning is often attributed to SGD's mysterious ability to avoid sharp local minima in the loss landscape, as sharp minima are known to lead to poor generalization. Recently, empirical evidence of heavy-tailed…
Neural network compression techniques have become increasingly popular as they can drastically reduce the storage and computation requirements for very large networks. Recent empirical studies have illustrated that even simple pruning…
The problem of posterior inference is central to Bayesian statistics and a wealth of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have been proposed to obtain asymptotically correct samples from the posterior. As datasets in applications grow…
In the real world, long-tailed data distributions are prevalent, making it challenging for models to effectively learn and classify tail classes. However, we discover that in the field of drug chemistry, certain tail classes exhibit higher…
In a broad class of reinforcement learning applications, stochastic rewards have heavy-tailed distributions, which lead to infinite second-order moments for stochastic (semi)gradients in policy evaluation and direct policy optimization. In…
Structured non-convex learning problems, for which critical points have favorable statistical properties, arise frequently in statistical machine learning. Algorithmic convergence and statistical estimation rates are well-understood for…
Unraveling the reasons behind the remarkable success and exceptional generalization capabilities of deep neural networks presents a formidable challenge. Recent insights from random matrix theory, specifically those concerning the spectral…
Stochastic gradients closely relate to both optimization and generalization of deep neural networks (DNNs). Some works attempted to explain the success of stochastic optimization for deep learning by the arguably heavy-tail properties of…
Many popular learning-rate schedules for deep neural networks combine a decaying trend with local perturbations that attempt to escape saddle points and bad local minima. We derive convergence guarantees for bandwidth-based step-sizes, a…