Related papers: Almost Sure Saddle Avoidance of Stochastic Gradien…

In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…

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 consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…

In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus…

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…

Nonconvex optimization underlies many modern machine learning and control tasks, where saddle points pose the dominant obstacle to reliable convergence in high-dimensional settings. Escaping these saddle points deterministically using…

Recent work has shown that stochastically perturbed gradient methods can efficiently escape strict saddle points of smooth functions. We extend this body of work to nonsmooth optimization, by analyzing an inexact analogue of a…

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is most widely used for deep neural network (DNN) training. However, the method does not always converge to a flat minimum of the loss surface that can demonstrate high generalization capability.…

Distributed training of massive machine learning models, in particular deep neural networks, via Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is becoming commonplace. Several families of communication-reduction methods, such as quantization,…

Stochastic gradient optimization methods are broadly used to minimize non-convex smooth objective functions, for instance when training deep neural networks. However, theoretical guarantees on the asymptotic behaviour of these methods…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…

Stochastic gradient methods are among the most important algorithms in training machine learning problems. While classical assumptions such as strong convexity allow a simple analysis they are rarely satisfied in applications. In recent…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its Ruppert-Polyak averaged variant (ASGD) lie at the heart of modern large-scale learning, yet their theoretical properties in high-dimensional settings are rarely understood. In this paper, we provide…

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…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the most important single algorithm in modern machine learning. Although SGD with unbiased gradient estimators has been studied extensively over at least half a century, SGD variants relying on…

Recent work has established an empirically successful framework for adapting learning rates for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). This effectively removes all needs for tuning, while automatically reducing learning rates over time on…

Past research has indicated that the covariance of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) error done via minibatching plays a critical role in determining its regularization and escape from low potential points. Motivated by some new…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…

The massive size of modern neural networks has motivated substantial recent interest in neural network quantization. We introduce Stochastic Markov Gradient Descent (SMGD), a discrete optimization method applicable to training quantized…

We propose a projected semi-stochastic gradient descent method with mini-batch for improving both the theoretical complexity and practical performance of the general stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). We are able to prove linear…