Related papers: Almost Sure Saddle Avoidance of Stochastic Gradien…
Recent studies have provided both empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in various scenarios. Such heavy tails potentially result in iterates with diverging…
Smooth, non-convex optimization problems on Riemannian manifolds occur in machine learning as a result of orthonormality, rank or positivity constraints. First- and second-order necessary optimality conditions state that the Riemannian…
We study to what extent may stochastic gradient descent (SGD) be understood as a "conventional" learning rule that achieves generalization performance by obtaining a good fit to training data. We consider the fundamental stochastic convex…
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…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…
Recent works have shown that high probability metrics with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibit informativeness and in some cases advantage over the commonly adopted mean-square error-based ones. In this work we provide a formal…
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…
Momentum methods, such as heavy ball method~(HB) and Nesterov's accelerated gradient method~(NAG), have been widely used in training neural networks by incorporating the history of gradients into the current updating process. In practice,…
In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…
In the era of large-scale neural network models, optimization algorithms often struggle with generalization due to an overreliance on training loss. One key insight widely accepted in the machine learning community is the idea that wide…
Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in the context of deep neural networks has raised lots of concerns recently. Along this line, we study a general form of gradient based optimization dynamics with unbiased…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are widely used and highly effective optimization methods in machine learning, especially for neural network training. By using a single datum or a small subset of the data, selected…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants (Polyak Heavy-Ball and Nesterov) for tracking time-varying optima under strong convexity and smoothness. Our…
We consider stochastic strongly-convex-strongly-concave (SCSC) saddle point (SP) problems which frequently arise in applications ranging from distributionally robust learning to game theory and fairness in machine learning. We focus on the…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise. We analyze preconditioned SGD in the geometry induced by a symmetric positive definite matrix $\mathbf{M}$,…
Momentum Stochastic Gradient Descent (MSGD) algorithm has been widely applied to many nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, e.g., training deep neural networks, variational Bayesian inference, and etc. Despite its empirical…
We propose and analyze several stochastic gradient algorithms for finding stationary points or local minimum in nonconvex, possibly with nonsmooth regularizer, finite-sum and online optimization problems. First, we propose a simple proximal…
Stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) and its variants have been the dominating optimization methods in machine learning. Compared to SGD with small-batch training, SGD with large-batch training can better utilize the computational power of…
Gradient clipping is a commonly used technique to stabilize the training process of neural networks. A growing body of studies has shown that gradient clipping is a promising technique for dealing with the heavy-tailed behavior that emerged…