Related papers: Why is parameter averaging beneficial in SGD? An o…
This article examines the implicit regularization effect of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). We consider the case of SGD without replacement, the variant typically used to optimize large-scale neural networks. We analyze this algorithm in…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the main approach to optimizing neural networks. Several generalization properties of deep networks, such as convergence to a flatter minima, are believed to arise from SGD. This article explores the…
This paper considers the estimation of quantiles via a smoothed version of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. By smoothing the score function in the conventional SGD quantile algorithm, we achieve monotonicity in the quantile…
This paper formalizes and analyzes Gaussian smoothing applied to two prominent optimization methods: Stochastic Gradient Descent (GSmoothSGD) and Adam (GSmoothAdam) in deep learning. By attenuating small fluctuations, Gaussian smoothing…
We investigate the Randomized Stochastic Accelerated Gradient (RSAG) method, utilizing either constant or adaptive step sizes, for stochastic optimization problems with generalized smooth objective functions. Under relaxed affine variance…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a foundational algorithm for large-scale statistical learning and stochastic optimization. However, statistical inference based on SGD iterates remains challenging when stochastic gradients have infinite…
Graduated optimization is a global optimization technique that is used to minimize a multimodal nonconvex function by smoothing the objective function with noise and gradually refining the solution. This paper experimentally evaluates the…
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…
Consider a number of workers running SGD independently on the same pool of data and averaging the models every once in a while -- a common but not well understood practice. We study model averaging as a variance-reducing mechanism and…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a promising alternative optimizer to stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The originally-proposed motivation behind SAM was to bias neural networks towards flatter minima that are believed to…
This article introduces a novel family of optimization algorithms - Anisotropic Gaussian Smoothing Gradient Descent (AGS-GD), AGS-Stochastic Gradient Descent (AGS-SGD), and AGS-Adam - that employ anisotropic Gaussian smoothing to enhance…
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 a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…
We consider a variant of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a random learning rate and reveal its convergence properties. SGD is a widely used stochastic optimization algorithm in machine learning, especially deep learning. Numerous…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
We show that parametric models trained by a stochastic gradient method (SGM) with few iterations have vanishing generalization error. We prove our results by arguing that SGM is algorithmically stable in the sense of Bousquet and Elisseeff.…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an out-of-equilibrium algorithm used extensively to train artificial neural networks. However very little is known on to what extent SGD is crucial for to the success of this technology and, in…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performed in an asynchronous manner plays a crucial role in training large-scale machine learning models. However, the generalization performance of asynchronous delayed SGD, which is an essential metric…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of large-scale learning, yet classical analyses rely on assumptions that can be either too strong (bounded variance) or too coarse (uniform noise). The expected smoothness (ES) condition…