Related papers: How to escape sharp minima with random perturbatio…

This paper proposes a stochastic variant of a classic algorithm---the cubic-regularized Newton method [Nesterov and Polyak 2006]. The proposed algorithm efficiently escapes saddle points and finds approximate local minima for general…

Stochastic gradient descent is a simple approach to find the local minima of a cost function whose evaluations are corrupted by noise. In this paper, we develop a procedure extending stochastic gradient descent algorithms to the case where…

We propose a family of nonconvex optimization algorithms that are able to save gradient and negative curvature computations to a large extent, and are guaranteed to find an approximate local minimum with improved runtime complexity. At the…

We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…

We consider Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a gradient-based optimization method for deep networks that has exhibited performance improvements on image and language prediction problems. We show that when SAM is applied with a convex…

We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…

Due to the highly non-convex nature of large-scale robust parameter estimation, avoiding poor local minima is challenging in real-world applications where input data is contaminated by a large or unknown fraction of outliers. In this paper,…

We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…

Gradient-based algorithms are effective for many machine learning tasks, but despite ample recent effort and some progress, it often remains unclear why they work in practice in optimising high-dimensional non-convex functions and why they…

Gradient-based minimax optimal algorithms have greatly promoted the development of continuous optimization and machine learning. One seminal work due to Yurii Nesterov [Nes83a] established $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{L/\mu})$ gradient…

Gradient-based algorithms are one of the methods of choice for the optimisation of Markov Decision Processes. In this article we will present a novel approximate Newton algorithm for the optimisation of such models. The algorithm has…

Adversarial training has been widely studied in recent years due to its role in improving model robustness against adversarial attacks. This paper focuses on comparing different distributed adversarial training algorithms--including…

Toward achieving robust and defensive neural networks, the robustness against the weight parameters perturbations, i.e., sharpness, attracts attention in recent years (Sun et al., 2020). However, sharpness is known to remain a critical…

(Neal and Hinton, 1998) recast maximum likelihood estimation of any given latent variable model as the minimization of a free energy functional $F$, and the EM algorithm as coordinate descent applied to $F$. Here, we explore alternative…

Recent studies showed that the generalization of neural networks is correlated with the sharpness of the loss landscape, and flat minima suggests a better generalization ability than sharp minima. In this paper, we propose a novel method…

Robust parameter estimation is a crucial task in several 3D computer vision pipelines such as Structure from Motion (SfM). State-of-the-art algorithms for robust estimation, however, still suffer from difficulties in converging to…

Choosing the optimization algorithm that performs best on a given machine learning problem is often delicate, and there is no guarantee that current state-of-the-art algorithms will perform well across all tasks. Consequently, the more…

The paper considers the problem of network-based computation of global minima in smooth nonconvex optimization problems. It is known that distributed gradient-descent-type algorithms can achieve convergence to the set of global minima by…

We study the SAM (Sharpness-Aware Minimization) optimizer which has recently attracted a lot of interest due to its increased performance over more classical variants of stochastic gradient descent. Our main contribution is the derivation…

A recent empirical observation (Li et al., 2022b) of activation sparsity in MLP blocks offers an opportunity to drastically reduce computation costs for free. Although having attributed it to training dynamics, existing theoretical…