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We develop a first-order accelerated algorithm for a class of constrained bilinear saddle-point problems with applications to network systems. The algorithm is a modified time-varying primal-dual version of an accelerated mirror-descent…
We consider stochastic gradient methods under the interpolation regime where a perfect fit can be obtained (minimum loss at each observation). While previous work highlighted the implicit regularization of such algorithms, we consider an…
Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…
Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often…
In applications with significant class imbalance or asymmetric costs, metrics such as the $F_\beta$-measure, AM measure, Jaccard similarity coefficient, and weighted accuracy offer more suitable evaluation criteria than standard binary…
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…
Large learning rates, when applied to gradient descent for nonconvex optimization, yield various implicit biases including the edge of stability (Cohen et al., 2021), balancing (Wang et al., 2022), and catapult (Lewkowycz et al., 2020).…
In this paper, we consider the online proximal mirror descent for solving the time-varying composite optimization problems. For various applications, the algorithm naturally involves the errors in the gradient and proximal operator. We…
We provide a detailed asymptotic study of gradient flow trajectories and their implicit optimization bias when minimizing the exponential loss over "diagonal linear networks". This is the simplest model displaying a transition between…
This work establishes new convergence guarantees for gradient descent in smooth convex optimization via a computer-assisted analysis technique. Our theory allows nonconstant stepsize policies with frequent long steps potentially violating…
We study continual learning on multiple linear classification tasks by sequentially running gradient descent (GD) for a fixed budget of iterations per task. When all tasks are jointly linearly separable and are presented in a cyclic/random…
Owing to their connection with generative adversarial networks (GANs), saddle-point problems have recently attracted considerable interest in machine learning and beyond. By necessity, most theoretical guarantees revolve around…
Gradient-based methods enable efficient search capabilities in high dimensions. However, in order to apply them effectively in offline optimization paradigms such as offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Imitation Learning (IL), we require…
We demonstrate that the choice of optimizer, neural network architecture, and regularizer significantly affect the adversarial robustness of linear neural networks, providing guarantees without the need for adversarial training. To this…
The stochastic mirror descent (SMD) algorithm is a general class of training algorithms, which includes the celebrated stochastic gradient descent (SGD), as a special case. It utilizes a mirror potential to influence the implicit bias of…
We derive several numerical methods for designing optimized first-order algorithms in unconstrained convex optimization settings. Our methods are based on the Performance Estimation Problem (PEP) framework, which casts the worst-case…
Large-scale optimization problems require algorithms both effective and efficient. One such popular and proven algorithm is Stochastic Gradient Descent which uses first-order gradient information to solve these problems. This paper studies…
Many practitioners who use the EM algorithm complain that it is sometimes slow. When does this happen, and what can be done about it? In this paper, we study the general class of bound optimization algorithms - including…
We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…
Parallel stochastic gradient methods are gaining prominence in solving large-scale machine learning problems that involve data distributed across multiple nodes. However, obtaining unbiased stochastic gradients, which have been the focus of…