Related papers: Decentralized SGD and Average-direction SAM are As…

Uniform stability is a notion of algorithmic stability that bounds the worst case change in the model output by the algorithm when a single data point in the dataset is replaced. An influential work of Hardt et al. (2016) provides strong…

This paper develops asymptotic theory for quantile estimation via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate. The quantile loss function is neither smooth nor strongly convex. Beyond conventional perspectives and…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is widely used to seek flatter minima -- often linked to better generalization. In its standard implementation, SAM updates the current iterate using the loss gradient evaluated at a point perturbed by…

It is not clear yet why ADAM-alike adaptive gradient algorithms suffer from worse generalization performance than SGD despite their faster training speed. This work aims to provide understandings on this generalization gap by analyzing…

We consider the problem of decentralized consensus optimization, where the sum of $n$ smooth and strongly convex functions are minimized over $n$ distributed agents that form a connected network. In particular, we consider the case that the…

We analyze asynchronous-type algorithms for distributed SGD in the heterogeneous setting, where each worker has its own computation and communication speeds, as well as data distribution. In these algorithms, workers compute possibly stale…

We study diffusion and consensus based optimization of a sum of unknown convex objective functions over distributed networks. The only access to these functions is through stochastic gradient oracles, each of which is only available at a…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) provides a simple and efficient way to solve a broad range of machine learning problems. Here, we focus on distribution regression (DR), involving two stages of sampling: Firstly, we regress from…

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has substantially improved the generalization of neural networks under various settings. Despite the success, its effectiveness remains poorly understood. In this work, we discover an intriguing phenomenon…

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has received increasing attention in computer vision since it can effectively eliminate the sharp local minima from the training trajectory and mitigate generalization degradation. However, SAM requires…

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…

In this paper, we study the implicit regularization of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) through the lens of {\em dynamical stability} (Wu et al., 2018). We start by revising existing stability analyses of SGD, showing how the Frobenius…

Recent empirical work on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) applied to over-parameterized deep learning has shown that most gradient components over epochs are quite small. Inspired by such observations, we rigorously study properties of…

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…

Multi-epoch, small-batch, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been the method of choice for learning with large over-parameterized models. A popular theory for explaining why SGD works well in practice is that the algorithm has an…

Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…

Sharpness-aware and gradient-alignment methods have been shown to improve generalization, however each family of methods targets a single geometric property of the loss landscape, while ignoring the other. In this paper, we show that this…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…

Compressed Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithms have been recently proposed to address the communication bottleneck in distributed and decentralized optimization problems, such as those that arise in federated machine learning.…