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Despite exceptional achievements, training neural networks remains computationally expensive and is often plagued by instabilities that can degrade convergence. While learning rate schedules can help mitigate these issues, finding optimal…
Recent work has established an empirically successful framework for adapting learning rates for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). This effectively removes all needs for tuning, while automatically reducing learning rates over time on…
In machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely deployed to train models using highly non-convex objectives with equally complex noise models. Unfortunately, SGD theory often makes restrictive assumptions that fail to…
Recent work has argued that stochastic gradient descent can approximate the Bayesian uncertainty in model parameters near local minima. In this work we develop a similar correspondence for minibatch natural gradient descent (NGD). We prove…
Many popular learning-rate schedules for deep neural networks combine a decaying trend with local perturbations that attempt to escape saddle points and bad local minima. We derive convergence guarantees for bandwidth-based step-sizes, a…
This paper studies a risk minimization problem with decision dependent data distribution. The problem pertains to the performative prediction setting in which a trained model can affect the outcome estimated by the model. Such dependency…
In batch learning, stability together with existence and uniqueness of the solution corresponds to well-posedness of Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) methods; recently, it was proved that CV_loo stability is necessary and sufficient for…
We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…
It is well known that, for most datasets, the use of large-size minibatches for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) typically leads to slow convergence and poor generalization. On the other hand, large minibatches are of great practical…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
The gradient descent (GD) has been one of the most common optimizer in machine learning. In particular, the loss landscape of a neural network is typically sharpened during the initial phase of training, making the training dynamics hover…
We develop a stochastic differential equation, called homogenized SGD, for analyzing the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a high-dimensional random least squares problem with $\ell^2$-regularization. We show that homogenized…
Despite its empirical success and recent theoretical progress, there generally lacks a quantitative analysis of the effect of batch normalization (BN) on the convergence and stability of gradient descent. In this paper, we provide such an…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a workhorse algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems in data science and machine learning. Understanding the convergence of SGD is hence of fundamental importance. In this work we examine…
The performance of fully synchronized distributed systems has faced a bottleneck due to the big data trend, under which asynchronous distributed systems are becoming a major popularity due to their powerful scalability. In this paper, we…
We study the asynchronous stochastic gradient descent algorithm for distributed training over $n$ workers which have varying computation and communication frequency over time. In this algorithm, workers compute stochastic gradients in…
Modern machine learning models are typically trained via multi-pass stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with small batch sizes, and understanding their dynamics in high dimensions is of great interest. However, an analytical framework for…
Stochastic gradient descent plays a fundamental role in nearly all applications of deep learning. However its ability to converge to a global minimum remains shrouded in mystery. In this paper we propose to study the behavior of the loss…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to simulation optimization, stochastic programming, and online M-estimation, where sampling effort is a decision variable. We study the mini-batch gradient noise as a sampling-design object.…
The generalization performance of a machine learning algorithm such as a neural network depends in a non-trivial way on the structure of the data distribution. To analyze the influence of data structure on test loss dynamics, we study an…