Related papers: Modified Step Size for Enhanced Stochastic Gradien…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the main approach for training deep networks: it moves towards the optimum of the cost function by iteratively updating the parameters of a model in the direction of the gradient of the loss evaluated on…
The classical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with polynomially decaying stepsize $\eta_t = \eta/\sqrt{t}$ relies on well-tuned $\eta$ depending on problem parameters such as Lipschitz smoothness constant, which is often…
We study the convergence of the last iterate in subgradient methods applied to the minimization of a nonsmooth convex function with bounded subgradients. We first introduce a proof technique that generalizes the standard analysis of…
We introduce a hybrid stochastic estimator to design stochastic gradient algorithms for solving stochastic optimization problems. Such a hybrid estimator is a convex combination of two existing biased and unbiased estimators and leads to…
In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for stochastic variance reduced gradient descent methods such as SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient…
We provide tight finite-time convergence bounds for gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent on quadratic functions, when the gradients are delayed and reflect iterates from $\tau$ rounds ago. First, we show that without stochastic…
Adaptive Gradient Descent with Energy (AEGD) is a variant of gradient descent (GD) designed to mitigate step-size sensitivity through an energy-based formulation. AEGD is notable for its unconditional energy stability, which guarantees…
We showcase important features of the dynamics of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the training of neural networks. We present empirical observations that commonly used large step sizes (i) lead the iterates to jump from one side of…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…
Classical stochastic gradient methods for optimization rely on noisy gradient approximations that become progressively less accurate as iterates approach a solution. The large noise and small signal in the resulting gradients makes it…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been studied extensively over the past decades due to its simplicity and broad applicability in machine learning. In this work, we analyze the local behavior of gradient descent and stochastic gradient…
This paper explores the suspicious alignment phenomenon in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) under ill-conditioned optimization, where the Hessian spectrum splits into dominant and bulk subspaces. This phenomenon describes the behavior of…
With a weighting scheme proportional to t, a traditional stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm achieves a high probability convergence rate of O({\kappa}/T) for strongly convex functions, instead of O({\kappa} ln(T)/T). We also prove…
Many particle-based Bayesian inference methods use a single global step size for all parts of the update. In Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), however, each update combines two qualitatively different effects: attraction toward…
Stochastic gradient updates are widely used for their efficiency and scalability, but their effective step sizes can depend strongly on feature scaling and local model sensitivity. Gauss-Newton methods address such scale effects through…
This paper investigates different vector step-size adaptation approaches for non-stationary online, continual prediction problems. Vanilla stochastic gradient descent can be considerably improved by scaling the update with a vector of…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm has been widely used in statistical estimation for large-scale data due to its computational and memory efficiency. While most existing works focus on the convergence of the objective function…
In this paper, we revisit a classical adaptive stepsize strategy for gradient descent: the Polyak stepsize (PolyakGD), originally proposed in Polyak (1969). We study the convergence behavior of PolyakGD from two perspectives: tight…