Related papers: Convergence guarantees for forward gradient descen…
Natural gradient descent has proven effective at mitigating the effects of pathological curvature in neural network optimization, but little is known theoretically about its convergence properties, especially for \emph{nonlinear} networks.…
In artificial neural networks trained with gradient descent, the weights used for processing stimuli are also used during backward passes to calculate gradients. For the real brain to approximate gradients, gradient information would have…
Model-free reinforcement learning attempts to find an optimal control action for an unknown dynamical system by directly searching over the parameter space of controllers. The convergence behavior and statistical properties of these…
We study a fully decentralized federated learning algorithm, which is a novel gradient descent algorithm executed on a communication-based network. For convenience, we refer to it as a network gradient descent (NGD) method. In the NGD…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used algorithm in deep-learning neural networks has attracted continuing studies for the theoretical principles behind its success. A recent work reports an anomaly (inverse) relation between the…
We show that running gradient descent with variable learning rate guarantees loss $f(x) \leq 1.1 \cdot f(x^*) + \epsilon$ for the logistic regression objective, where the error $\epsilon$ decays exponentially with the number of iterations…
In this work, we investigate a particular implicit bias in gradient descent training, which we term "Feature Averaging," and argue that it is one of the principal factors contributing to the non-robustness of deep neural networks. We show…
Gradient descent has been a central training principle for artificial neural networks from the early beginnings to today's deep learning networks. The most common implementation is the backpropagation algorithm for training feed-forward…
We consider the problem of predicting as well as the best linear combination of d given functions in least squares regression, and variants of this problem including constraints on the parameters of the linear combination. When the input…
Convolutional neural networks are widely used in imaging and image recognition. Learning such networks from training data leads to the minimization of a non-convex function. This makes the analysis of standard optimization methods such as…
Stochastic gradient algorithm is a key ingredient of many machine learning methods, particularly appropriate for large-scale learning.However, a major caveat of large data is their incompleteness.We propose an averaged stochastic gradient…
This paper shows that a perturbed form of gradient descent converges to a second-order stationary point in a number iterations which depends only poly-logarithmically on dimension (i.e., it is almost "dimension-free"). The convergence rate…
In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…
With increasing scale in model and dataset size, the training of deep neural networks becomes a massive computational burden. One approach to speed up the training process is Selective Backprop. For this approach, we perform a forward pass…
When training a machine learning model with observational data, it is often encountered that some values are systemically missing. Learning from the incomplete data in which the missingness depends on some covariates may lead to biased…
We study the complexity of training neural network models with one hidden nonlinear activation layer and an output weighted sum layer. We analyze Gradient Descent applied to learning a bounded target function on $n$ real-valued inputs. We…
We introduce data structures for solving robust regression through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by sampling gradients with probability proportional to their norm, i.e., importance sampling. Although SGD is widely used for large scale…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the main approach to optimizing neural networks. Several generalization properties of deep networks, such as convergence to a flatter minima, are believed to arise from SGD. This article explores the…
A vast literature on convergence guarantees for gradient descent and derived methods exists at the moment. However, a simple practical situation remains unexplored: when a fixed step size is used, can we expect gradient descent to converge…
Gradient descent, when applied to the task of logistic regression, outputs iterates which are biased to follow a unique ray defined by the data. The direction of this ray is the maximum margin predictor of a maximal linearly separable…