Related papers: Local Convergence of Approximate Newton Method for…

State-of-the-art language models (LMs) represented by long-short term memory recurrent neural networks (LSTM-RNNs) and Transformers are becoming increasingly complex and expensive for practical applications. Low-bit neural network…

The key task of machine learning is to minimize the loss function that measures the model fit to the training data. The numerical methods to do this efficiently depend on the properties of the loss function. The most decisive among these…

The non-convexity of the artificial neural network (ANN) training landscape brings inherent optimization difficulties. While the traditional back-propagation stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variants are effective in…

Recent efforts to accelerate LLM pretraining have focused on computationally-efficient approximations that exploit second-order structure. This raises a key question for large-scale training: how much performance is forfeited by these…

We develop a fast and robust algorithm for solving large scale convex composite optimization models with an emphasis on the $\ell_1$-regularized least squares regression (Lasso) problems. Despite the fact that there exist a large number of…

In this paper, we have extended the well-established universal approximator theory to neural networks that use the unbounded ReLU activation function and a nonlinear softmax output layer. We have proved that a sufficiently large neural…

Large scale optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning and data analysis and there is a plethora of algorithms for solving such problems. Many of these algorithms employ sub-sampling, as a way to either speed up the…

In this paper, we study the optimality gap between two-layer ReLU networks regularized with weight decay and their convex relaxations. We show that when the training data is random, the relative optimality gap between the original problem…

This paper aims to understand the training solution, which is obtained by the back-propagation algorithm, of two-layer neural networks whose hidden layer is composed of the units with smooth activation functions, including the usual sigmoid…

We describe an algorithm that learns two-layer residual units using rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation: suppose the input $\mathbf{x}$ is from a distribution with support space $\mathbb{R}^d$ and the ground-truth generative model is a…

Recently, it was demonstrated in [CS2012,CS2013] that the robustness of the classical Non-Local Means (NLM) algorithm [BCM2005] can be improved by incorporating $\ell^p (0 < p \leq 2)$ regression into the NLM framework. This general…

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on the pre-trained fine-tuning paradigm have become pivotal in solving natural language processing tasks, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance. Nevertheless, the theoretical understanding of…

Finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point of a nonconvex function with a Lipschitz continuous Hessian is a central problem in optimization. Regularized Newton methods are a classical tool and have been studied extensively, yet they still face…

In this paper, we present a detailed convergence analysis of a recently developed approximate Newton-type fully distributed optimization method for smooth, strongly convex local loss functions, called Network-GIANT, which has been…

In this paper, we consider one dimensional (shallow) ReLU neural networks in which weights are chosen randomly and only the terminal layer is trained. First, we mathematically show that for such networks L2-regularized regression…

We study the training dynamics of gradient descent in a softmax self-attention layer trained to perform linear regression and show that a simple first-order optimization algorithm can converge to the globally optimal self-attention…

Recently, fully-connected and convolutional neural networks have been trained to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide variety of tasks such as speech recognition, image classification, natural language processing, and…

Solving non-convex, NP-hard optimization problems is crucial for training machine learning models, including neural networks. However, non-convexity often leads to black-box machine learning models with unclear inner workings. While convex…

Neural networks are usually trained with different variants of gradient descent based optimization algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent or the Adam optimizer. Recent theoretical work states that the critical points (where the…

The softmax function is a widely used activation function in the output layers of neural networks, responsible for converting raw scores into class probabilities while introducing essential non-linearity. Implementing Softmax efficiently…