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Differential equations in general and neural ODEs in particular are an essential technique in continuous-time system identification. While many deterministic learning algorithms have been designed based on numerical integration via the…
This work analyzes the solution trajectory of gradient-based algorithms via a novel basis function decomposition. We show that, although solution trajectories of gradient-based algorithms may vary depending on the learning task, they behave…
We study the implicit regularization imposed by gradient descent for learning multi-layer homogeneous functions including feed-forward fully connected and convolutional deep neural networks with linear, ReLU or Leaky ReLU activation. We…
Even for the gradient descent (GD) method applied to neural network training, understanding its optimization dynamics, including convergence rate, iterate trajectories, function value oscillations, and especially its implicit acceleration,…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely believed to perform implicit regularization when used to train deep neural networks, but the precise manner in which this occurs has thus far been elusive. We prove that SGD minimizes an average…
Gradient descent (GD) is a collection of continuous optimization methods that have achieved immeasurable success in practice. Owing to data science applications, GD with diminishing step sizes has become a prominent variant. While this…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…
Learning in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) takes place by minimizing a non-convex high-dimensional loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strategy. The learning process is observed to be able to find good minimizers…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence plays a central role in probabilistic machine learning, where it commonly serves as the canonical loss function. Optimization in such settings is often performed over the probability simplex, where the…
Understanding the algorithmic bias of \emph{stochastic gradient descent} (SGD) is one of the key challenges in modern machine learning and deep learning theory. Most of the existing works, however, focus on \emph{very small or even…
Domain decomposition methods (DDMs) are popular solvers for discretized systems of partial differential equations (PDEs), with one-level and multilevel variants. These solvers rely on several algorithmic and mathematical parameters,…
Despite the omnipresent use of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization methods in the training of deep neural networks (DNNs), it remains, in basically all practically relevant scenarios, a fundamental open problem to provide a…
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…
In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…
We provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of gradient clipping in training deep neural networks. The key ingredient is a new smoothness condition derived from practical neural network training examples. We observe that…
We devise a distributional variant of gradient temporal-difference (TD) learning. Distributional reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform the regular one in the recent study \citep{bellemare2017distributional}. In the…
Neural networks are trained by optimizing multi-dimensional sets of fitting parameters on non-convex loss landscapes. Low-loss regions of the landscapes correspond to the parameter sets that perform well on the training data. A key issue in…
Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is known to have poorer training and test performance on large neural networks, compared to ordinary stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In this paper, we perform a detailed study…
Adaptive gradient methods have become popular in optimizing deep neural networks; recent examples include AdaGrad and Adam. Although Adam usually converges faster, variations of Adam, for instance, the AdaBelief algorithm, have been…
Establishing a theoretical analysis that explains why deep learning can outperform shallow learning such as kernel methods is one of the biggest issues in the deep learning literature. Towards answering this question, we evaluate excess…