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Deep generative models (DGMs) are effective on learning multilayered representations of complex data and performing inference of input data by exploring the generative ability. However, little work has been done on examining or empowering…
We study the trade-offs between convergence rate and robustness to gradient errors in designing a first-order algorithm. We focus on gradient descent (GD) and accelerated gradient (AG) methods for minimizing strongly convex functions when…
Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…
The most advanced diffusion models have recently adopted increasingly deep stacked networks (e.g., U-Net or Transformer) to promote the generative emergence capabilities of vision generation models similar to large language models (LLMs).…
Likelihood-based deep generative models (DGMs) have gained significant attention for their ability to approximate the distributions of high-dimensional data. However, these models lack a performance guarantee in assigning higher likelihood…
Gradient Descent (GD) is a powerful workhorse of modern machine learning thanks to its scalability and efficiency in high-dimensional spaces. Its ability to find local minimisers is only guaranteed for losses with Lipschitz gradients, where…
The lack of mathematical tractability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has hindered progress towards having a unified convergence analysis of training algorithms, in the general setting. We propose a unified optimization framework for…
Normalized gradient descent has shown substantial success in speeding up the convergence of exponentially-tailed loss functions (which includes exponential and logistic losses) on linear classifiers with separable data. In this paper, we go…
Natural Gradient Descent (NGD) has emerged as a promising optimization algorithm for training neural network-based solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs), such as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). However, its practical…
Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often…
Understanding the properties of neural networks trained via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is at the heart of the theory of deep learning. In this work, we take a mean-field view, and consider a two-layer ReLU network trained via SGD for…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…
In recent years, even though Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are well-known for training neural networks, it suffers from limitations such as the lack of theoretical guarantees, vanishing gradients, and excessive…
Decentralized optimization has become a fundamental tool for large-scale learning systems; however, most existing methods rely on the classical Lipschitz smoothness assumption, which is often violated in problems with rapidly varying…
Adaptive optimization algorithms, such as Adam and RMSprop, have shown better optimization performance than stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in some scenarios. However, recent studies show that they often lead to worse generalization…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum is widely used for training modern deep learning architectures. While it is well-understood that using momentum can lead to faster convergence rate in various settings, it has also been…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…
While deep learning is successful in a number of applications, it is not yet well understood theoretically. A satisfactory theoretical characterization of deep learning however, is beginning to emerge. It covers the following questions: 1)…
Large learning rates, when applied to gradient descent for nonconvex optimization, yield various implicit biases including the edge of stability (Cohen et al., 2021), balancing (Wang et al., 2022), and catapult (Lewkowycz et al., 2020).…
Gradient normalization and soft clipping are two popular techniques for tackling instability issues and improving convergence of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum. In this article, we study these types of methods through the…