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Transformers excel at in-context learning (ICL) -- learning from demonstrations without parameter updates -- but how they do so remains a mystery. Recent work suggests that Transformers may internally run Gradient Descent (GD), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Deqing Fu , Tian-Qi Chen , Robin Jia , Vatsal Sharan

We study $\textit{gradient descent}$ (GD) for logistic regression on linearly separable data with stepsizes that adapt to the current risk, scaled by a constant hyperparameter $\eta$. We show that after at most $1/\gamma^2$ burn-in steps,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-21 Ruiqi Zhang , Jingfeng Wu , Licong Lin , Peter L. Bartlett

We study convergence rates of AdaGrad-Norm as an exemplar of adaptive stochastic gradient methods (SGD), where the step sizes change based on observed stochastic gradients, for minimizing non-convex, smooth objectives. Despite their…

In-context learning with attention enables large neural networks to make context-specific predictions by selectively focusing on relevant examples. Here, we adapt this idea to supervised learning procedures such as lasso regression and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-11 Erin Craig , Robert Tibshirani

We propose a new technique that boosts the convergence of training generative adversarial networks. Generally, the rate of training deep models reduces severely after multiple iterations. A key reason for this phenomenon is that a deep…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-15 Atsushi Nitanda , Taiji Suzuki

We study how multi-head softmax attention models are trained to perform in-context learning on linear data. Through extensive empirical experiments and rigorous theoretical analysis, we demystify the emergence of elegant attention patterns:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Jianliang He , Xintian Pan , Siyu Chen , Zhuoran Yang

While the Transformer architecture has achieved remarkable success across various domains, a thorough theoretical foundation explaining its optimization dynamics is yet to be fully developed. In this study, we aim to bridge this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Bingqing Song , Boran Han , Shuai Zhang , Jie Ding , Mingyi Hong

We provide a detailed asymptotic study of gradient flow trajectories and their implicit optimization bias when minimizing the exponential loss over "diagonal linear networks". This is the simplest model displaying a transition between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Edward Moroshko , Suriya Gunasekar , Blake Woodworth , Jason D. Lee , Nathan Srebro , Daniel Soudry

The generalization mystery of overparametrized deep nets has motivated efforts to understand how gradient descent (GD) converges to low-loss solutions that generalize well. Real-life neural networks are initialized from small random values…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Kaifeng Lyu , Zhiyuan Li , Runzhe Wang , Sanjeev Arora

Graph Transformers (GTs) have demonstrated their advantages across a wide range of tasks. However, the self-attention mechanism in GTs overlooks the graph's inductive biases, particularly biases related to structure, which are crucial for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-25 Chuang Liu , Zelin Yao , Yibing Zhan , Xueqi Ma , Shirui Pan , Wenbin Hu

A deep equilibrium model uses implicit layers, which are implicitly defined through an equilibrium point of an infinite sequence of computation. It avoids any explicit computation of the infinite sequence by finding an equilibrium point…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Kenji Kawaguchi

Selecting an effective step-size is a fundamental challenge in first-order optimization, especially for problems with non-Euclidean geometries. This paper presents a novel adaptive step-size strategy for optimization algorithms that rely on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Abbas Khademi , Antonio Silveti-Falls

While attention-based models have demonstrated the remarkable ability of in-context learning (ICL), the theoretical understanding of how these models acquired this ability through gradient descent training is still preliminary. Towards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Yedi Zhang , Aaditya K. Singh , Peter E. Latham , Andrew Saxe

We establish the asymptotic implicit bias of gradient descent (GD) for generic non-homogeneous deep networks under exponential loss. Specifically, we characterize three key properties of GD iterates starting from a sufficiently small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Yuhang Cai , Kangjie Zhou , Jingfeng Wu , Song Mei , Michael Lindsey , Peter L. Bartlett

The optimization algorithms are crucial in training physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), as unsuitable methods may lead to poor solutions. Compared to the common gradient descent (GD) algorithm, implicit gradient descent (IGD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Xianliang Xu , Ting Du , Wang Kong , Bin Shan , Ye Li , Zhongyi Huang

We consider linear prediction with a convex Lipschitz loss, or more generally, stochastic convex optimization problems of generalized linear form, i.e.~where each instantaneous loss is a scalar convex function of a linear function. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Idan Amir , Roi Livni , Nathan Srebro

Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-27 Ahmed Khaled , Peter Richtárik

Self-attention is essential to Transformer architectures, yet how information is embedded in the self-attention matrices and how different objective functions impact this process remains unclear. We present a mathematical framework to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Matteo Saponati , Pascal Sager , Pau Vilimelis Aceituno , Thilo Stadelmann , Benjamin Grewe

We study the implicit bias of the general family of steepest descent algorithms with infinitesimal learning rate in deep homogeneous neural networks. We show that: (a) an algorithm-dependent geometric margin starts increasing once the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Nikolaos Tsilivis , Eitan Gronich , Julia Kempe , Gal Vardi

This work studies the global convergence and implicit bias of Gauss Newton's (GN) when optimizing over-parameterized one-hidden layer networks in the mean-field regime. We first establish a global convergence result for GN in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Michael Arbel , Romain Menegaux , Pierre Wolinski