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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…
Classical optimisation theory guarantees monotonic objective decrease for gradient descent (GD) when employed in a small step size, or ``stable", regime. In contrast, gradient descent on neural networks is frequently performed in a large…
The interplay between optimization and privacy has become a central theme in privacy-preserving machine learning. Noisy stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has emerged as a cornerstone algorithm, particularly in large-scale settings. These…
Gradient descent prevails in artificial neural network training, but seems inept for spiking neural networks as small parameter changes can cause sudden, disruptive (dis-)appearances of spikes. Here, we demonstrate exact gradient descent…
Stochastic gradient optimization is the dominant learning paradigm for a variety of scenarios, from classical supervised learning to modern self-supervised learning. We consider stochastic gradient algorithms for learning problems whose…
In view of solving convex optimization problems with noisy gradient input, we analyze the asymptotic behavior of gradient-like flows under stochastic disturbances. Specifically, we focus on the widely studied class of mirror descent schemes…
One crucial factor behind the success of deep learning lies in the implicit bias induced by noise inherent in gradient-based training algorithms. Motivated by empirical observations that training with noisy labels improves model…
Many modern learning tasks involve fitting nonlinear models to data which are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Due to this overparameterization, the training…
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…
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…
Modern deep networks are trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) whose key hyperparameters are the number of data considered at each step or batch size $B$, and the step size or learning rate $\eta$. For small $B$ and large $\eta$,…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still is the workhorse for many practical problems. However, it converges slow, and can be difficult to tune. It is possible to precondition SGD to accelerate its convergence remarkably. But many attempts…
We study the limiting dynamics of a large class of noisy gradient descent systems in the overparameterized regime. In this regime the set of global minimizers of the loss is large, and when initialized in a neighbourhood of this zero-loss…
We study the gradient descent (GD) dynamics of a depth-2 linear neural network with a single input and output. We show that GD converges at an explicit linear rate to a global minimum of the training loss, even with a large stepsize --…
In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
Gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent are central to modern machine learning, yet their behavior under large step sizes remains theoretically unclear. Recent work suggests that acceleration often arises near the edge of…
Due to common architecture designs, symmetries exist extensively in contemporary neural networks. In this work, we unveil the importance of the loss function symmetries in affecting, if not deciding, the learning behavior of machine…
Large-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used for training in distributed deep learning because of its training-time efficiency, however, extremely large-batch SGD leads to poor generalization and easily converges to sharp…
Recent advances in deep learning optimization have unveiled two intriguing phenomena under large learning rates: Edge of Stability (EoS) and Progressive Sharpening (PS), challenging classical Gradient Descent (GD) analyses. Current research…