Related papers: Corridor Geometry in Gradient-Based Optimization
Geometry-aware optimizers such as Newton and natural gradient can improve conditioning in deep learning, but scalable variants such as K-FAC, Shampoo, and related preconditioners usually impose structural approximations early, often…
It is well understood that neural networks with carefully hand-picked weights provide powerful function approximation and that they can be successfully trained in over-parametrized regimes. Since over-parametrization ensures zero training…
Communication has been seen as a significant bottleneck in industrial applications over large-scale networks. To alleviate the communication burden, sign-based optimization algorithms have gained popularity recently in both industrial and…
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,…
Relieving the reliance of neural network training on a global back-propagation (BP) has emerged as a notable research topic due to the biological implausibility and huge memory consumption caused by BP. Among the existing solutions, local…
We study the fundamental optimization principles of self-attention, the defining mechanism of transformers, by analyzing the implicit bias of gradient-based optimizers in training a self-attention layer with a linear decoder in binary…
We propose a stochastic variant of the classical Polyak step-size (Polyak, 1987) commonly used in the subgradient method. Although computing the Polyak step-size requires knowledge of the optimal function values, this information is readily…
Learning rules -- prescriptions for updating model parameters to improve performance -- are typically assumed rather than derived. Why do some learning rules work better than others, and under what assumptions can a given rule be considered…
At the heart of the standard deep learning training loop is a greedy gradient step minimizing a given loss. We propose to add a second step to maximize training generalization. To do this, we optimize the loss of the next training step.…
Any gradient descent optimization requires to choose a learning rate. With deeper and deeper models, tuning that learning rate can easily become tedious and does not necessarily lead to an ideal convergence. We propose a variation of the…
Continual Learning (CL) aims to train neural networks on a dynamic stream of tasks without forgetting previously learned knowledge. Among optimization-based approaches, C-Flat has emerged as a promising solution due to its plug-and-play…
One of the most important parts of Artificial Neural Networks is minimizing the loss functions which tells us how good or bad our model is. To minimize these losses we need to tune the weights and biases. Also to calculate the minimum value…
The Polyak stepsize has been proven to be a fundamental stepsize in convex optimization, giving near optimal gradient descent rates across a wide range of assumptions. The universality of the Polyak stepsize has also inspired many…
The gradient descent (GD) method -- is a fundamental and likely the most popular optimization algorithm in machine learning (ML), with a history traced back to a paper in 1847 (Cauchy, 1847). It was studied under various assumptions,…
The learning rate is perhaps the single most important parameter in the training of neural networks and, more broadly, in stochastic (nonconvex) optimization. Accordingly, there are numerous effective, but poorly understood, techniques for…
Many tasks in machine learning and signal processing can be solved by minimizing a convex function of a measure. This includes sparse spikes deconvolution or training a neural network with a single hidden layer. For these problems, we study…
We study non-convex subgradient flows for training two-layer ReLU neural networks from a convex geometry and duality perspective. We characterize the implicit bias of unregularized non-convex gradient flow as convex regularization of an…
We consider optimization problems in which the goal is find a $k$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{R}^n$, $k<<n$, which minimizes a convex and smooth loss. Such problems generalize the fundamental task of principal component analysis (PCA)…
In this paper, we study when we might expect the optimization curve induced by gradient descent to be \emph{convex} -- precluding, for example, an initial plateau followed by a sharp decrease, making it difficult to decide when optimization…
The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…