Related papers: Effective Gradient Sample Size via Variation Estim…

Many applications in machine learning or signal processing involve nonsmooth optimization problems. This nonsmoothness brings a low-dimensional structure to the optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a randomized proximal gradient…

Despite the popularity of the Adam optimizer in practice, most theoretical analyses study Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) as a proxy for Adam, and little is known about how the solutions found by Adam differ. In this paper, we show that…

Stochastic gradient-based descent (SGD), have long been central to training large language models (LLMs). However, their effectiveness is increasingly being questioned, particularly in large-scale applications where empirical evidence…

Adaptive gradient methods, which adopt historical gradient information to automatically adjust the learning rate, despite the nice property of fast convergence, have been observed to generalize worse than stochastic gradient descent (SGD)…

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…

Network quantization is a dominant paradigm of model compression. However, the abrupt changes in quantized weights during training often lead to severe loss fluctuations and result in a sharp loss landscape, making the gradients unstable…

Modern large scale machine learning applications require stochastic optimization algorithms to be implemented on distributed computational architectures. A key bottleneck is the communication overhead for exchanging information, such as…

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants are algorithms of choice for many Deep Learning tasks. These methods operate in a small-batch regime wherein a fraction of the training data, say $32$-$512$ data points, is…

We propose an optimization method for minimizing the finite sums of smooth convex functions. Our method incorporates an accelerated gradient descent (AGD) and a stochastic variance reduction gradient (SVRG) in a mini-batch setting. Unlike…

As a technique to alleviate the pressure of data annotation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) has attracted widespread attention. In the specific domain of medical image segmentation, semi-supervised methods (SSMIS) have become a research…

Fine-tuning large pretrained language models on a limited training corpus usually suffers from poor generalization. Prior works show that the recently-proposed sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) optimization method can improve the model…

Can we modify the training data distribution to encourage the underlying optimization method toward finding solutions with superior generalization performance on in-distribution data? In this work, we approach this question for the first…

We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…

Recent experiments have shown that, often, when training a neural network with gradient descent (GD) with a step size $\eta$, the operator norm of the Hessian of the loss grows until it approximately reaches $2/\eta$, after which it…

We propose in this paper a new minimization algorithm based on a slightly modified version of the scalar auxiliary variable (SAV) approach coupled with a relaxation step and an adaptive strategy. It enjoys several distinct advantages over…

Sampling methods (e.g., node-wise, layer-wise, or subgraph) has become an indispensable strategy to speed up training large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing sampling methods are mostly based on the graph structural…

Uniform sampling of training data has been commonly used in traditional stochastic optimization algorithms such as Proximal Stochastic Gradient Descent (prox-SGD) and Proximal Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (prox-SDCA). Although uniform…

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by minimizing the worst-case loss within a fixed parameter-space radius neighborhood. SAM and its variants mainly rely on a first-order linearized surrogate, while flat minima are…

Computing the loss gradient via backpropagation consumes considerable energy during deep learning (DL) model training. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to efficiently compute DL models' gradients to mitigate the substantial energy…

While Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization in deep neural networks by minimizing both loss and sharpness, it suffers from inefficiency in distributed large-batch training. We present Landscape-Smoothed SAM (LSAM), a…