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We analyze the variance of stochastic gradients along negative curvature directions in certain non-convex machine learning models and show that stochastic gradients exhibit a strong component along these directions. Furthermore, we show…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the workhorse algorithm of deep learning technology. At each step of the training phase, a mini batch of samples is drawn from the training dataset and the weights of the neural network are adjusted…
Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in the context of deep neural networks has raised lots of concerns recently. Along this line, we study a general form of gradient based optimization dynamics with unbiased…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been widely used in machine learning due to its computational efficiency and favorable generalization properties. Recently, it has been empirically demonstrated that the gradient noise in several deep…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) undergoes complicated multiplicative noise for the mean-square loss. We use this property of SGD noise to derive a stochastic differential equation (SDE) with simpler additive noise by performing a random…
Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) offer the most promising path to obtaining quantum advantages via noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processors. Such systems leverage classical optimization to tune the parameters of a…
Stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods have been proved to converge efficiently to first-order stationary points which, however, can be saddle points in nonconvex optimization. It has been observed that a stochastic…
Continuous-time approximation of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a crucial tool to study its escaping behaviors from stationary points. However, existing stochastic differential equation (SDE) models fail to fully capture these…
In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path of the…
High-dimensional non-convex optimization problems in engineering design, control, and learning are often hindered by saddle points, flat plateaus, and strongly anisotropic curvature. This paper develops a unified, curvature-adaptive…
We study the learning dynamics of a multi-pass, mini-batch Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) procedure for empirical risk minimization in high-dimensional multi-index models with isotropic random data. In an asymptotic regime where the…
We show that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) escapes from sharp minima exponentially fast even before SGD reaches stationary distribution. SGD has been a de-facto standard training algorithm for various machine learning tasks. However,…
Stochastic learning dynamics based on Langevin or Levy stochastic differential equations (SDEs) in deep neural networks control the variance of noise by varying the size of the mini-batch or directly those of injecting noise. Since the…
Saddle points constitute a crucial challenge for first-order gradient descent algorithms. In notions of classical machine learning, they are avoided for example by means of stochastic gradient descent methods. In this work, we provide…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is of fundamental importance in deep learning. Despite its simplicity, elucidating its efficacy remains challenging. Conventionally, the success of SGD is ascribed to the stochastic gradient noise (SGN)…
In this paper, we provide a theoretical study of noise geometry for minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a phenomenon where noise aligns favorably with the geometry of local landscape. We propose two metrics, derived from analyzing…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has become a cornerstone of neural network optimization due to its computational efficiency and generalization capabilities. However, the gradient noise introduced by SGD is often assumed to be uncorrelated…
Recent years have seen increased interest in performance guarantees of gradient descent algorithms for non-convex optimization. A number of works have uncovered that gradient noise plays a critical role in the ability of gradient descent…