Related papers: Langevin Dynamics: A Unified Perspective on Optimi…

Uniform stability is a notion of algorithmic stability that bounds the worst case change in the model output by the algorithm when a single data point in the dataset is replaced. An influential work of Hardt et al. (2016) provides strong…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…

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…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…

In this paper, we examine the time it takes for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to reach the global minimum of a general, non-convex loss function. We approach this question through the lens of randomly perturbed dynamical systems and…

Stochastic gradient methods with momentum are widely used in applications and at the core of optimization subroutines in many popular machine learning libraries. However, their sample complexities have not been obtained for problems beyond…

The current interpretation of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) as a stochastic process lacks generality in that its numerical scheme restricts continuous-time dynamics as well as the loss function and the distribution of gradient noise. We…

Distributed optimization plays an important role in modern large-scale machine learning and data processing systems by optimizing the utilization of computational resources. One of the classical and popular approaches is Local Stochastic…

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…

The distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by a sum of $n$ local cost functions by using local information exchange is considered. This problem is an important component of many machine…

Conditional stochastic optimization covers a variety of applications ranging from invariant learning and causal inference to meta-learning. However, constructing unbiased gradient estimators for such problems is challenging due to the…

Motivated by robust and quantile regression problems, we investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for minimizing an objective function $f$ that is locally strongly convex with a sub--quadratic tail. This setting covers…

We consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In the context of most machine learning applications, each loss function is non-negative and thus can be expressed as the…

Neural networks are usually trained by some form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD)). A number of strategies are in common use intended to improve SGD optimization, such as learning rate schedules, momentum, and batching. These are…

In the past several years, the last-iterate convergence of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm has triggered people's interest due to its good performance in practice but lack of theoretical understanding. For Lipschitz convex…

We study the stochastic optimization problem from a continuous-time perspective, with a focus on the Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum (SGDM) method. We show that the trajectory of SGDM, despite its \emph{stochastic} nature,…

Nonconvex optimization underlies many modern machine learning and control tasks, where saddle points pose the dominant obstacle to reliable convergence in high-dimensional settings. Escaping these saddle points deterministically using…

Many relevant problems in the area of systems and control, such as controller synthesis, observer design and model reduction, can be viewed as optimization problems involving dynamical systems: for instance, maximizing performance in the…

The performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) depends critically on how learning rates are tuned and decreased over time. We propose a method to automatically adjust multiple learning rates so as to minimize the expected error at any…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is commonly modeled as a Langevin process, assuming that minibatch noise acts as Brownian motion. However, this approximation relies on a continuous-time limit and a sqrt(eta) noise scaling that does not…