Related papers: From Gradient Clipping to Normalization for Heavy …
Real-world data is laden with outlying values. The challenge for machine learning is that the learner typically has no prior knowledge of whether the feedback it receives (losses, gradients, etc.) will be heavy-tailed or not. In this work,…
An increasing number of studies have focused on stochastic first-order methods (SFOMs) under heavy-tailed gradient noises, which have been observed in the training of practical deep learning models. In this paper, we focus on two types of…
Choosing the optimization algorithm that performs best on a given machine learning problem is often delicate, and there is no guarantee that current state-of-the-art algorithms will perform well across all tasks. Consequently, the more…
Regularization is essential for avoiding over-fitting to training data in network optimization, leading to better generalization of the trained networks. The label noise provides a strong implicit regularization by replacing the target…
Stochastic-gradient-based optimization has been a core enabling methodology in applications to large-scale problems in machine learning and related areas. Despite the progress, the gap between theory and practice remains significant, with…
A commonly used heuristic in non-convex optimization is Normalized Gradient Descent (NGD) - a variant of gradient descent in which only the direction of the gradient is taken into account and its magnitude ignored. We analyze this heuristic…
Tuning hyperparameters, such as the stepsize, presents a major challenge of training machine learning models. To address this challenge, numerous adaptive optimization algorithms have been developed that achieve near-optimal complexities,…
Gradient descent algorithm is the most utilized method when optimizing machine learning issues. However, there exists many local minimums and saddle points in the loss function, especially for high dimensional non-convex optimization…
The low-rank matrix recovery problem seeks to reconstruct an unknown $n_1 \times n_2$ rank-$r$ matrix from $m$ linear measurements, where $m\ll n_1n_2$. This problem has been extensively studied over the past few decades, leading to a…
We introduce a novel and efficient algorithm called the stochastic approximate gradient descent (SAGD), as an alternative to the stochastic gradient descent for cases where unbiased stochastic gradients cannot be trivially obtained.…
Stochastic nested optimization, including stochastic compositional, min-max and bilevel optimization, is gaining popularity in many machine learning applications. While the three problems share the nested structure, existing works often…
Sign Gradient Descent (SignGD) is a simple yet robust optimization method, widely used in machine learning for its resilience to gradient noise and compatibility with low-precision computations. While its empirical performance is well…
In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…
We develop generalization error bounds for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with label noise in non-convex settings under uniform dissipativity and smoothness conditions. Under a suitable choice of semimetric, we establish a contraction in…
Optimization algorithms are pivotal in advancing various scientific and industrial fields but often encounter obstacles such as trapping in local minima, saddle points, and plateaus (flat regions), which makes the convergence to reasonable…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) has become a widely used technique for safeguarding sensitive information in deep learning applications. Unfortunately, DPSGD's per-sample gradient clipping and uniform noise…
We study the generalization properties of the popular stochastic optimization method known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for optimizing general non-convex loss functions. Our main contribution is providing upper bounds on the…
Gaussian process ($GP$) regression is a widely used non-parametric modeling tool, but its cubic complexity in the training size limits its use on massive data sets. A practical remedy is to predict using only the nearest neighbours of each…
Low-rank matrix estimation under heavy-tailed noise is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs, especially since robust loss…