Related papers: Neural Network-based High-index Saddle Dynamics Me…
Recent advances in symbolic dynamic programming (SDP) combined with the extended algebraic decision diagram (XADD) data structure have provided exact solutions for mixed discrete and continuous (hybrid) MDPs with piecewise linear dynamics…
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…
The optimization step in many machine learning problems rarely relies on vanilla gradient descent but it is common practice to use momentum-based accelerated methods. Despite these algorithms being widely applied to arbitrary loss…
Recently, the problem of local minima in very high dimensional non-convex optimization has been challenged and the problem of saddle points has been introduced. This paper introduces a dynamic type of normalization that forces the system to…
We examine the behavior of accelerated gradient methods in smooth nonconvex unconstrained optimization, focusing in particular on their behavior near strict saddle points. Accelerated methods are iterative methods that typically step along…
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…
Dynamic neural networks (DyNNs) have become viable techniques to enable intelligence on resource-constrained edge devices while maintaining computational efficiency. In many cases, the implementation of DyNNs can be sub-optimal due to its…
A game theory inspired methodology is proposed for finding a function's saddle points. While explicit descent methods are known to have severe convergence issues, implicit methods are natural in an adversarial setting, as they take the…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…
This paper considers the problem of understanding the behavior of a general class of accelerated gradient methods on smooth nonconvex functions. Motivated by some recent works that have proposed effective algorithms, based on Polyak's heavy…
Synthesizing user-intended programs from a small number of input-output examples is a challenging problem with several important applications like spreadsheet manipulation, data wrangling and code refactoring. Existing synthesis systems…
This paper introduces the Neural Network for Nonlinear Hawkes processes (NNNH), a non-parametric method based on neural networks to fit nonlinear Hawkes processes. Our method is suitable for analyzing large datasets in which events exhibit…
This paper presents an alternative approach for the computation of trajectory segments on slow manifolds of saddle type. This approach is based on iterative methods rather than collocation-type methods. Compared to collocation methods, that…
A method for locating first order saddle points on the energy surface of a magnetic system is described and several applications presented where the mechanism of various magnetic transitions is identified. The starting point for the…
We consider the problem of approximating a function by an element of a nonlinear manifold which admits a differentiable parametrization, typical examples being neural networks with differentiable activation functions or tensor networks.…
Neural networks are trained by optimizing multi-dimensional sets of fitting parameters on non-convex loss landscapes. Low-loss regions of the landscapes correspond to the parameter sets that perform well on the training data. A key issue in…
The position-based dynamics (PBD) algorithm is a popular and versatile technique for real-time simulation of deformable bodies, but is only applicable to forces that can be expressed as linearly compliant constraints. In this work, we…
Local search heuristics for non-convex optimizations are popular in applied machine learning. However, in general it is hard to guarantee that such algorithms even converge to a local minimum, due to the existence of complicated saddle…
We study gradient flow on the multi-index regression problem for high-dimensional Gaussian data. Multi-index functions consist of a composition of an unknown low-rank linear projection and an arbitrary unknown, low-dimensional link…
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…