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Even for the gradient descent (GD) method applied to neural network training, understanding its optimization dynamics, including convergence rate, iterate trajectories, function value oscillations, and especially its implicit acceleration,…
In a series of recent theoretical works, it was shown that strongly over-parameterized neural networks trained with gradient-based methods could converge exponentially fast to zero training loss, with their parameters hardly varying. In…
We analyze the convergence of the averaged stochastic gradient descent for overparameterized two-layer neural networks for regression problems. It was recently found that a neural tangent kernel (NTK) plays an important role in showing the…
We study inverse optimization (IO), where the goal is to use a parametric optimization program as the hypothesis class to infer relationships between input-decision pairs. Most of the literature focuses on learning only the objective…
We introduce a simple algorithm, True Asymptotic Natural Gradient Optimization (TANGO), that converges to a true natural gradient descent in the limit of small learning rates, without explicit Fisher matrix estimation. For quadratic models…
Adaptive gradient methods such as Adam have gained increasing popularity in deep learning optimization. However, it has been observed that compared with (stochastic) gradient descent, Adam can converge to a different solution with a…
Deep neural network training involves both forward propagation (from features through logits to loss) and backward propagation (from loss through gradients to parameter updates). While perturbations along the forward chain, including…
The deep learning recipe of casting real-world problems as mathematical optimisation and tackling the optimisation by training deep neural networks using gradient-based optimisation has undoubtedly proven to be a fruitful one. The…
We study the implicit bias of gradient flow (i.e., gradient descent with infinitesimal step size) on linear neural network training. We propose a tensor formulation of neural networks that includes fully-connected, diagonal, and…
Many modern deep learning applications require balancing multiple objectives that are often conflicting. Examples include multi-task learning, fairness-aware learning, and the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). This leads to…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have achieved remarkable results in the task of generating realistic natural images. In most successful applications, GAN models share two common aspects: solving a challenging saddle point…
When optimizing over-parameterized models, such as deep neural networks, a large set of parameters can achieve zero training error. In such cases, the choice of the optimization algorithm and its respective hyper-parameters introduces…
Linear and quadratic optimization are crucial in numerous real-world applications, ranging from training machine learning models to solving integer linear programs. Recently, learning-to-optimize methods (L2O) for linear (LPs) or quadratic…
Deep learning empirically achieves high performance in many applications, but its training dynamics has not been fully understood theoretically. In this paper, we explore theoretical analysis on training two-layer ReLU neural networks in a…
Large-scale optimization problems require algorithms both effective and efficient. One such popular and proven algorithm is Stochastic Gradient Descent which uses first-order gradient information to solve these problems. This paper studies…
Non-convex optimization problems are challenging to solve; the success and computational expense of a gradient descent algorithm or variant depend heavily on the initialization strategy. Often, either random initialization is used or…
Natural gradient descent (NGD) is a powerful optimization technique for machine learning, but the computational complexity of the inverse Fisher information matrix limits its application in training deep neural networks. To overcome this…
We study the complexity of training neural network models with one hidden nonlinear activation layer and an output weighted sum layer. We analyze Gradient Descent applied to learning a bounded target function on $n$ real-valued inputs. We…
Understanding the asymptotic behavior of gradient-descent training of deep neural networks is essential for revealing inductive biases and improving network performance. We derive the infinite-time training limit of a mathematically…
This work aims to provide understandings on the remarkable success of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by theoretically analyzing their generalization performance and establishing optimization guarantees for gradient descent based…