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Adaptive gradient-descent optimizers are the standard choice for training neural network models. Despite their faster convergence than gradient-descent and remarkable performance in practice, the adaptive optimizers are not as well…
Deep learning optimization relies heavily on the assumption of smooth loss landscapes, a condition systematically violated by modern architectures due to non-smooth components such as ReLU activations and quantization operators. In such…
A number of recent adaptive optimizers improve the generalisation performance of Adam by essentially reducing the variance of adaptive stepsizes to get closer to SGD with momentum. Following the above motivation, we suppress the range of…
Despite an extensive body of literature on deep learning optimization, our current understanding of what makes an optimization algorithm effective is fragmented. In particular, we do not understand well whether enhanced optimization…
Stochastic gradient-based descent (SGD), have long been central to training large language models (LLMs). However, their effectiveness is increasingly being questioned, particularly in large-scale applications where empirical evidence…
Heavy ball momentum is crucial in accelerating (stochastic) gradient-based optimization algorithms for machine learning. Existing heavy ball momentum is usually weighted by a uniform hyperparameter, which relies on excessive tuning.…
Understanding the algorithmic bias of \emph{stochastic gradient descent} (SGD) is one of the key challenges in modern machine learning and deep learning theory. Most of the existing works, however, focus on \emph{very small or even…
This paper studies a class of adaptive gradient based momentum algorithms that update the search directions and learning rates simultaneously using past gradients. This class, which we refer to as the "Adam-type", includes the popular…
The adaptive moment estimation (Adam) optimizer proposed by Kingma & Ba (2014) is presumably the most popular stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method for the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) in artificial intelligence…
Understanding the remarkable efficacy of Adam when training transformer-based language models has become a central research topic within the optimization community. To gain deeper insights, several simplifications of Adam have been…
Stochastic optimization plays a crucial role in the advancement of deep learning technologies. Over the decades, significant effort has been dedicated to improving the training efficiency and robustness of deep neural networks, via various…
Despite the vast empirical evidence supporting the efficacy of adaptive optimization methods in deep learning, their theoretical understanding is far from complete. This work introduces novel SDEs for commonly used adaptive optimizers:…
An algorithm is said to be adaptive to a certain parameter (of the problem) if it does not need a priori knowledge of such a parameter but performs competitively to those that know it. This dissertation presents our work on adaptive…
One of the primary reasons behind the success of neural networks has been the emergence of an array of new, highly-successful optimizers, perhaps most importantly the Adam optimizer. It is widely used for training neural networks, yet…
Adaptive gradient algorithm (AdaGrad) and its variants, such as RMSProp, Adam, AMSGrad, etc, have been widely used in deep learning. Although these algorithms are faster in the early phase of training, their generalization performance is…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is an inherently sequential training algorithm--computing the gradient at batch $i$ depends on the model parameters learned from batch $i-1$. Prior approaches that break this dependence do not honor them…
Transformers have proved effective in many NLP tasks. However, their training requires non-trivial efforts regarding designing cutting-edge optimizers and learning rate schedulers carefully (e.g., conventional SGD fails to train…
Modern adaptive optimization methods, such as Adam and its variants, have emerged as the most widely used tools in deep learning over recent years. These algorithms offer automatic mechanisms for dynamically adjusting the update step based…
Sign-based optimization algorithms, such as SignSGD and Muon, have garnered significant attention for their remarkable performance in training large foundation models. Despite this empirical success, we still lack a theoretical…
Adaptive gradient methods have shown excellent performances for solving many machine learning problems. Although multiple adaptive gradient methods were recently studied, they mainly focus on either empirical or theoretical aspects and also…