Related papers: Step by Step: Adaptive Gradient Descent for Traini…
The theory of training deep networks has become a central question of modern machine learning and has inspired many practical advancements. In particular, the gradient descent (GD) optimization algorithm has been extensively studied in…
A vast literature on convergence guarantees for gradient descent and derived methods exists at the moment. However, a simple practical situation remains unexplored: when a fixed step size is used, can we expect gradient descent to converge…
The learning rate is perhaps the single most important parameter in the training of neural networks and, more broadly, in stochastic (nonconvex) optimization. Accordingly, there are numerous effective, but poorly understood, techniques for…
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…
We study the convergence dynamics of Gradient Descent (GD) in a minimal binary classification setting, consisting of a two-neuron ReLU network and two training instances. We prove that even under these strong simplifying assumptions, while…
Deep neural networks have been used in various machine learning applications and achieved tremendous empirical successes. However, training deep neural networks is a challenging task. Many alternatives have been proposed in place of…
We investigate the generalization and optimization properties of shallow neural-network classifiers trained by gradient descent in the interpolating regime. Specifically, in a realizable scenario where model weights can achieve arbitrarily…
We analyze speed of convergence to global optimum for gradient descent training a deep linear neural network (parameterized as $x \mapsto W_N W_{N-1} \cdots W_1 x$) by minimizing the $\ell_2$ loss over whitened data. Convergence at a linear…
While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we…
A fairly comprehensive analysis is presented for the gradient descent dynamics for training two-layer neural network models in the situation when the parameters in both layers are updated. General initialization schemes as well as general…
The paper contains approximation guarantees for neural networks that are trained with gradient flow, with error measured in the continuous $L_2(\mathbb{S}^{d-1})$-norm on the $d$-dimensional unit sphere and targets that are Sobolev smooth.…
It is believed that Gradient Descent (GD) induces an implicit bias towards good generalization in training machine learning models. This paper provides a fine-grained analysis of the dynamics of GD for the matrix sensing problem, whose goal…
Gradient descent is one of the most widely used iterative algorithms in modern statistical learning. However, its precise algorithmic dynamics in high-dimensional settings remain only partially understood, which has limited its broader…
In this paper, we propose a novel optimization algorithm for training machine learning models called Input Normalized Stochastic Gradient Descent (INSGD), inspired by the Normalized Least Mean Squares (NLMS) algorithm used in adaptive…
We empirically demonstrate that full-batch gradient descent on neural network training objectives typically operates in a regime we call the Edge of Stability. In this regime, the maximum eigenvalue of the training loss Hessian hovers just…
We revisit the problem of learning a single neuron with ReLU activation under Gaussian input with square loss. We particularly focus on the over-parameterization setting where the student network has $n\ge 2$ neurons. We prove the global…
When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…
In this paper, we propose a geometric framework to analyze the convergence properties of gradient descent trajectories in the context of linear neural networks. We translate a well-known empirical observation of linear neural nets into a…
Learning rate decay (lrDecay) is a \emph{de facto} technique for training modern neural networks. It starts with a large learning rate and then decays it multiple times. It is empirically observed to help both optimization and…
Training deep belief networks (DBNs) requires optimizing a non-convex function with an extremely large number of parameters. Naturally, existing gradient descent (GD) based methods are prone to arbitrarily poor local minima. In this paper,…