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We consider gradient descent with `momentum', a widely used method for loss function minimization in machine learning. This method is often used with `Nesterov acceleration', meaning that the gradient is evaluated not at the current…
Gradient-variation online learning aims to achieve regret guarantees that scale with variations in the gradients of online functions, which has been shown to be crucial for attaining fast convergence in games and robustness in stochastic…
Gradient regularization (GR) has been shown to improve the generalizability of trained models. While Natural Gradient Descent has been shown to accelerate optimization in the initial phase of training, little attention has been paid to how…
Optimization techniques are of great importance to effectively and efficiently train a deep neural network (DNN). It has been shown that using the first and second order statistics (e.g., mean and variance) to perform Z-score…
In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…
Many recent successes of machine learning went hand in hand with advances in optimization. The exchange of ideas between these fields has worked both ways, with machine learning building on standard optimization procedures such as gradient…
Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…
The boosted Frank-Wolfe algorithm accelerates the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm by better aligning the update direction with the negative gradient. Its analysis, however, has been limited to deterministic convex problems, with step sizes…
We propose a new technique that boosts the convergence of training generative adversarial networks. Generally, the rate of training deep models reduces severely after multiple iterations. A key reason for this phenomenon is that a deep…
Gradient-based (a.k.a. `first order') optimization algorithms are routinely used to solve large scale non-convex problems. Yet, it is generally hard to predict their effectiveness. In order to gain insight into this question, we revisit the…
The training of machine learning models is typically carried out using some form of gradient descent, often with great success. However, non-asymptotic analyses of first-order optimization algorithms typically employ a gradient smoothness…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its many variants are the widespread optimization algorithms for training deep neural networks. However, SGD suffers from inevitable drawbacks, including vanishing gradients, lack of theoretical…
Gradient-based hyperparameter optimization has earned a widespread popularity in the context of few-shot meta-learning, but remains broadly impractical for tasks with long horizons (many gradient steps), due to memory scaling and gradient…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
Several sparsity-constrained algorithms such as Orthogonal Matching Pursuit or the Frank-Wolfe algorithm with sparsity constraints work by iteratively selecting a novel atom to add to the current non-zero set of variables. This selection…
The success of deep neural networks hinges on our ability to accurately and efficiently optimize high-dimensional, non-convex functions. In this paper, we empirically investigate the loss functions of state-of-the-art networks, and how…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
Studying the properties of stochastic noise to optimize complex non-convex functions has been an active area of research in the field of machine learning. Prior work has shown that the noise of stochastic gradient descent improves…
We study convergence properties of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for convex objectives without assumptions on smoothness or strict convexity. We consider the question of establishing that with high probability the objective evaluated at…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…