Related papers: From Continual Learning to SGD and Back: Better Ra…
Continual learning, focused on sequentially learning multiple tasks, has gained significant attention recently. Despite the tremendous progress made in the past, the theoretical understanding, especially factors contributing to catastrophic…
We study realizable continual linear regression under random task orderings, a common setting for developing continual learning theory. In this setup, the worst-case expected loss after $k$ learning iterations admits a lower bound of…
Autonomous machine learning systems that learn many tasks in sequence are prone to the catastrophic forgetting problem. Mathematical theory is needed in order to understand the extent of forgetting during continual learning. As a…
We study continual learning on multiple linear classification tasks by sequentially running gradient descent (GD) for a fixed budget of iterations per task. When all tasks are jointly linearly separable and are presented in a cyclic/random…
Many modern learning tasks involve fitting nonlinear models to data which are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Due to this overparameterization, the training…
A central challenge in continual learning is forgetting, the loss of performance on previously learned tasks induced by sequential adaptation to new ones. While forgetting has been extensively studied empirically, rigorous theoretical…
Theoretically understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in overparameterized models has led to the development of several optimization algorithms that are widely used in practice today. Recent work by~\citet{zou2021benign} provides…
Recent work has established an empirically successful framework for adapting learning rates for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). This effectively removes all needs for tuning, while automatically reducing learning rates over time on…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a central tool in machine learning. We prove that SGD converges to zero loss, even with a fixed (non-vanishing) learning rate - in the special case of homogeneous linear classifiers with smooth monotone…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…
Continual learning (CL), which aims to learn a sequence of tasks, has attracted significant recent attention. However, most work has focused on the experimental performance of CL, and theoretical studies of CL are still limited. In…
Modern machine learning focuses on highly expressive models that are able to fit or interpolate the data completely, resulting in zero training loss. For such models, we show that the stochastic gradients of common loss functions satisfy a…
We consider distributed learning using constant stepsize SGD (DSGD) over several devices, each sending a final model update to a central server. In a final step, the local estimates are aggregated. We prove in the setting of…
There is an increasing realization that algorithmic inductive biases are central in preventing overfitting; empirically, we often see a benign overfitting phenomenon in overparameterized settings for natural learning algorithms, such as…
A framework previously introduced in [3] for solving a sequence of stochastic optimization problems with bounded changes in the minimizers is extended and applied to machine learning problems such as regression and classification. The…
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…
We study the problem of transfer learning and fine-tuning in linear models for both regression and binary classification. In particular, we consider the use of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a linear model initialized with pretrained…
We analyze task orderings in continual learning for linear regression, assuming joint realizability of training data. We focus on orderings that greedily maximize dissimilarity between consecutive tasks, a concept briefly explored in prior…
To better understand catastrophic forgetting, we study fitting an overparameterized linear model to a sequence of tasks with different input distributions. We analyze how much the model forgets the true labels of earlier tasks after…