English
Related papers

Related papers: Convergence and Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent …

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Guy Smorodinsky , Sveta Gimpleson , Itay Safran

Continual learning seeks the human-like ability to accumulate new skills in machine intelligence. Its central challenge is catastrophic forgetting, whose underlying cause has not been fully understood for deep networks. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Ze Peng , Jian Zhang , Jintao Guo , Lei Qi , Yang Gao , Yinghuan Shi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Chulhee Yun , Shankar Krishnan , Hossein Mobahi

Recently, there has been growing interest in developing optimization methods for solving large-scale machine learning problems. Most of these problems boil down to the problem of minimizing an average of a finite set of smooth and strongly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-09 Aryan Mokhtari , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Alejandro Ribeiro

Neural networks trained to minimize the logistic (a.k.a. cross-entropy) loss with gradient-based methods are observed to perform well in many supervised classification tasks. Towards understanding this phenomenon, we analyze the training…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-23 Lenaic Chizat , Francis Bach

Implicit deep learning has recently become popular in the machine learning community since these implicit models can achieve competitive performance with state-of-the-art deep networks while using significantly less memory and computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Tianxiang Gao , Hongyang Gao

Adam has become one of the most favored optimizers in deep learning problems. Despite its success in practice, numerous mysteries persist regarding its theoretical understanding. In this paper, we study the implicit bias of Adam in linear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-18 Chenyang Zhang , Difan Zou , Yuan Cao

Neural networks trained with standard objectives exhibit behaviors characteristic of probabilistic inference: soft clustering, prototype specialization, and Bayesian uncertainty tracking. These phenomena appear across architectures -- in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Alan Oursland

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Jingfeng Wu , Difan Zou , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu

Attention mechanisms have revolutionized several domains of artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing and computer vision, by enabling models to selectively focus on relevant parts of the input data. While recent work has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Addison Kristanto Julistiono , Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Navid Azizan

In this paper, we study the implicit regularization of the gradient descent algorithm in homogeneous neural networks, including fully-connected and convolutional neural networks with ReLU or LeakyReLU activations. In particular, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Kaifeng Lyu , Jian Li

The gradient descent (GD) method -- is a fundamental and likely the most popular optimization algorithm in machine learning (ML), with a history traced back to a paper in 1847 (Cauchy, 1847). It was studied under various assumptions,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-20 Aleksandr Lobanov , Alexander Gasnikov , Eduard Gorbunov , Martin Takáč

In distributed training of machine learning models, gradient descent with local iterative steps, commonly known as Local (Stochastic) Gradient Descent (Local-(S)GD) or Federated averaging (FedAvg), is a very popular method to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Heng Zhu , Harsh Vardhan , Arya Mazumdar

We study the fundamental optimization principles of self-attention, the defining mechanism of transformers, by analyzing the implicit bias of gradient-based optimizers in training a self-attention layer with a linear decoder in binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Bhavya Vasudeva , Puneesh Deora , Christos Thrampoulidis

One of the mysteries in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-06 Simon S. Du , Xiyu Zhai , Barnabas Poczos , Aarti Singh

One of the objectives of continual learning is to prevent catastrophic forgetting in learning multiple tasks sequentially, and the existing solutions have been driven by the conceptualization of the plasticity-stability dilemma. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Seungyub Han , Yeongmo Kim , Taehyun Cho , Jungwoo Lee

Continual learning (CL) presents a fundamental challenge in training neural networks on sequential tasks without experiencing catastrophic forgetting. Traditionally, the dominant approach in CL has been gradient-based optimization, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Grzegorz Rypeść

We analyze continual learning on a sequence of separable linear classification tasks with binary labels. We show theoretically that learning with weak regularization reduces to solving a sequential max-margin problem, corresponding to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Itay Evron , Edward Moroshko , Gon Buzaglo , Maroun Khriesh , Badea Marjieh , Nathan Srebro , Daniel Soudry

The simplicity of gradient descent (GD) made it the default method for training ever-deeper and complex neural networks. Both loss functions and architectures are often explicitly tuned to be amenable to this basic local optimization. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-30 Dmitrii Marin , Meng Tang , Ismail Ben Ayed , Yuri Boykov

This paper shows that the implicit bias of gradient descent on linearly separable data is exactly characterized by the optimal solution of a dual optimization problem given by a smoothed margin, even for general losses. This is in contrast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Ziwei Ji , Matus Telgarsky