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The goal of this paper is to accelerate the training of machine learning models, a critical challenge since the training of large-scale deep neural models can be computationally expensive. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based training of neural networks with a large learning rate or a small batch-size typically ends in well-generalizing, flat regions of the weight space, as indicated by small eigenvalues of the Hessian of…
Stochastic gradient decent~(SGD) and its variants, including some accelerated variants, have become popular for training in machine learning. However, in all existing SGD and its variants, the sample size in each iteration~(epoch) of…
The scale of deep learning nowadays calls for efficient distributed training algorithms. Decentralized momentum SGD (DmSGD), in which each node averages only with its neighbors, is more communication efficient than vanilla Parallel momentum…
Through theoretical and experimental validation, unlike all existing adaptive methods like Adam which penalize frequently-changing parameters and are only applicable to sparse gradients, we propose the simplest SGD enhanced method,…
1-bit gradient compression and local steps are two representative techniques that enable drastic communication reduction in distributed SGD. Their benefits, however, remain an open question on Adam-based large model pre-training (e.g. BERT…
Distributed implementations of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) suffer from communication overheads, attributed to the high frequency of gradient updates inherent in small-batch training. Training with large batches can reduce…
The choice of step-size used in Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) optimization is empirically selected in most training procedures. Moreover, the use of scheduled learning techniques such as Step-Decaying, Cyclical-Learning, and Warmup to…
We provide a theoretical analysis of Adam under non-stationary stochastic objectives, separating two regimes: Euclidean tracking under adaptive strong monotonicity of the Adam-preconditioned mean-gradient operator, and high-probability…
Learning rate, batch size and momentum are three important hyperparameters in the SGD algorithm. It is known from the work of Jastrzebski et al. arXiv:1711.04623 that large batch size training of neural networks yields models which do not…
Data imbalance is a common problem in machine learning that can have a critical effect on the performance of a model. Various solutions exist but their impact on the convergence of the learning dynamics is not understood. Here, we elucidate…
We showcase important features of the dynamics of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the training of neural networks. We present empirical observations that commonly used large step sizes (i) lead the iterates to jump from one side of…
Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly RL from verifiable reward (RLVR), has become a crucial phase of training large language models (LLMs) and a key focus of current scaling efforts. However, optimization practices in RL largely follow…
NLP research has explored different neural model architectures and sizes, datasets, training objectives, and transfer learning techniques. However, the choice of optimizer during training has not been explored as extensively. Typically,…
It is common practice to decay the learning rate. Here we show one can usually obtain the same learning curve on both training and test sets by instead increasing the batch size during training. This procedure is successful for stochastic…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the many iterative optimization methods that are widely used in solving machine learning problems. These methods display valuable properties and attract researchers and industrial machine learning…
We propose a stochastic optimization method for minimizing loss functions, expressed as an expected value, that adaptively controls the batch size used in the computation of gradient approximations and the step size used to move along such…
It is known that the standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method, as well as accelerated and adaptive SGD optimization methods such as the Adam optimizer fail to converge if the learning rates do not converge to zero (as,…
In neural network training, RMSProp and Adam remain widely favoured optimisation algorithms. One of the keys to their performance lies in selecting the correct step size, which can significantly influence their effectiveness. Additionally,…
Adam outperforms SGD when training language models. Yet this advantage is not well-understood theoretically -- previous convergence analysis for Adam and SGD mainly focuses on the number of steps $T$ and is already minimax-optimal in…