Related papers: Gradient descent avoids strict saddles with a simp…
In this paper, we give a sharp analysis for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and prove that SGD is able to efficiently escape from saddle points and find an $(\epsilon, O(\epsilon^{0.5}))$-approximate second-order stationary point in…
We analyze the behavior of randomized coordinate gradient descent for nonconvex optimization, proving that under standard assumptions, the iterates almost surely escape strict saddle points. By formulating the method as a nonlinear random…
A generalized conditional gradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of them differentiable, is presented. This iterative method relies on two main ingredients: First, the minimization of a partially linearized…
While Standard gradient descent is one very popular optimisation method, its convergence cannot be proven beyond the class of functions whose gradient is globally Lipschitz continuous. As such, it is not actually applicable to realistic…
A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…
Regularization is a widely recognized technique in mathematical optimization. It can be used to smooth out objective functions, refine the feasible solution set, or prevent overfitting in machine learning models. Due to its simplicity and…
We consider minimizing a nonconvex, smooth function $f$ on a Riemannian manifold $\mathcal{M}$. We show that a perturbed version of Riemannian gradient descent algorithm converges to a second-order stationary point (and hence is able to…
Dynamical systems theory has recently been applied in optimization to prove that gradient descent algorithms bypass so-called strict saddle points of the loss function. However, in many modern machine learning applications, the required…
Gradient descent (GD) on logistic regression has many fascinating properties. When the dataset is linearly separable, it is known that the iterates converge in direction to the maximum-margin separator regardless of how large the step size…
The main aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of gradient descent (GD) algorithms with gradient errors that do not necessarily vanish, asymptotically. In particular, sufficient conditions are presented for both stability (almost sure…
Iteration complexities for optimizing smooth functions with first-order algorithms are typically stated in terms of a global Lipschitz constant of the gradient, and near-optimal results are then achieved using fixed step sizes. But many…
We study gradient descent (GD) dynamics on logistic regression problems with large, constant step sizes. For linearly-separable data, it is known that GD converges to the minimizer with arbitrarily large step sizes, a property which no…
We propose a descent subgradient algorithm for minimizing a real function, assumed to be locally Lipschitz, but not necessarily smooth or convex. To find an effective descent direction, the Goldstein subdifferential is approximated through…
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…
Recent years have seen increased interest in performance guarantees of gradient descent algorithms for non-convex optimization. A number of works have uncovered that gradient noise plays a critical role in the ability of gradient descent…
We study the gradient descent (GD) dynamics of a depth-2 linear neural network with a single input and output. We show that GD converges at an explicit linear rate to a global minimum of the training loss, even with a large stepsize --…
We consider the well-studied setting of minimizing a convex Lipschitz function using either gradient descent (GD) or its stochastic variant (SGD), and examine the last iterate convergence. By now, it is known that standard stepsize choices…
Backtracking line search is foundational in numerical optimization. The basic idea is to adjust the step-size of an algorithm by a constant factor until some chosen criterion (e.g. Armijo, Descent Lemma) is satisfied. We propose a novel way…
We consider the minimization of an objective function given access to unbiased estimates of its gradient through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with constant step-size. While the detailed analysis was only performed for quadratic…
This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm's convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and…