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We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…
In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing continuous submodular functions that naturally arise in many learning applications such as those involving utility functions in active learning and sensing, matrix approximations and network…
Recurrent neural networks are known for their notorious exploding and vanishing gradient problem (EVGP). This problem becomes more evident in tasks where the information needed to correctly solve them exist over long time scales, because…
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…
When an online learning algorithm is used to estimate the unknown parameters of a model, the signals interacting with the parameter estimates should not decay too quickly for the optimal values to be discovered correctly. This requirement…
Finding parameters in a deep neural network (NN) that fit training data is a nonconvex optimization problem, but a basic first-order optimization method (gradient descent) finds a global optimizer with perfect fit (zero-loss) in many…
We study a fixed step-size noisy distributed gradient descent algorithm for solving optimization problems in which the objective is a finite sum of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Random perturbations are introduced to the…
The adjoint sensitivity method scalably computes gradients of solutions to ordinary differential equations. We generalize this method to stochastic differential equations, allowing time-efficient and constant-memory computation of gradients…
We analyze recurrent neural networks with diagonal hidden-to-hidden weight matrices, trained with gradient descent in the supervised learning setting, and prove that gradient descent can achieve optimality \emph{without} massive…
Neural network optimization remains one of the most consequential yet poorly understood challenges in modern AI research, where improvements in training algorithms can lead to enhanced feature learning in foundation models,…
We consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In the context of most machine learning applications, each loss function is non-negative and thus can be expressed as the…
This paper investigates asymptotic behaviors of gradient descent algorithms (particularly accelerated gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent) in the context of stochastic optimization arising in statistics and machine learning…
The Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) has been a staple of signal processing, often being the first step for many audio tasks. A very familiar process when using the STFT is the search for the best STFT parameters, as they often have…
Stochastic (sub)gradient methods require step size schedule tuning to perform well in practice. Classical tuning strategies decay the step size polynomially and lead to optimal sublinear rates on (strongly) convex problems. An alternative…
We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
In gradient descent, changing how we parametrize the model can lead to drastically different optimization trajectories, giving rise to a surprising range of meaningful inductive biases: identifying sparse classifiers or reconstructing…
This paper introduces new parameter-free first-order methods for convex optimization problems in which the objective function exhibits H\"{o}lder smoothness. Inspired by the recently proposed distance-over-gradient (DOG) technique, we…
Stochastic optimization has found wide applications in minimizing objective functions in machine learning, which motivates a lot of theoretical studies to understand its practical success. Most of existing studies focus on the convergence…
Stiff ordinary differential equations (ODEs) play an important role in many scientific and engineering applications. Often, the dependence of the solution of the ODE on additional parameters is of interest, e.g.\ when dealing with…