Related papers: Theoretical Analysis on how Learning Rate Warmup A…
Learning rate warm-up - increasing the learning rate at the beginning of training - has become a ubiquitous heuristic in modern deep learning, yet its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. In this work, we provide a principled…
It is common in deep learning to warm up the learning rate $\eta$, often by a linear schedule between $\eta_{\text{init}} = 0$ and a predetermined target $\eta_{\text{trgt}}$. In this paper, we show through systematic experiments using SGD…
We provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of gradient clipping in training deep neural networks. The key ingredient is a new smoothness condition derived from practical neural network training examples. We observe that…
Training deep neural networks using a large batch size has shown promising results and benefits many real-world applications. However, the optimizer converges slowly at early epochs and there is a gap between large-batch deep learning…
Recent empirical advances show that training deep models with large learning rate often improves generalization performance. However, theoretical justifications on the benefits of large learning rate are highly limited, due to challenges in…
Learning Rate Warmup is a popular heuristic for training neural networks, especially at larger batch sizes, despite limited understanding of its benefits. Warmup decreases the update size $\Delta \mathbf{w}_t = \eta_t \mathbf{u}_t$ early in…
The generalization mystery in deep learning is the following: Why do over-parameterized neural networks trained with gradient descent (GD) generalize well on real datasets even though they are capable of fitting random datasets of…
Training large-scale models presents challenges not only in terms of resource requirements but also in terms of their convergence. For this reason, the learning rate (LR) is often decreased when the size of a model is increased. Such a…
In many real-world deployments of machine learning systems, data arrive piecemeal. These learning scenarios may be passive, where data arrive incrementally due to structural properties of the problem (e.g., daily financial data) or active,…
Gradient regularization (GR), which aims to penalize the gradient norm atop the loss function, has shown promising results in training modern over-parameterized deep neural networks. However, can we trust this powerful technique? This paper…
We study adaptive learning rate scheduling for norm-constrained optimizers (e.g., Muon and Lion). We introduce a generalized smoothness assumption under which local curvature decreases with the suboptimality gap and empirically verify that…
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 --…
Learning rate scheduling plays a critical role in the optimization of deep neural networks, directly influencing convergence speed, stability, and generalization. While existing schedulers such as cosine annealing, cyclical learning rates,…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum is widely used for training modern deep learning architectures. While it is well-understood that using momentum can lead to faster convergence rate in various settings, it has also been…
The learning rate warmup heuristic achieves remarkable success in stabilizing training, accelerating convergence and improving generalization for adaptive stochastic optimization algorithms like RMSprop and Adam. Here, we study its…
The convergence rate and final performance of common deep learning models have significantly benefited from heuristics such as learning rate schedules, knowledge distillation, skip connections, and normalization layers. In the absence of…
The deep learning recipe of casting real-world problems as mathematical optimisation and tackling the optimisation by training deep neural networks using gradient-based optimisation has undoubtedly proven to be a fruitful one. The…
Normalized gradient descent has shown substantial success in speeding up the convergence of exponentially-tailed loss functions (which includes exponential and logistic losses) on linear classifiers with separable data. In this paper, we go…
We analyze the convergence behavior of stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) under dynamic learning-rate and batch-size schedules by introducing a novel and simpler Lyapunov function. We extend the existing theoretical framework…
Understanding the advantages of deep neural networks trained by gradient descent (GD) compared to shallow models remains an open theoretical challenge. In this paper, we introduce a class of target functions (single and multi-index Gaussian…