Related papers: Zeroth-Order Sharpness-Aware Learning with Exponen…
Classical supervised learning via empirical risk (or negative log-likelihood) minimization hinges upon the assumption that the testing distribution coincides with the training distribution. This assumption can be challenged in modern…
We consider in this paper a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. We present a new class of…
Approximate second-order optimization methods often exhibit poorer generalization compared to first-order approaches. In this work, we look into this issue through the lens of the loss landscape and find that existing second-order methods…
This paper investigates how to accelerate the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on nonconvex problems with zeroth-order information available only. We propose a zeroth-order (ZO) distributed primal-dual stochastic…
We study a class of zeroth-order distributed optimization problems, where each agent can control a partial vector and observe a local cost that depends on the joint vector of all agents, and the agents can communicate with each other with…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has attracted considerable attention for its effectiveness in improving generalization in deep neural network training by explicitly minimizing sharpness in the loss landscape. Its success, however, relies…
This paper proposes a method for machine learning from unlabeled data in the form of a time-series. The mapping that is learned is shown to extract slowly evolving information that would be useful for control applications, while efficiently…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has recently emerged as an effective technique for improving DNN robustness to input variations. However, its interplay with the compactness requirements of on-device DNN deployments remains less explored.…
The total complexity (measured as the total number of gradient computations) of a stochastic first-order optimization algorithm that finds a first-order stationary point of a finite-sum smooth nonconvex objective function $F(w)=\frac{1}{n}…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization, learning from finite differences of function evaluations without backpropagation, has recently regained attention in deep learning due to its memory efficiency and applicability to gray- or black-box…
Gradient-free/zeroth-order methods for black-box convex optimization have been extensively studied in the last decade with the main focus on oracle calls complexity. In this paper, besides the oracle complexity, we focus also on iteration…
Distributed optimization is the standard way of speeding up machine learning training, and most of the research in the area focuses on distributed first-order, gradient-based methods. Yet, there are settings where some…
Consider semi-supervised learning for classification, where both labeled and unlabeled data are available for training. The goal is to exploit both datasets to achieve higher prediction accuracy than just using labeled data alone. We…
Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has emerged as a highly effective technique to improve model generalization, but its underlying principles are not fully understood. We investigate m-sharpness, where SAM performance improves monotonically…
$\ell_0$ constrained optimization is prevalent in machine learning, particularly for high-dimensional problems, because it is a fundamental approach to achieve sparse learning. Hard-thresholding gradient descent is a dominant technique to…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has been instrumental in improving deep neural network training by minimizing both training loss and loss sharpness. Despite the practical success, the mechanisms behind SAM's generalization enhancements…
Stochastic optimization problems with unknown decision-dependent distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its importance in applications. Since the gradient of the objective function is inaccessible as a…
In this paper, we study and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for solving bilvel problems, when neither the upper/lower objective values, nor their unbiased gradient estimates are available. In particular, exploiting…
Sharpness aware minimization (SAM) optimizer has been extensively explored as it can generalize better for training deep neural networks via introducing extra perturbation steps to flatten the landscape of deep learning models. Integrating…
Sharpness-aware and gradient-alignment methods have been shown to improve generalization, however each family of methods targets a single geometric property of the loss landscape, while ignoring the other. In this paper, we show that this…