Related papers: Improving the Straight-Through Estimator with Zero…

As 6G and beyond networks grow increasingly complex and interconnected, federated learning (FL) emerges as an indispensable paradigm for securely and efficiently leveraging decentralized edge data for AI. By virtue of the superposition…

Neural stochastic differential equation model with a Brownian motion term can capture epistemic uncertainty of deep neural network from the perspective of a dynamical system. The goal of this paper is to improve the convergence rate of the…

Brain-inspired neuromorphic computing with spiking neural networks (SNNs) is a promising energy-efficient computational approach. However, successfully training SNNs in a more biologically plausible and neuromorphic-hardware-friendly way is…

Online learning with limited information feedback (bandit) tries to solve the problem where an online learner receives partial feedback information from the environment in the course of learning. Under this setting, Flaxman et al.[8]…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is indispensable for complex non-convex tasks where explicit gradients are computationally prohibitive or strictly inaccessible. For deploying ZO methods over distributed heterogeneous networks, the gradient…

Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on downstream tasks has been adopted in a variety of domains recently. However, it is costly to update the entire parameter set of large pre-trained models. Although recently proposed parameter-efficient…

Fine-tuning LLMs is necessary for various dedicated downstream tasks, but classic backpropagation-based fine-tuning methods require substantial GPU memory. To this end, a recent work, MeZO, which relies solely on forward passes to fine-tune…

Deep learning networks are typically trained by Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods that iteratively improve the model parameters by estimating a gradient on a very small fraction of the training data. A major roadblock faced when…

Many modern machine learning applications, such as multi-task learning, require finding optimal model parameters to trade-off multiple objective functions that may conflict with each other. The notion of the Pareto set allows us to focus on…

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…

Iterative differential approximation methods that rely upon backpropagation have enabled the optimization of neural networks; however, at present, they remain computationally expensive, especially when training models at scale. In this…

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have garnered significant attention for their versatility and potential for solving a wide spectrum of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the cost of running these PLMs may be…

In this work, to efficiently help escape the stationary and saddle points, we propose, analyze, and generalize a stochastic strategy performed as an operator for a first-order gradient descent algorithm in order to increase the target…

We investigate progressive freezing as an alternative to straight-through estimators (STE) for training binary networks from scratch. Under controlled training conditions, we find that while global progressive freezing works for…

Automated machine learning has been widely explored to reduce human efforts in designing neural architectures and looking for proper hyperparameters. In the domain of neural initialization, however, similar automated techniques have rarely…

Optimization in machine learning, both theoretical and applied, is presently dominated by first-order gradient methods such as stochastic gradient descent. Second-order optimization methods, that involve second derivatives and/or second…

A major challenge in training large-scale machine learning models is configuring the training process to maximize model performance, i.e., finding the best training setup from a vast design space. In this work, we unlock a gradient-based…

Binarization of neural networks is a dominant paradigm in neural networks compression. The pioneering work BinaryConnect uses Straight Through Estimator (STE) to mimic the gradients of the sign function, but it also causes the crucial…

The gradients used to train neural networks are typically computed using backpropagation. While an efficient way to obtain exact gradients, backpropagation is computationally expensive, hinders parallelization, and is biologically…

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a biologically plausible framework for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing. However, it is a challenge to train SNNs due to their non-differentiability, efficiently. Existing gradient approximation…