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Recently, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants have become the dominant methods in the large-scale optimization of machine learning (ML) problems. A variety of strategies have been proposed for tuning the step sizes, ranging…

The learning rate is a crucial hyperparameter in deep learning, with its ideal value depending on the problem and potentially changing during training. In this paper, we investigate the practical utility of adaptive learning rate mechanisms…

Recent advances in the theoretical understanding of SGD led to a formula for the optimal batch size minimizing the number of effective data passes, i.e., the number of iterations times the batch size. However, this formula is of no…

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) has been widely used in many machine learning and statistical applications. Despite the observed empirical benefits of SGDM over traditional SGD, the theoretical understanding of the role of…

The stochastic proximal gradient method is a powerful generalization of the widely used stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and has found numerous applications in Machine Learning. However, it is notoriously known that this method…

Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…

We propose an adaptive step-size rule for decentralized optimization. Choosing a step-size that balances convergence and stability is challenging. This is amplified in the decentralized setting as agents observe only local (possibly…

We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…

Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…

Training a modern machine learning architecture on a new task requires extensive learning-rate tuning, which comes at a high computational cost. Here we develop new Polyak-type adaptive learning rates that can be used on top of any momentum…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its Ruppert-Polyak averaged variant (ASGD) lie at the heart of modern large-scale learning, yet their theoretical properties in high-dimensional settings are rarely understood. In this paper, we provide…

We propose a new stochastic gradient method called MOTAPS (Moving Targetted Polyak Stepsize) that uses recorded past loss values to compute adaptive stepsizes. MOTAPS can be seen as a variant of the Stochastic Polyak (SP) which is also a…

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) methods have become fundamental optimization tools in machine learning, combining the computational efficiency of stochastic gradients with the acceleration benefits of momentum. Despite…

In large-scale learning algorithms, the momentum term is usually included in the stochastic sub-gradient method to improve the learning speed because it can navigate ravines efficiently to reach a local minimum. However, step-size and…

We study online covariance matrix estimation for Polyak--Ruppert averaged stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The online batch-means estimator of Zhu, Chen and Wu (2023) achieves an operator-norm convergence rate of $O(n^{-(1-\alpha)/4})$,…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been studied extensively over the past decades due to its simplicity and broad applicability in machine learning. In this work, we analyze the local behavior of gradient descent and stochastic gradient…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…

Large over-parametrized models learned via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) methods have become a key element in modern machine learning. Although SGD methods are very effective in practice, most theoretical analyses of SGD suggest slower…

A framework is introduced for sequentially solving convex stochastic minimization problems, where the objective functions change slowly, in the sense that the distance between successive minimizers is bounded. The minimization problems are…