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This paper proposes a new optimization algorithm called Entropy-SGD for training deep neural networks that is motivated by the local geometry of the energy landscape. Local extrema with low generalization error have a large proportion of…
We analyze the one-pass stochastic gradient descent dynamics of a two-layer neural network with quadratic activations in a teacher--student framework. In the high-dimensional regime, where the input dimension $N$ and the number of samples…
In machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely deployed to train models using highly non-convex objectives with equally complex noise models. Unfortunately, SGD theory often makes restrictive assumptions that fail to…
We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for composite optimization problems with $N$ sequential operators subject to perturbations in both the forward and backward passes. Unlike classical analyses that treat gradient noise as additive…
In this work, we theoretically investigate the generalization properties of neural networks (NN) trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm with large learning rates. Under such a training regime, our finding is that, the…
The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the classical central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made for…
Machine learning has made tremendous progress in recent years, with models matching or even surpassing humans on a series of specialized tasks. One key element behind the progress of machine learning in recent years has been the ability to…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental algorithm in machine learning, representing the optimization backbone for training several classic models, from regression to neural networks. Given the recent practical focus on…
Understanding the algorithmic bias of \emph{stochastic gradient descent} (SGD) is one of the key challenges in modern machine learning and deep learning theory. Most of the existing works, however, focus on \emph{very small or even…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variations have been effectively used to optimize neural network models. However, with the rapid growth of big data and deep learning, SGD is no longer the most suitable choice due to its…
Effective training of deep neural networks suffers from two main issues. The first is that the parameter spaces of these models exhibit pathological curvature. Recent methods address this problem by using adaptive preconditioning for…
The gradient noise of SGD is considered to play a central role in the observed strong generalization abilities of deep learning. While past studies confirm that the magnitude and the covariance structure of gradient noise are critical for…
Gradient descent algorithm is the most utilized method when optimizing machine learning issues. However, there exists many local minimums and saddle points in the loss function, especially for high dimensional non-convex optimization…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the most popular of the machine learning methods applied to training deep neural networks (DNN) today. It has recently been demonstrated that SGD can be statistically biased so that certain…
We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…
Convergence detection of iterative stochastic optimization methods is of great practical interest. This paper considers stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate and momentum. We show that there exists a transient…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path of the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is commonly used for optimization in large-scale machine learning problems. Langford et al. (2009) introduce a sparse online learning method to induce sparsity via truncated gradient. With high-dimensional…
It is not clear yet why ADAM-alike adaptive gradient algorithms suffer from worse generalization performance than SGD despite their faster training speed. This work aims to provide understandings on this generalization gap by analyzing…
Deep neural networks with remarkably strong generalization performances are usually over-parameterized. Despite explicit regularization strategies are used for practitioners to avoid over-fitting, the impacts are often small. Some…