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We study scalable alternatives to robust gradient descent (RGD) techniques that can be used when the losses and/or gradients can be heavy-tailed, though this will be unknown to the learner. The core technique is simple: instead of trying to…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is most widely used for deep neural network (DNN) training. However, the method does not always converge to a flat minimum of the loss surface that can demonstrate high generalization capability.…
We establish maximal concentration bounds for the iterates generated by stochastic approximation algorithms with general step sizes, where the noise has a finite-state Markovian component plus a Martingale-difference component. When the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still is the workhorse for many practical problems. However, it converges slow, and can be difficult to tune. It is possible to precondition SGD to accelerate its convergence remarkably. But many attempts…
The interplay between optimization and privacy has become a central theme in privacy-preserving machine learning. Noisy stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has emerged as a cornerstone algorithm, particularly in large-scale settings. These…
We consider a standard distributed optimization problem in which networked nodes collaboratively minimize the sum of their locally known convex costs. For this setting, we address for the first time the fundamental problem of design and…
What enables Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to achieve better generalization than Gradient Descent (GD) in Neural Network training? This question has attracted much attention. In this paper, we study the distribution of the Stochastic…
We analyze the effect of synchronization on distributed stochastic gradient algorithms. By exploiting an analogy with dynamical models of biological quorum sensing - where synchronization between agents is induced through communication with…
An increasing number of studies have focused on stochastic first-order methods (SFOMs) under heavy-tailed gradient noises, which have been observed in the training of practical deep learning models. In this paper, we focus on two types of…
While there already exist randomized subspace Newton methods that restrict the search direction to a random subspace for a convex function, we propose a randomized subspace regularized Newton method for a non-convex function {and more…
A stochastic gradient method for synchronous distributed optimization is studied. For reducing communication cost, we particularly focus on utilization of compression of communicated gradients. Several work has shown that {\it{sparsified}}…
We introduce biased gradient oracles to capture a setting where the function measurements have an estimation error that can be controlled through a batch size parameter. Our proposed oracles are appealing in several practical contexts, for…
This paper studies the distributed optimization problem under the influence of heavy-tailed gradient noises. Here, a heavy-tailed noise means that the noise does not necessarily satisfy the bounded variance assumption. Instead, it satisfies…
We consider minimizing high-dimensional smooth nonconvex objectives using only noisy pairwise comparisons. Unlike classical zeroth-order methods limited by the ambient dimension $d$, we propose Noisy-Comparison Random Search (NCRS), a…
Recent studies have demonstrated that noise in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is closely related to generalization: A larger SGD noise, if not too large, results in better generalization. Since the covariance of the SGD noise is…
We study the generalization error of randomized learning algorithms -- focusing on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) -- using a novel combination of PAC-Bayes and algorithmic stability. Importantly, our generalization bounds hold for all…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…
Sign Gradient Descent (SignGD) is a simple yet robust optimization method, widely used in machine learning for its resilience to gradient noise and compatibility with low-precision computations. While its empirical performance is well…
We introduce a doubly stochastic proximal gradient algorithm for optimizing a finite average of smooth convex functions, whose gradients depend on numerically expensive expectations. Our main motivation is the acceleration of the…
This work presents the convergence rate analysis of stochastic variants of the broad class of direct-search methods of directional type. It introduces an algorithm designed to optimize differentiable objective functions $f$ whose values can…