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We analyze the learning properties of the stochastic gradient method when multiple passes over the data and mini-batches are allowed. We study how regularization properties are controlled by the step-size, the number of passes and the…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…
Smooth game optimization has recently attracted great interest in machine learning as it generalizes the single-objective optimization paradigm. However, game dynamics is more complex due to the interaction between different players and is…
We study the role of batch size in stochastic conditional gradient methods under a $\mu$-Kurdyka-{\L}ojasiewicz ($\mu$-KL) condition. Focusing on momentum-based stochastic conditional gradient algorithms (e.g., Scion), we derive a new…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is an estimation tool for large data employed in machine learning and statistics. Due to the Markovian nature of the SGD process, inference is a challenging problem. An underlying asymptotic normality of…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is the dominant algorithm in many optimization scenarios, including convex optimization instances and non-convex neural network training. Yet, in the stochastic setting, momentum interferes…
A theoretical, and potentially also practical, problem with stochastic gradient descent is that trajectories may escape to infinity. In this note, we investigate uniform boundedness properties of iterates and function values along the…
Momentum based stochastic gradient methods such as heavy ball (HB) and Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (NAG) method are widely used in practice for training deep networks and other supervised learning models, as they often provide…
The success of the Adam optimizer on a wide array of architectures has made it the default in settings where stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performs poorly. However, our theoretical understanding of this discrepancy is lagging,…
We study the fundamental optimization principles of self-attention, the defining mechanism of transformers, by analyzing the implicit bias of gradient-based optimizers in training a self-attention layer with a linear decoder in binary…
Composition optimization is widely-applied in nonconvex machine learning. Various advanced stochastic algorithms that adopt momentum and variance reduction techniques have been developed for composition optimization. However, these…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
In this paper we address the convergence of stochastic approximation when the functions to be minimized are not convex and nonsmooth. We show that the "mean-limit" approach to the convergence which leads, for smooth problems, to the ODE…
Mini-batch gradient descent based methods are the de facto algorithms for training neural network architectures today. We introduce a mini-batch selection strategy based on submodular function maximization. Our novel submodular formulation…
Stochastic gradient descent updates parameters with summation gradient computed from a random data batch. This summation will lead to unbalanced training process if the data we obtained is unbalanced. To address this issue, this paper takes…
It has been experimentally observed that distributed implementations of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms exhibit speedup saturation and decaying generalization ability beyond a particular batch-size. In this work, we…
Recent work has argued that stochastic gradient descent can approximate the Bayesian uncertainty in model parameters near local minima. In this work we develop a similar correspondence for minibatch natural gradient descent (NGD). We prove…
We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…
Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been developed as a flexible family of scalable Bayesian sampling algorithms. However, there has been little theoretical analysis of the impact of minibatch size to the algorithm's…