Related papers: Functional Central Limit Theorem for Stochastic Gr…
Large learning rates, when applied to gradient descent for nonconvex optimization, yield various implicit biases including the edge of stability (Cohen et al., 2021), balancing (Wang et al., 2022), and catapult (Lewkowycz et al., 2020).…
In this letter, we study distributed optimization, where a network of agents, abstracted as a directed graph, collaborates to minimize the average of locally-known convex functions. Most of the existing approaches over directed graphs are…
The diffusion approximation of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in current literature is only valid on a finite time interval. In this paper, we establish the uniform-in-time diffusion approximation of SGD, by only assuming that the…
We analyze the behavior of randomized coordinate gradient descent for nonconvex optimization, proving that under standard assumptions, the iterates almost surely escape strict saddle points. By formulating the method as a nonlinear random…
The proximal gradient algorithm for minimizing the sum of a smooth and a nonsmooth convex function often converges linearly even without strong convexity. One common reason is that a multiple of the step length at each iteration may…
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…
In this paper, we establish new convergence results for the quantized distributed gradient descent and suggest a novel strategy of choosing the stepsizes for the high-performance of the algorithm. Under the strongly convexity assumption on…
We consider centralized and distributed mirror descent algorithms over a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, and prove that the problem variables converge to an optimizer of a possibly nonsmooth function when the step sizes are square…
We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…
To solve convex optimization problems with a noisy gradient input, we analyze the global behavior of subgradient-like flows under stochastic errors. The objective function is composite, being equal to the sum of two convex functions, one…
In order to characterize the fluctuation between the ergodic limit and the time-averaging estimator of a full discretization in a quantitative way, we establish a central limit theorem for the full discretization of the parabolic stochastic…
We consider the minimization of an M-convex function, which is a discrete convexity concept for functions on the integer lattice points. It is known that a minimizer of an Mconvex function can be obtained by the steepest descent algorithm.…
We describe limit fluctuations of the height function for the open TASEP on the coexistence line under the stationary measure. It is known that the height function satisfies a law of large numbers as the number of sites $n$ goes to infinity…
A prevalent belief among optimization specialists is that linear convergence of gradient descent is contingent on the function growing quadratically away from its minimizers. In this work, we argue that this belief is inaccurate. We show…
In this paper, we focus on the decentralized stochastic subgradient-based methods in minimizing nonsmooth nonconvex functions without Clarke regularity, especially in the decentralized training of nonsmooth neural networks. We propose a…
In their seminal work, Polyak and Juditsky showed that stochastic approximation algorithms for solving smooth equations enjoy a central limit theorem. Moreover, it has since been argued that the asymptotic covariance of the method is best…
For solving pseudo-convex global optimization problems, we present a novel fully adaptive steepest descent method (or ASDM) without any hard-to-estimate parameters. For the step-size regulation in an $\varepsilon$-normalized direction, we…
The growing size of available data has attracted increasing interest in solving minimax problems in a decentralized manner for various machine learning tasks. Previous theoretical research has primarily focused on the convergence rate and…
The notion of the stationary equilibrium ensemble has played a central role in statistical mechanics. In machine learning as well, training serves as generalized equilibration that drives the probability distribution of model parameters…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for strongly convex functions converges at the rate $\bO(1/k)$. However, achieving good results in practice requires tuning the parameters (for example the learning rate) of the algorithm. In this paper we…