Related papers: Improved high-dimensional estimation with Langevin…
We obtain an improved finite-sample guarantee on the linear convergence of stochastic gradient descent for smooth and strongly convex objectives, improving from a quadratic dependence on the conditioning $(L/\mu)^2$ (where $L$ is a bound on…
Multi-layer neural networks are among the most powerful models in machine learning, yet the fundamental reasons for this success defy mathematical understanding. Learning a neural network requires to optimize a non-convex high-dimensional…
Efficient computation of min-max problems is a central question in optimization, learning, games, and controls. Arguably the most natural algorithm is gradient-descent-ascent (GDA). However, since the 1970s, conventional wisdom has argued…
We study the problem of estimating low-rank matrices from linear measurements (a.k.a., matrix sensing) through nonconvex optimization. We propose an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve a nonconvex…
Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in the context of deep neural networks has raised lots of concerns recently. Along this line, we study a general form of gradient based optimization dynamics with unbiased…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
We prove quantitative convergence rates at which discrete Langevin-like processes converge to the invariant distribution of a related stochastic differential equation. We study the setup where the additive noise can be non-Gaussian and…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…
Stochastic Gradient Descent Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) algorithms, which add noise to the classic gradient descent, are known to improve the training of neural networks in some cases where the neural network is very deep. In this paper we…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
The main aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of gradient descent (GD) algorithms with gradient errors that do not necessarily vanish, asymptotically. In particular, sufficient conditions are presented for both stability (almost sure…
We consider a distributed learning problem in which the computation is carried out on a system consisting of a master node and multiple worker nodes. In such systems, the existence of slow-running machines called stragglers will cause a…
We analyze a class of stochastic gradient algorithms with momentum on a high-dimensional random least squares problem. Our framework, inspired by random matrix theory, provides an exact (deterministic) characterization for the sequence of…
This paper studies distributed nonconvex optimization problems with stochastic gradients for a multi-agent system, in which each agent aims to minimize the sum of all agents' cost functions by using local compressed information exchange. We…
The decentralized gradient descent (DGD) algorithm, and its sibling, diffusion, are workhorses in decentralized machine learning, distributed inference and estimation, and multi-agent coordination. We propose a novel, principled framework…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) provides a simple and efficient way to solve a broad range of machine learning problems. Here, we focus on distribution regression (DR), involving two stages of sampling: Firstly, we regress from…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…
Stochastic learning dynamics based on Langevin or Levy stochastic differential equations (SDEs) in deep neural networks control the variance of noise by varying the size of the mini-batch or directly those of injecting noise. Since the…
We consider stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for least-squares regression with potentially several passes over the data. While several passes have been widely reported to perform practically better in terms of predictive performance on…