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We propose a second-order (Hessian or Hessian-free) based optimization method for variational inference inspired by Gaussian backpropagation, and argue that quasi-Newton optimization can be developed as well. This is accomplished by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-30 Kai Fan , Ziteng Wang , Jeff Beck , James Kwok , Katherine Heller

Second-order methods for neural network optimization have several advantages over methods based on first-order gradient descent, including better scaling to large mini-batch sizes and fewer updates needed for convergence. But they are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-21 Huishuai Zhang , Caiming Xiong , James Bradbury , Richard Socher

Second-order information -- such as curvature or data covariance -- is critical for optimisation, diagnostics, and robustness. However, in many modern settings, only the gradients are observable. We show that the gradients alone can reveal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Arash Jamshidi , Katsiaryna Haitsiukevich , Kai Puolamäki

In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Davide Barbieri , Matteo Bonforte , Peio Ibarrondo

We introduce a novel method to compute a rank $m$ approximation of the inverse of the Hessian matrix in the distributed regime. By leveraging the differences in gradients and parameters of multiple Workers, we are able to efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-09-18 Sébastien M. R. Arnold , Chunming Wang

In this paper, we propose a novel optimization algorithm for training machine learning models called Input Normalized Stochastic Gradient Descent (INSGD), inspired by the Normalized Least Mean Squares (NLMS) algorithm used in adaptive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Salih Atici , Hongyi Pan , Ahmet Enis Cetin

The representation of functions by artificial neural networks depends on a large number of parameters in a non-linear fashion. Suitable parameters of these are found by minimizing a 'loss functional', typically by stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Stephan Wojtowytsch

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a prevalent optimization technique for large-scale distributed machine learning. While SGD computation can be efficiently divided between multiple machines, communication typically becomes a bottleneck…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-24 Dmitrii Avdiukhin , Grigory Yaroslavtsev

Accelerating the convergence of second-order optimization, particularly Newton-type methods, remains a pivotal challenge in algorithmic research. In this paper, we extend previous work on the \textbf{Quadratic Gradient (QG)} and rigorously…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-01 John Chiang

Second-order optimizers hold intriguing potential for deep learning, but suffer from increased cost and sensitivity to the non-convexity of the loss surface as compared to gradient-based approaches. We introduce a coordinate descent method…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Ravi G. Patel , Nathaniel A. Trask , Mamikon A. Gulian , Eric C. Cyr

Optimizing smooth convex functions in stochastic settings, where only noisy estimates of gradients and Hessians are available, is a fundamental problem in optimization. While first-order methods possess a low per-iteration cost, their…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-06 Antoine Godichon-Baggioni , Bruno Portier , Guillaume Sallé

Stochastic gradient descent method and its variants constitute the core optimization algorithms that achieve good convergence rates for solving machine learning problems. These rates are obtained especially when these algorithms are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 S. Ilker Birbil , Ozgur Martin , Gonenc Onay , Figen Oztoprak

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in deep learning due to its computational efficiency, but a complete understanding of why SGD performs so well remains a major challenge. It has been observed empirically that most…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-20 Carmina Fjellström , Kaj Nyström

Particle-based approximate Bayesian inference approaches such as Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) combine the flexibility and convergence guarantees of sampling methods with the computational benefits of variational inference. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Lauro Langosco di Langosco , Vincent Fortuin , Heiko Strathmann

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used optimization methods for solving various machine learning problems. SGD solves an optimization problem by iteratively sampling a few data points from the input data, computing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Aditya Devarakonda , James Demmel

Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-16 Alberto Bietti , Julien Mairal

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based and non-parametric particle method for sampling from a target distribution, such as in Bayesian inference and other machine learning tasks. Different from other particle methods,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-02 Viktor Stein , Wuchen Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Vivak Patel , Shushu Zhang , Bowen Tian

We consider a variant of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a random learning rate and reveal its convergence properties. SGD is a widely used stochastic optimization algorithm in machine learning, especially deep learning. Numerous…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-09 Naoki Yoshida , Shogo Nakakita , Masaaki Imaizumi

We study the generalization properties of the popular stochastic optimization method known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for optimizing general non-convex loss functions. Our main contribution is providing upper bounds on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Gergely Neu , Gintare Karolina Dziugaite , Mahdi Haghifam , Daniel M. Roy