A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
Nesterov SGD is widely used for training modern neural networks and other machine learning models. Yet, its advantages over SGD have not been theoretically clarified. Indeed, as we show in our paper, both theoretically and empirically, Nesterov SGD with any parameter selection does not in general provide acceleration o…
Stochastic gradient decent~(SGD) and its variants, including some accelerated variants, have become popular for training in machine learning. However, in all existing SGD and its variants, the sample size in each iteration~(epoch) of training is the same as the size of the full training set. In this paper, we propose a…
In this paper, we study the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method for the nonconvex nonsmooth optimization, and propose an accelerated SGD method by combining the variance reduction technique with Nesterov's extrapolation technique. Moreover, based on the local error bound condition, we establish the linear converge…
We study local SGD (also known as parallel SGD and federated averaging), a natural and frequently used stochastic distributed optimization method. Its theoretical foundations are currently lacking and we highlight how all existing error guarantees in the convex setting are dominated by a simple baseline, minibatch SGD.…
The paper analyzes time-dependent streaming data with biased gradient estimates and proposes improved stochastic optimization methods.
problem Stochastic optimization in a streaming setting with time-dependent and biased gradient estimates.
method Analysis of several first-order methods including SGD, mini-batch SGD, and time-varying mini-batch SGD, along with their Polyak-Ruppert averages.
result Time-varying mini-batch SGD methods can break long- and short-range dependence structures, and biased SGD methods can achieve comparable performance to their unbiased counterparts.
In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original SVRG, called variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Unlike the choices of snapshot and starting points in SVRG and its proximal variant, Prox-SVRG, the two vectors of VR-SGD are set to the average and last iterate of the previous epoch, respecti…
Modern machine learning focuses on highly expressive models that are able to fit or interpolate the data completely, resulting in zero training loss. For such models, we show that the stochastic gradients of common loss functions satisfy a strong growth condition. Under this condition, we prove that constant step-size …
This paper explains why Adam generalizes worse than SGD by analyzing its components.
problem Understanding why Adam generalizes worse than Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD).
method Diffusion theoretical framework to disentangle the effects of Adaptive Learning Rate and Momentum.
result Adaptive Learning Rate helps escape saddle points but not select flat minima, while Momentum provides a drift effect to help pass through saddle points.
In this work we consider the stochastic minimization of nonsmooth convex loss functions, a central problem in machine learning. We propose a novel algorithm called Accelerated Nonsmooth Stochastic Gradient Descent (ANSGD), which exploits the structure of common nonsmooth loss functions to achieve optimal convergence ra…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with constant momentum and its variants such as Adam are the optimization algorithms of choice for training deep neural networks (DNNs). Since DNN training is incredibly computationally expensive, there is great interest in speeding up the convergence. Nesterov accelerated gradient (NA…
SGDM accelerates faster than SGD with large batch sizes and permits broader learning rates.
problem Understanding the role of momentum in SGDM and its convergence rates.
method Analysis of SGDM convergence rates under strongly convex settings, including finite-sample rates and asymptotic normality of the averaged estimator.
result SGDM converges faster than SGD with large batch sizes and permits broader learning rates.
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 significant improvements over stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Rigorously speak…
Stochastic gradient descent (\textsc{Sgd}) methods are the most powerful optimization tools in training machine learning and deep learning models. Moreover, acceleration (a.k.a. momentum) methods and diagonal scaling (a.k.a. adaptive gradient) methods are the two main techniques to improve the slow convergence of \text…
Machine learning, especially deep neural networks, has been rapidly developed in fields including computer vision, speech recognition and reinforcement learning. Although Mini-batch SGD is one of the most popular stochastic optimization methods in training deep networks, it shows a slow convergence rate due to the larg…
To accelerate the training of machine learning models, distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants have been widely adopted, which apply multiple workers in parallel to speed up training. Among them, Local SGD has gained much attention due to its lower communication cost. Nevertheless, when the data …
Stochastic momentum methods trade compute efficiency for serial runtime.
problem Stochastic momentum methods trade compute efficiency for serial runtime.
method Stochastic HB and ASGD for consistent linear regression with Gaussian covariates.
result HB preserves SGD-level CE over a larger batch-size window, allowing larger batches to reduce serial runtime until HB reaches its deterministic accelerated scale.
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used techniques for online optimization in machine learning. In this work, we accelerate SGD by adaptively learning how to sample the most useful training examples at each time step. First, we show that SGD can be used to learn the best possible sampling distr…
Integrating adaptive learning rate and momentum techniques into SGD leads to a large class of efficiently accelerated adaptive stochastic algorithms, such as AdaGrad, RMSProp, Adam, AccAdaGrad, \textit{etc}. In spite of their effectiveness in practice, there is still a large gap in their theories of convergences, espec…
In this paper we explore acceleration techniques for large scale nonconvex optimization problems with special focuses on deep neural networks. The extrapolation scheme is a classical approach for accelerating stochastic gradient descent for convex optimization, but it does not work well for nonconvex optimization typic…
Momentum-based acceleration of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in deep learning. We propose the quasi-hyperbolic momentum algorithm (QHM) as an extremely simple alteration of momentum SGD, averaging a plain SGD step with a momentum step. We describe numerous connections to and identities with other alg…