We consider the behavior of gradient flow and of discrete and noisy gradient descent. It is commonly noted that the addition of noise to the process of discrete gradient descent can affect the trajectory of gradient descent. In previous work, we observed such effects. There, we considered the case where the minima had …
arXiv research
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.
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We study how the behavior of deep policy gradient algorithms reflects the conceptual framework motivating their development. To this end, we propose a fine-grained analysis of state-of-the-art methods based on key elements of this framework: gradient estimation, value prediction, and optimization landscapes. Our result…
Study on Einstein solitons with bounds and asymptotic behavior.
We introduce a new approach for comparing reinforcement learning policies, using Wasserstein distances (WDs) in a newly defined latent behavioral space. We show that by utilizing the dual formulation of the WD, we can learn score functions over policy behaviors that can in turn be used to lead policy optimization towar…
New example of non-Kähler soliton with Kähler-like behavior at infinity.
This paper investigates asymptotic behaviors of gradient descent algorithms (particularly accelerated gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent) in the context of stochastic optimization arising in statistics and machine learning where objective functions are estimated from available data. We show that these alg…
The study examines 4D steady gradient Ricci solitons with nonnegative curvature away from a compact set.
Wide networks with polynomial activations have proven asymptotic behavior.
In this note, we observe the behavior of gradient flow and discrete and noisy gradient descent in some simple settings. It is commonly noted that addition of noise to gradient descent can affect the trajectory of gradient descent. Here, we run some computer experiments for gradient descent on some simple functions, and…
The paper studies Möbius energy gradient of helix pairs and finds limiting behavior as coiling ratio increases.
The asymptotic behavior of the stochastic gradient algorithm with a biased gradient estimator is analyzed. Relying on arguments based on the dynamic system theory (chain-recurrence) and the differential geometry (Yomdin theorem and Lojasiewicz inequality), tight bounds on the asymptotic bias of the iterates generated b…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been widely used in machine learning due to its computational efficiency and favorable generalization properties. Recently, it has been empirically demonstrated that the gradient noise in several deep learning settings admits a non-Gaussian, heavy-tailed behavior. This suggests tha…
This paper presents a stochastic behavior analysis of a kernel-based stochastic restricted-gradient descent method. The restricted gradient gives a steepest ascent direction within the so-called dictionary subspace. The analysis provides the transient and steady state performance in the mean squared error criterion. It…
Gradient descent on neural nets often operates at the Edge of Stability, where loss behavior is complex but loss decreases over time.
Study on asymptotic behavior of Taub-NUT type solitons and construction of new ALF Calabi-Yau metrics.
Proposes a continuous flow model to understand and control instability in gradient descent for deep learning.
We prove that the evolution of weight vectors in online gradient descent can encode arbitrary polynomial-space computations, even in very simple learning settings. Our results imply that, under weak complexity-theoretic assumptions, it is impossible to reason efficiently about the fine-grained behavior of online gradie…
Random feature model shows slow self-correction of generalization gap.
The paper studies stochastic gradient descent with infinite variance gradients.
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 noise, which unifies SGD and standard Langevin dynamics. Through investigating this …
Gradient descent dynamics in neural networks show quenching and activation phases.
Riemannian gradient descent escapes some spurious critical points on low-rank matrix manifold.
In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The algorithm's aim is to find a reward function such that the resulting optimal policy matche…
Study compares dropout and l2 regularization in linear models.
Infinitesimal boosting converges to a deterministic process in large sample limit.
We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approaches have generally ignored the mismatch between the distribution of states visited under the behavior policy used to collect data, and what …
Study reveals biases in gradient descent for GLNs, improving neural network performance.
This article suggests that deterministic Gradient Descent, which does not use any stochastic gradient approximation, can still exhibit stochastic behaviors. In particular, it shows that if the objective function exhibit multiscale behaviors, then in a large learning rate regime which only resolves the macroscopic but n…
We prove that two-layer (Leaky)ReLU networks initialized by e.g. the widely used method proposed by He et al. (2015) and trained using gradient descent on a least-squares loss are not universally consistent. Specifically, we describe a large class of one-dimensional data-generating distributions for which, with high pr…
The study examines the dynamic behavior of RMSprop and Adam algorithms.
Gradient flows of neural networks converge to optimal values or diverge, with thresholds and asymptotic behaviors.
3D steady gradient Ricci solitons are all O(2)-symmetric.
Training generative adversarial networks (GANs) often suffers from cyclic behaviors of iterates. Based on a simple intuition that the direction of centripetal acceleration of an object moving in uniform circular motion is toward the center of the circle, we present the Simultaneous Centripetal Acceleration (SCA) method…
This paper uses SDEs to analyze GANs training and long-run behavior.
The paper explores how structured representations influence learning dynamics in neural networks.
We survey some of the recent progress on complete gradient shrinking Ricci solitons, including the classifications in dimension three and asymptotic behavior of potential functions as well as volume growths of geodesic balls in higher dimensions. This article is written for the conference proceedings dedicated to Yau's…
In this paper, we study two kind of L^2 norm preserved non-local heat flows on closed manifolds. We first study the global existence, stability and asymptotic behavior to such non-local heat flows. Next we give the gradient estimates of positive solutions to these heat flows.
MaxVA improves Adam's step sizes by maximizing gradient variance.
Gradient rollback explains neural models by identifying influential training examples.
Constructs expanding gradient Ricci solitons with unique properties.
Survey on gradient Ricci solitons in 4D, focusing on geometry and classification.
We make policy optimization algorithms batch size-invariant by decoupling proximal and behavior policies.
Robust algorithm for distributed optimization resistant to Byzantine failures.
We investigate the low-energy behavior of the gradient flow of the norm of the Riemannian curvature on four-manifolds. Specifically, we show long time existence and exponential convergence to a metric of constant sectional curvature when the initial metric has positive Yamabe constant and small initial energy.
Experience replay (ER) is a fundamental component of off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL). ER recalls experiences from past iterations to compute gradient estimates for the current policy, increasing data-efficiency. However, the accuracy of such updates may deteriorate when the policy diverges from past behavio…
We propose a simple and general variant of the standard reparameterized gradient estimator for the variational evidence lower bound. Specifically, we remove a part of the total derivative with respect to the variational parameters that corresponds to the score function. Removing this term produces an unbiased gradient …
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 only consider a single direction, and do not try to model distance from extremum…
We conduct mathematical analysis on the effect of batch normalization (BN) on gradient backpropogation in residual network training, which is believed to play a critical role in addressing the gradient vanishing/explosion problem, in this work. By analyzing the mean and variance behavior of the input and the gradient i…