Stochastic Gradient/Mirror Descent: Minimax Optimality and Implicit Regularization
Stochastic descent methods (of the gradient and mirror varieties) have become increasingly popular in optimization. In fact, it is now widely recognized that the success of deep learning is not only due to the special deep architecture of the models, but also due to the behavior of the stochastic descent methods used, which play a key role in reaching "good" solutions that generalize well to unseen data. In an attempt to shed some light on why this is the case, we revisit some minimax properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for the square loss of linear models---originally developed in the 1990's---and extend them to general stochastic mirror descent (SMD) algorithms for general loss functions and nonlinear models. In particular, we show that there is a fundamental identity which holds for SMD (and SGD) under very general conditions, and which implies the minimax optimality of SMD (and SGD) for sufficiently small step size, and for a general class of loss functions and general nonlinear models. We further show that this identity can be used to naturally establish other properties of SMD (and SGD), namely convergence and implicit regularization for over-parameterized linear models (in what is now being called the "interpolating regime"), some of which have been shown in certain cases in prior literature. We also argue how this identity can be used in the so-called "highly over-parameterized" nonlinear setting (where the number of parameters far exceeds the number of data points) to provide insights into why SMD (and SGD) may have similar convergence and implicit regularization properties for deep learning.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Geometry, Computation, and Optimality in Stochastic Optimization
We study computational and statistical consequences of problem geometry in stochastic and online optimization. By focusing on constraint set and gradient geometry, we characterize the problem families for which stochasti…
Stochastic OptimizationA Markov Chain Theory Approach to Characterizing the Minimax Optimality of Stochastic Gradient Descent (for Least Squares)
This work provides a simplified proof of the statistical minimax optimality of (iterate averaged) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), for the special case of least squares. This result is obtained by analyzing SGD as a st…
Efficient Mirror Descent Ascent Methods for Nonsmooth Minimax Problems
In the paper, we propose a class of efficient mirror descent ascent methods to solve the nonsmooth nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax problems by using dynamic mirror functions, and introduce a convergence analysis fram…
A Stochastic Interpretation of Stochastic Mirror Descent: Risk-Sensitive Optimality
Stochastic mirror descent (SMD) is a fairly new family of algorithms that has recently found a wide range of applications in optimization, machine learning, and control. It can be considered a generalization of the class…
Zeroth-Order Stochastic Mirror Descent Algorithms for Minimax Excess Risk Optimization
The minimax excess risk optimization (MERO) problem is a new variation of the traditional distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem, which achieves uniformly low regret across all test distributions under suitab…