The study on the implicit regularization induced by gradient-based optimization is a longstanding pursuit. In the present paper, we characterize the implicit regularization of momentum gradient descent (MGD) with early stopping by comparing with the explicit $\ell_2$-regularization (ridge). In details, we study MGD in the continuous-time view, so-called momentum gradient flow (MGF), and show that its tendency is closer to ridge than the gradient descent (GD) [Ali et al., 2019] for least squares regression. Moreover, we prove that, under the calibration $t=\sqrt{2/\lambda}$, where $t$ is the time parameter in MGF and $\lambda$ is the tuning parameter in ridge regression, the risk of MGF is no more than 1.54 times that of ridge. In particular, the relative Bayes risk of MGF to ridge is between 1 and 1.035 under the optimal tuning. The numerical experiments support our theoretical results strongly.
Escaping from saddle points and finding local minimum is a central problem in nonconvex optimization. Perturbed gradient methods are perhaps the simplest approach for this problem. However, to find $(\epsilon, \sqrt{\epsilon})$-approximate local minima, the existing best stochastic gradient complexity for this type of algorithms is $\tilde O(\epsilon^{-3.5})$, which is not optimal. In this paper, we propose LENA (Last stEp shriNkAge), a faster perturbed stochastic gradient framework for finding local minima. We show that LENA with stochastic gradient estimators such as SARAH/SPIDER and STORM can find $(\epsilon, \epsilon_{H})$-approximate local minima within $\tilde O(\epsilon^{-3} + \epsilon_{H}^{-6})$ stochastic gradient evaluations (or $\tilde O(\epsilon^{-3})$ when $\epsilon_H = \sqrt{\epsilon}$). The core idea of our framework is a step-size shrinkage scheme to control the average movement of the iterates, which leads to faster convergence to the local minima.
We introduce a new distortion measure for point processes called functional-covering distortion. It is inspired by intensity theory and is related to both the covering of point processes and logarithmic loss distortion. We obtain the distortion-rate function with feedforward under this distortion measure for a large class of point processes. For Poisson processes, the rate-distortion function is obtained under a general condition called constrained functional-covering distortion, of which both covering and functional-covering are special cases. Also for Poisson processes, we characterize the rate-distortion region for a two-encoder CEO problem and show that feedforward does not enlarge this region.
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane, the $k$-center problem is to find $k$ congruent disks of minimum possible radius such that their union covers all the points in $P$. The $2$-center problem is a special case of the $k$-center problem that has been extensively studied in the recent past \cite{CAHN,HT,SH}. In this paper, we consider a generalized version of the $2$-center problem called \textit{proximity connected} $2$-center (PCTC) problem. In this problem, we are also given a parameter $\delta\geq 0$ and we have the additional constraint that the distance between the centers of the disks should be at most $\delta$. Note that when $\delta=0$, the PCTC problem is reduced to the $1$-center(minimum enclosing disk) problem and when $\delta$ tends to infinity, it is reduced to the $2$-center problem. The PCTC problem first appeared in the context of wireless networks in 1992 \cite{ACN0}, but obtaining a nontrivial deterministic algorithm for the problem remained open. In this paper, we resolve this open problem by providing a deterministic $O(n^2\log n)$ time algorithm for the problem.
We study online convex optimization with switching costs, a practically important but also extremely challenging problem due to the lack of complete offline information. By tapping into the power of machine learning (ML) based optimizers, ML-augmented online algorithms (also referred to as expert calibration in this paper) have been emerging as state of the art, with provable worst-case performance guarantees. Nonetheless, by using the standard practice of training an ML model as a standalone optimizer and plugging it into an ML-augmented algorithm, the average cost performance can be even worse than purely using ML predictions. In order to address the "how to learn" challenge, we propose EC-L2O (expert-calibrated learning to optimize), which trains an ML-based optimizer by explicitly taking into account the downstream expert calibrator. To accomplish this, we propose a new differentiable expert calibrator that generalizes regularized online balanced descent and offers a provably better competitive ratio than pure ML predictions when the prediction error is large. For training, our loss function is a weighted sum of two different losses -- one minimizing the average ML prediction error for better robustness, and the other one minimizing the post-calibration average cost. We also provide theoretical analysis for EC-L2O, highlighting that expert calibration can be even beneficial for the average cost performance and that the high-percentile tail ratio of the cost achieved by EC-L2O to that of the offline optimal oracle (i.e., tail cost ratio) can be bounded. Finally, we test EC-L2O by running simulations for sustainable datacenter demand response. Our results demonstrate that EC-L2O can empirically achieve a lower average cost as well as a lower competitive ratio than the existing baseline algorithms.
We investigate the feature compression of high-dimensional ridge regression using the optimal subsampling technique. Specifically, based on the basic framework of random sampling algorithm on feature for ridge regression and the A-optimal design criterion, we first obtain a set of optimal subsampling probabilities. Considering that the obtained probabilities are uneconomical, we then propose the nearly optimal ones. With these probabilities, a two step iterative algorithm is established which has lower computational cost and higher accuracy. We provide theoretical analysis and numerical experiments to support the proposed methods. Numerical results demonstrate the decent performance of our methods.
Momentum methods, including heavy-ball~(HB) and Nesterov's accelerated gradient~(NAG), are widely used in training neural networks for their fast convergence. However, there is a lack of theoretical guarantees for their convergence and acceleration since the optimization landscape of the neural network is non-convex. Nowadays, some works make progress towards understanding the convergence of momentum methods in an over-parameterized regime, where the number of the parameters exceeds that of the training instances. Nonetheless, current results mainly focus on the two-layer neural network, which are far from explaining the remarkable success of the momentum methods in training deep neural networks. Motivated by this, we investigate the convergence of NAG with constant learning rate and momentum parameter in training two architectures of deep linear networks: deep fully-connected linear neural networks and deep linear ResNets. Based on the over-parameterization regime, we first analyze the residual dynamics induced by the training trajectory of NAG for a deep fully-connected linear neural network under the random Gaussian initialization. Our results show that NAG can converge to the global minimum at a $(1 - \mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{\kappa}))^t$ rate, where $t$ is the iteration number and $\kappa > 1$ is a constant depending on the condition number of the feature matrix. Compared to the $(1 - \mathcal{O}(1/{\kappa}))^t$ rate of GD, NAG achieves an acceleration over GD. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical guarantee for the convergence of NAG to the global minimum in training deep neural networks. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to deep linear ResNets and derive a similar convergence result.
This paper makes the first attempt to apply newly developed upwind GFDM for the meshless solution of two-phase porous flow equations. In the presented method, node cloud is used to flexibly discretize the computational domain, instead of complicated mesh generation. Combining with moving least square approximation and local Taylor expansion, spatial derivatives of oil-phase pressure at a node are approximated by generalized difference operators in the local influence domain of the node. By introducing the first-order upwind scheme of phase relative permeability, and combining the discrete boundary conditions, fully-implicit GFDM-based nonlinear discrete equations of the immiscible two-phase porous flow are obtained and solved by the nonlinear solver based on the Newton iteration method with the automatic differentiation, to avoid the additional computational cost and possible computational instability caused by sequentially coupled scheme. Two numerical examples are implemented to test the computational performances of the presented method. Detailed error analysis finds the two sources of the calculation error, roughly studies the convergence order thus find that the low-order error of GFDM makes the convergence order of GFDM lower than that of FDM when node spacing is small, and points out the significant effect of the symmetry or uniformity of the node collocation in the node influence domain on the accuracy of generalized difference operators, and the radius of the node influence domain should be small to achieve high calculation accuracy, which is a significant difference between the studied hyperbolic two-phase porous flow problem and the elliptic problems when GFDM is applied.
In the interdependent values (IDV) model introduced by Milgrom and Weber [1982], agents have private signals that capture their information about different social alternatives, and the valuation of every agent is a function of all agent signals. While interdependence has been mainly studied for auctions, it is extremely relevant for a large variety of social choice settings, including the canonical setting of public projects. The IDV model is very challenging relative to standard independent private values, and welfare guarantees have been achieved through two alternative conditions known as {\em single-crossing} and {\em submodularity over signals (SOS)}. In either case, the existing theory falls short of solving the public projects setting. Our contribution is twofold: (i) We give a workable characterization of truthfulness for IDV public projects for the largest class of valuations for which such a characterization exists, and term this class \emph{decomposable valuations}; (ii) We provide possibility and impossibility results for welfare approximation in public projects with SOS valuations. Our main impossibility result is that, in contrast to auctions, no universally truthful mechanism performs better for public projects with SOS valuations than choosing a project at random. Our main positive result applies to {\em excludable} public projects with SOS, for which we establish a constant factor approximation similar to auctions. Our results suggest that exclusion may be a key tool for achieving welfare guarantees in the IDV model.
The stochastic gradient Langevin Dynamics is one of the most fundamental algorithms to solve sampling problems and non-convex optimization appearing in several machine learning applications. Especially, its variance reduced versions have nowadays gained particular attention. In this paper, we study two variants of this kind, namely, the Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient Langevin Dynamics and the Stochastic Recursive Gradient Langevin Dynamics. We prove their convergence to the objective distribution in terms of KL-divergence under the sole assumptions of smoothness and Log-Sobolev inequality which are weaker conditions than those used in prior works for these algorithms. With the batch size and the inner loop length set to $\sqrt{n}$, the gradient complexity to achieve an $\epsilon$-precision is $\tilde{O}((n+dn^{1/2}\epsilon^{-1})\gamma^2 L^2\alpha^{-2})$, which is an improvement from any previous analyses. We also show some essential applications of our result to non-convex optimization.
We prove linear convergence of gradient descent to a global minimum for the training of deep residual networks with constant layer width and smooth activation function. We further show that the trained weights, as a function of the layer index, admits a scaling limit which is H\"older continuous as the depth of the network tends to infinity. The proofs are based on non-asymptotic estimates of the loss function and of norms of the network weights along the gradient descent path. We illustrate the relevance of our theoretical results to practical settings using detailed numerical experiments on supervised learning problems.