We present an algorithm for minimizing an objective with hard-to-compute gradients by using a related, easier-to-access function as a proxy. Our algorithm is based on approximate proximal-point iterations on the proxy combined with relatively few stochastic gradients from the objective. When the difference between the objective and the proxy is $\delta$-smooth, our algorithm guarantees convergence at a rate matching stochastic gradient descent on a $\delta$-smooth objective, which can lead to substantially better sample efficiency. Our algorithm has many potential applications in machine learning, and provides a principled means of leveraging synthetic data, physics simulators, mixed public and private data, and more.

We consider potentially non-convex optimization problems, for which optimal rates of approximation depend on the dimension of the parameter space and the smoothness of the function to be optimized. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that achieves close to optimal a priori computational guarantees, while also providing a posteriori certificates of optimality. Our general formulation builds on infinite-dimensional sums-of-squares and Fourier analysis, and is instantiated on the minimization of periodic functions.

We resolve the min-max complexity of distributed stochastic convex optimization (up to a log factor) in the intermittent communication setting, where M machines work in parallel over the course of R rounds of communication to optimize the objective, and during each round of communication, each machine may sequentially compute K stochastic gradient estimates. We present a novel lower bound with a matching upper bound that establishes an optimal algorithm.

The existing analysis of asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) degrades dramatically when any delay is large, giving the impression that performance depends primarily on the delay. On the contrary, we prove much better guarantees for the same asynchronous SGD algorithm regardless of the delays in the gradients, depending instead just on the number of parallel devices used to implement the algorithm. Our guarantees are strictly better than the existing analyses, and we also argue that asynchronous SGD outperforms synchronous minibatch SGD in the settings we consider. For our analysis, we introduce a novel recursion based on ``virtual iterates'' and delay-adaptive stepsizes, which allow us to derive state-of-the-art guarantees for both convex and non-convex objectives.

We study the problem of distributed stochastic non-convex optimization with intermittent communication. We consider the full participation setting where $M$ machines work in parallel over $R$ communication rounds and the partial participation setting where $M$ machines are sampled independently every round from some meta-distribution over machines. We propose and analyze a new algorithm that improves existing methods by requiring fewer and lighter variance reduction operations. We also present lower bounds, showing our algorithm is either $\textit{optimal}$ or $\textit{almost optimal}$ in most settings. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm.

We present a direct (primal only) derivation of Mirror Descent as a “partial” discretization of gradient flow on a Riemannian manifold where the metric tensor is the Hessian of the Mirror Descent potential function. We contrast this discretization to Natural Gradient Descent, which is obtained by a “full” forward Euler discretization. This view helps shed light on the relationship between the methods and allows generalizing Mirror Descent to any Riemannian geometry in $\mathbb{R}^d$, even when the metric tensor is not a Hessian, and thus there is no “dual.”

We resolve the min-max complexity of distributed stochastic convex optimization (up to a log factor) in the intermittent communication setting, where $M$ machines work in parallel over the course of $R$ rounds of communication to optimize the objective, and during each round of communication, each machine may sequentially compute $K$ stochastic gradient estimates. We present a novel lower bound with a matching upper bound that establishes an optimal algorithm.

Recent work has highlighted the role of initialization scale in determining the structure of the solutions that gradient methods converge to. In particular, it was shown that large initialization leads to the neural tangent kernel regime solution, whereas small initialization leads to so called “rich regimes”. However, the initialization structure is richer than the overall scale alone and involves relative magnitudes of different weights and layers in the network. Here we show that these relative scales, which we refer to as initialization shape, play an important role in determining the learned model. We develop a novel technique for deriving the inductive bias of gradient-flow and use it to obtain closed-form implicit regularizers for multiple cases of interest.

We propose and analyze a stochastic Newton algorithm for homogeneous distributed stochastic convex optimization, where each machine can calculate stochastic gradients of the same population objective, as well as stochastic Hessian-vector products (products of an independent unbiased estimator of the Hessian of the population objective with arbitrary vectors), with many such stochastic computations performed between rounds of communication. We show that our method can reduce the number, and frequency, of required communication rounds, compared to existing methods without hurting performance, by proving convergence guarantees for quasi-self-concordant objectives (e.g., logistic regression), alongside empirical evidence.

We present and analyze an algorithm for optimizing smooth and convex or strongly convex objectives using minibatch stochastic gradient estimates. The algorithm is optimal with respect to its dependence on both the minibatch size and minimum expected loss simultaneously. This improves over the optimal method of Lan, which is insensitive to the minimum expected loss; over the optimistic acceleration of Cotter et al., which has suboptimal dependence on the minibatch size; and over the algorithm of Liu and Belkin, which is limited to least squares problems and is also similarly suboptimal. Applied to interpolation learning, the improvement over Cotter et al.~and Liu and Belkin translates to a linear, rather than square-root, parallelization speedup.

We design a general framework for answering adaptive statistical queries that focuses on providing explicit confidence intervals along with point estimates. Prior work in this area has either focused on providing tight confidence intervals for specific analyses, or providing general worst-case bounds for point estimates. Unfortunately, as we observe, these worst-case bounds are loose in many settings — often not even beating simple baselines like sample splitting. Our main contribution is to design a framework for providing valid, instance-specific confidence intervals for point estimates that can be generated by heuristics. When paired with good heuristics, this method gives guarantees that are orders of magnitude better than the best worst-case bounds. We provide a Python library implementing our method.

We investigate the computational complexity of several basic linear algebra primitives, including largest eigenvector computation and linear regression, in the computational model that allows access to the data via a matrix-vector product oracle. We show that for polynomial accuracy, $\Theta(d)$ calls to the oracle are necessary and sufficient even for a randomized algorithm. Our lower bound is based on a reduction to estimating the least eigenvalue of a random Wishart matrix. This simple distribution enables a concise proof, leveraging a few key properties of the random Wishart ensemble.

A recent line of work studies overparametrized neural networks in the “kernel regime,” i.e. when during training the network behaves as a kernelized linear predictor, and thus, training with gradient descent has the effect of finding the corresponding minimum RKHS norm solution. This stands in contrast to other studies which demonstrate how gradient descent on overparametrized networks can induce rich implicit biases that are not RKHS norms. Building on an observation by \citet{chizat2018note}, we show how the \textbf{\textit{scale of the initialization}} controls the transition between the “kernel” (aka lazy) and “rich” (aka active) regimes and affects generalization properties in multilayer homogeneous models. We provide a complete and detailed analysis for a family of simple depth-$D$ linear networks that exhibit an interesting and meaningful transition between the kernel and rich regimes, and highlight an interesting role for the \emph{width} of the models. We further demonstrate this transition empirically for matrix factorization and multilayer non-linear networks.

We study local SGD (also known as parallel SGD and federated SGD), a natural and frequently used 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. (1) For quadratic objectives we prove that local SGD strictly dominates minibatch SGD and that accelerated local SGD is minmax optimal for quadratics; (2) For general convex objectives we provide the first guarantee that at least \emph{sometimes} improves over minibatch SGD, but our guarantee does not always improve over, nor even match, minibatch SGD; (3) We show that indeed local SGD does \emph{not} dominate minibatch SGD by presenting a lower bound on the performance of local SGD that is worse than the minibatch SGD guarantee.

We provide a detailed asymptotic study of gradient flow trajectories and their implicit optimization bias when minimizing the exponential loss over "diagonal linear networks". This is the simplest model displaying a transition between "kernel" and non-kernel ("rich" or "active") regimes. We show how the transition is controlled by the relationship between the initialization scale and how accurately we minimize the training loss. Our results indicate that some limit behavior of gradient descent only kick in at ridiculous training accuracies (well beyond 10^-100). Moreover, the implicit bias at reasonable initialization scales and training accuracies is more complex and not captured by these limits.

We analyze Local SGD (aka parallel or federated SGD) and Minibatch SGD in the heterogeneous distributed setting, where each machine has access to stochastic gradient estimates for a different, machine-specific, convex objective; the goal is to optimize w.r.t.~the average objective; and machines can only communicate intermittently. We argue that, (i) Minibatch SGD (even without acceleration) dominates all existing analysis of Local SGD in this setting, (ii) accelerated Minibatch SGD is optimal when the heterogeneity is high, and (iii) present the first upper bound for Local SGD that improves over Minibatch SGD in a non-homogeneous regime.

We give nearly matching upper and lower bounds on the oracle complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points $(\|\nabla F(x)\|\leq\epsilon$ in stochastic convex optimization. We jointly analyze the oracle complexity in both the local stochastic oracle model and the global oracle (or, statistical learning) model. This allows us to decompose the complexity of finding near-stationary points into optimization complexity and sample complexity, and reveals some surprising differences between the complexity of stochastic optimization versus learning. Notably, we show that in the global oracle/statistical learning model, only logarithmic dependence on smoothness is required to find a near-stationary point, whereas polynomial dependence on smoothness is necessary in the local stochastic oracle model. In other words, the separation in complexity between the two models can be exponential, and the folklore understanding that smoothness is required to find stationary points is only weakly true for statistical learning. Our upper bounds are based on extensions of a recent “recursive regularization” technique proposed by Allen-Zhu (2018). We show how to extend the technique to achieve near-optimal rates, and in particular show how to leverage the extra information available in the global oracle model. Our algorithm for the global model can be implemented efficiently through finite sum methods, and suggests an interesting new computational-statistical tradeoff.

We note that known methods achieving the optimal oracle complexity for first order convex optimization require quadratic memory, and ask whether this is necessary, and more broadly seek to characterize the minimax number of first order queries required to optimize a convex Lipschitz function subject to a memory constraint.

Classifiers can be trained with data-dependent constraints to satisfy fairness goals, reduce churn, achieve a targeted false positive rate, or other policy goals. We study the generalization performance for such constrained optimization problems, in terms of how well the constraints are satisfied at evaluation time, given that they are satisfied at training time. To improve generalization, we frame the problem as a two-player game where one player optimizes the model parameters on a training dataset, and the other player enforces the constraints on an independent validation dataset. We build on recent work in two-player constrained optimization to show that if one uses this two-dataset approach, then constraint generalization can be significantly improved. As we illustrate experimentally, this approach works not only in theory, but also in practice.

The problem of handling adaptivity in data analysis, intentional or not, permeates a variety of fields, including test-set overfitting in ML challenges and the accumulation of invalid scientific discoveries. We propose a mechanism for answering an arbitrarily long sequence of potentially adaptive statistical queries, by charging a price for each query and using the proceeds to collect additional samples. Crucially, we guarantee statistical validity without any assumptions on how the queries are generated. We also ensure with high probability that the cost for $M$ non-adaptive queries is $O(\log M)$, while the cost to a potentially adaptive user who makes $M$ queries that do not depend on any others is $O(\sqrt{M})$.

We suggest a general oracle-based framework that captures parallel stochastic optimization in different parallelization settings described by a dependency graph, and derive generic lower bounds in terms of this graph. We then use the framework and derive lower bounds to study several specific parallel optimization settings, including delayed updates and parallel processing with intermittent communication. We highlight gaps between lower and upper bounds on the oracle complexity, and cases where the ``natural'' algorithms are not known to be optimal.

We consider learning a predictor which is non-discriminatory with respect to a “protected attribute” according to the notion of “equalized odds” proposed by Hardt et al. (2016). We study the problem of learning such a non-discriminatory predictor from a finite training set, both statistically and computationally. We show that a post-hoc correction approach, as suggested by Hardt et al, can be highly suboptimal, present a nearly-optimal statistical procedure, argue that the associated computational problem is intractable, and suggest a second moment relaxation of the non-discrimination definition for which learning is tractable.

We study implicit regularization when optimizing an underdetermined quadratic objective over a matrix $X$ with gradient descent on a factorization of X. We conjecture and provide empirical and theoretical evidence that with small enough step sizes and initialization close enough to the origin, gradient descent on a full dimensional factorization converges to the minimum nuclear norm solution.

We provide tight upper and lower bounds on the complexity of minimizing the average of m convex functions using gradient and prox oracles of the component functions. We show a significant gap between the complexity of deterministic vs randomized optimization. For smooth functions, we show that accelerated gradient descent (AGD) and an accelerated variant of SVRG are optimal in the deterministic and randomized settings respectively, and that a gradient oracle is sufficient for the optimal rate. For non-smooth functions, having access to prox oracles reduces the complexity and we present optimal methods based on smoothing that improve over methods using just gradient accesses.