The Optimality of (Accelerated) SGD for High-Dimensional Quadratic Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Haihan, Liu, Yuanshi, Chen, Qianwen, Fang, Cong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhang, Haihan
Liu, Yuanshi
Chen, Qianwen
Fang, Cong
author_facet Zhang, Haihan
Liu, Yuanshi
Chen, Qianwen
Fang, Cong
contents Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely used algorithm in machine learning, particularly for neural network training. Recent studies on SGD for canonical quadratic optimization or linear regression show it attains well generalization under suitable high-dimensional settings. However, a fundamental question -- for what kinds of high-dimensional learning problems SGD and its accelerated variants can achieve optimality has yet to be well studied. This paper investigates SGD with two essential components in practice: exponentially decaying step size schedule and momentum. We establish the convergence upper bound for momentum accelerated SGD (ASGD) and propose concrete classes of learning problems under which SGD or ASGD achieves min-max optimal convergence rates. The characterization of the target function is based on standard power-law decays in (functional) linear regression. Our results unveil new insights for understanding the learning bias of SGD: (i) SGD is efficient in learning ``dense'' features where the corresponding weights are subject to an infinity norm constraint; (ii) SGD is efficient for easy problem without suffering from the saturation effect; (iii) momentum can accelerate the convergence rate by order when the learning problem is relatively hard. To our knowledge, this is the first work to clearly identify the optimal boundary of SGD versus ASGD for the problem under mild settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_09745
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Optimality of (Accelerated) SGD for High-Dimensional Quadratic Optimization
Zhang, Haihan
Liu, Yuanshi
Chen, Qianwen
Fang, Cong
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely used algorithm in machine learning, particularly for neural network training. Recent studies on SGD for canonical quadratic optimization or linear regression show it attains well generalization under suitable high-dimensional settings. However, a fundamental question -- for what kinds of high-dimensional learning problems SGD and its accelerated variants can achieve optimality has yet to be well studied. This paper investigates SGD with two essential components in practice: exponentially decaying step size schedule and momentum. We establish the convergence upper bound for momentum accelerated SGD (ASGD) and propose concrete classes of learning problems under which SGD or ASGD achieves min-max optimal convergence rates. The characterization of the target function is based on standard power-law decays in (functional) linear regression. Our results unveil new insights for understanding the learning bias of SGD: (i) SGD is efficient in learning ``dense'' features where the corresponding weights are subject to an infinity norm constraint; (ii) SGD is efficient for easy problem without suffering from the saturation effect; (iii) momentum can accelerate the convergence rate by order when the learning problem is relatively hard. To our knowledge, this is the first work to clearly identify the optimal boundary of SGD versus ASGD for the problem under mild settings.
title The Optimality of (Accelerated) SGD for High-Dimensional Quadratic Optimization
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09745