Exact Risk Curves of signSGD in High-Dimensions: Quantifying Preconditioning and Noise-Compression Effects

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xiao, Ke Liang, Marshall, Noah, Agarwala, Atish, Paquette, Elliot
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Xiao, Ke Liang
Marshall, Noah
Agarwala, Atish
Paquette, Elliot
author_facet Xiao, Ke Liang
Marshall, Noah
Agarwala, Atish
Paquette, Elliot
contents In recent years, signSGD has garnered interest as both a practical optimizer as well as a simple model to understand adaptive optimizers like Adam. Though there is a general consensus that signSGD acts to precondition optimization and reshapes noise, quantitatively understanding these effects in theoretically solvable settings remains difficult. We present an analysis of signSGD in a high dimensional limit, and derive a limiting SDE and ODE to describe the risk. Using this framework we quantify four effects of signSGD: effective learning rate, noise compression, diagonal preconditioning, and gradient noise reshaping. Our analysis is consistent with experimental observations but moves beyond that by quantifying the dependence of these effects on the data and noise distributions. We conclude with a conjecture on how these results might be extended to Adam.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_12135
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exact Risk Curves of signSGD in High-Dimensions: Quantifying Preconditioning and Noise-Compression Effects
Xiao, Ke Liang
Marshall, Noah
Agarwala, Atish
Paquette, Elliot
Machine Learning
In recent years, signSGD has garnered interest as both a practical optimizer as well as a simple model to understand adaptive optimizers like Adam. Though there is a general consensus that signSGD acts to precondition optimization and reshapes noise, quantitatively understanding these effects in theoretically solvable settings remains difficult. We present an analysis of signSGD in a high dimensional limit, and derive a limiting SDE and ODE to describe the risk. Using this framework we quantify four effects of signSGD: effective learning rate, noise compression, diagonal preconditioning, and gradient noise reshaping. Our analysis is consistent with experimental observations but moves beyond that by quantifying the dependence of these effects on the data and noise distributions. We conclude with a conjecture on how these results might be extended to Adam.
title Exact Risk Curves of signSGD in High-Dimensions: Quantifying Preconditioning and Noise-Compression Effects
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12135