























In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus is on deriving exactly solvable results and discussing their implications. The main contributions of this work are to derive the stationary distribution for discrete-time SGD in a quadratic loss function with and without momentum; in particular, one implication of our result is that the fluctuation caused by discrete-time dynamics takes a distorted shape and is dramatically larger than a continuous-time theory could predict. Examples of applications of the proposed theory considered in this work include the approximation error of variants of SGD, the effect of minibatch noise, the optimal Bayesian inference, the escape rate from a sharp minimum, and the stationary covariance of a few second-order methods including damped Newton's method, natural gradient descent, and Adam.
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理,仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。