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Interpolation, growth conditions, and stochastic gradient descent Mishkin, Aaron

Abstract

Current machine learning practice requires solving huge-scale empirical risk minimization problems quickly and robustly. These problems are often highly under-determined and admit multiple solutions which exactly fit, or interpolate, the training data. In such cases, stochastic gradient descent has been shown to converge without decreasing step-sizes or averaging, and can achieve the fast convergence of deterministic gradient methods. Recent work has further shown that stochastic acceleration and line-search methods for step-size selection are possible in this restricted setting. Although pioneering, existing analyses for first-order methods under interpolation have two major weaknesses: they are restricted to the finite-sum setting, and, secondly, they are not tight with the best deterministic rates. To address these issues, we extend the notion of interpolation to stochastic optimization problems with general, first-order oracles. We use the proposed framework to analyze stochastic gradient descent with a fixed step-size and with an Armijo-type line-search, as well as Nesterov’s accelerated gradient method with stochastic gradients. In nearly all settings, we obtain faster convergence with a wider range of parameters. The improvement for stochastic Nesterov acceleration is comparable to dividing by the square-root of the condition number and addresses criticism that existing rates were not truly “accelerated”. In the case of convex functions, our convergence rates for stochastic gradient descent — both with and without the stochastic Armijo line-search — recover the best-known rates in the deterministic setting. We also provide a simple extension to L2-regularized minimization, which opens the path to proximal-gradient methods and non-smooth optimization under interpolation.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International