On the Noisy Gradient Descent that Generalizes as SGD

Jul 12, 2020

Speakers

About

The gradient noise of SGD is considered to play a central role in the observed strong generalization abilities of deep learning. While past studies confirm that the magnitude and the covariance structure of gradient noise are critical for regularization, it remains unclear whether or not the class of noise distributions is important. In this work we provide negative results by showing that noises in classes different from the SGD noise can also effectively regularize gradient descent. Our finding is based on a novel observation on the structure of the SGD noise: it is the multiplication of the gradient matrix and a sampling noise that arises from the mini-batch sampling procedure. Moreover, the sampling noises unify two kinds of gradient regularizing noises that belong to the Gaussian class: the one using (scaled) Fisher as covariance and the one using the gradient covariance of SGD as covariance. Finally, thanks to the flexibility of choosing noise class, an algorithm is proposed to perform noisy gradient descent that generalizes well, the variant of which even benefits large batch SGD training without hurting generalization.

Organizer

Categories

About ICML 2020

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. ICML is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of machine learning used in closely related areas like artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, and robotics. ICML is one of the fastest growing artificial intelligence conferences in the world. Participants at ICML span a wide range of backgrounds, from academic and industrial researchers, to entrepreneurs and engineers, to graduate students and postdocs.

Store presentation

Should this presentation be stored for 1000 years?

How do we store presentations

Total of 0 viewers voted for saving the presentation to eternal vault which is 0.0%

Sharing

Recommended Videos

Presentations on similar topic, category or speaker

Interested in talks like this? Follow ICML 2020