证明AdaGrad在重尾噪声下仍可收敛,且无需预知噪声特性。
Can Adaptive Gradient Methods Converge under Heavy-Tailed Noise? A Case Study of AdaGrad
- 提出AdaGrad在重尾噪声下的首个可证明收敛率,适用尾指数4/3 < p ≤ 2
- 无需预先知道尾指数p,实现对噪声分布的自适应处理
- 揭示现有最优率不可达,为理论研究提供新基准
现代机器学习优化过程中常出现重尾梯度噪声。尽管已有梯度裁剪、归一化等机制用于保证收敛性,但自适应优化方法(如Adam、AdamW)常在无额外操作下表现良好。本文首次系统研究经典自适应方法AdaGrad在重尾噪声下的收敛性。在非凸优化场景下,当尾指数p满足4/3 < p ≤ 2时,我们给出了首个可证明的收敛速率,且无需事先知晓p值,具有自适应性。此外,我们建立了依赖算法的下界,表明现有重尾优化的极小极大率无法被AdaGrad达到。最后,在一个常见变体AdaGrad-Norm上,于附加温和假设下,进一步获得适用于任意1 < p ≤ 2的改进速率。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Many tasks in modern machine learning are observed to involve heavy-tailed gradient noise during the optimization process. To manage this realistic and challenging setting, new mechanisms, such as gradient clipping and gradient normalization, have been introduced to ensure the convergence of first-order algorithms. However, adaptive gradient methods, a famous class of modern optimizers that includes popular $\mathtt{Adam}$ and $\mathtt{AdamW}$, often perform well even without any extra operations mentioned above. It is therefore natural to ask whether adaptive gradient methods can converge under heavy-tailed noise without any algorithmic changes. In this work, we take the first step toward answering this question by investigating a special case, $\mathtt{AdaGrad}$, the origin of adaptive gradient methods. We provide the first provable convergence rate for $\mathtt{AdaGrad}$ in non-convex optimization when the tail index $p$ satisfies $4/3<p\leq2$. Notably, this result is achieved without requiring any prior knowledge of $p$ and is hence adaptive to the tail index. In addition, we develop an algorithm-dependent lower bound, suggesting that the existing minimax rate for heavy-tailed optimization is not attainable by $\mathtt{AdaGrad}$. Lastly, we consider $\mathtt{AdaGrad}\text{-}\mathtt{Norm}$, a popular variant of $\mathtt{AdaGrad}$ in theoretical studies, and show an improved rate that holds for any $1<p\leq2$ under an extra mild assumption.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。