提出可自适应调整表示的函数梯度下降法,理论保证收敛且实用性强。
Functional Gradient Descent with Adaptive Representations

- 通过动态调整函数梯度的表示方式,实现可计算的函数空间优化
- 在平滑损失下收敛至驻点,满足PL条件时可达全局最优
- 适用于回归、PDE求解和视觉任务,优于固定近似与神经网络基线
函数优化问题通常通过固定表示(如神经网络)的参数优化来解决,导致非凸损失,使训练和理论分析复杂化。函数梯度下降(FGD)直接在函数空间中进行,具有强收敛性与清晰理论,但因函数梯度为无限维而难以实现,现有方法依赖固定近似,引入误差。本文提出一种新算法,可在优化过程中自适应地调整函数梯度表示,并将近似显式纳入理论分析,证明无论近似如何,平滑损失下可收敛至驻点,满足平滑性+Polyak-Lojasiewicz条件时可收敛至全局最小值。据我们所知,这是首个在一般设置下具有此类保证的可实现FGD方法。在回归、偏微分方程数值求解及现代计算机视觉任务中均验证了有效性,表现持续优于固定近似FGD与神经网络基线,在效率与精度上更优。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Functional optimization problems are typically solved by optimizing the parameters of a fixed representation, such as a neural network, resulting in highly nonconvex losses that complicate both training and theoretical analysis. An interesting alternative is functional gradient descent (FGD), that is, gradient descent directly in function space, which benefits from strong convergence results and admits a clean theory. However, FGD is difficult to implement in practice because functional gradients are infinite-dimensional, and thus cannot be fully computed nor stored in memory. Existing implementations therefore rely on fixed approximations, which introduce approximation error. We propose a new, theoretically-grounded FGD algorithm that adapts the representation of the functional gradients over the course of optimization. By explicitly incorporating this approximation into the analysis, we establish convergence to a stationary point (for smooth losses) and to a global minimizer (under smoothness + a Polyak-Lojasiewicz-type condition) regardless of our approximations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementable FGD method with such guarantees in a general setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on regression, numerical solution of PDEs, and modern computer vision. Across settings, our method consistently outperforms both FGD with fixed approximations and neural network baselines in efficiency and accuracy.
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