24 accepted papers
Recent advancements in machine learning have improved performance while also increasing computational demands. While federated and distributed setups address these issues, their structures remain vulnerable to malicious influences. In this paper, we address a specific threat: Byzantine attacks, wher
Large pre-trained models are commonly adapted to downstream tasks using parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which injects small trainable low-rank matrices instead of updating all weights. While LoRA dramatically reduces trainable parameters with little overhe…
This paper investigates the global convergence of stepsized Newton methods for convex functions with Hölder continuous Hessians or third derivatives. We propose several simple stepsize schedules with fast global convergence guarantees, up to $\mathcal {O}(1/k^3)$ . For cases with multiple plausible…
Methods with adaptive stepsizes, such as AdaGrad and Adam, are essential for training modern Deep Learning models, especially Large Language Models. Typically, the noise in the stochastic gradients is heavy-tailed for the later ones. Gradient clipping provably helps to achieve good high-probability…
With the increase in the number of parameters in large language models, the training process increasingly demands larger volumes of GPU memory. A significant portion of this memory is typically consumed by the optimizer state. To overcome this challenge, recent approaches such as low-rank adaptation…
There are various measures of predictive uncertainty in the literature, but their relationships to each other remain unclear. This paper uses a decomposition of statistical pointwise risk into components associated with different sources of predictive uncertainty: namely, aleatoric uncertainty (inhe…
We introduce the concept of the self-referencing causal cycle (abbreviated ReCall )—a mechanism that enables large language models (LLMs) to bypass the limitations of unidirectional causality, which underlies a phenomenon known as the reversal curse. When an LLM is prompted with sequential data, it…
Due to the non-smoothness of optimization problems in Machine Learning, generalized smoothness assumptions have been gaining a lot of attention in recent years. One of the most popular assumptions of this type is $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness (Zhang et al., 2020). In this paper, we focus on the class of (s…
Non-convex Machine Learning problems typically do not adhere to the standard smoothness assumption. Based on empirical findings, Zhang et al. (2020b) proposed a more realistic generalized $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness assumption, though it remains largely unexplored. Many existing algorithms designed for s…
Second-order methods for convex optimization outperform first-order methods in terms of theoretical iteration convergence, achieving rates up to $O(k^{-5})$ for highly-smooth functions. However, their practical performance and applications are limited due to their multi-level structure and implement…
LocalSGD and SCAFFOLD are widely used methods in distributed stochastic optimization, with numerous applications in machine learning, large-scale data processing, and federated learning. However, rigorously establishing their theoretical advantages over simpler methods, such as minibatch SGD (MbS…
Robust routing under uncertainty is central to real-world logistics, yet most benchmarks assume static, idealized settings. We present \texttt{SVRPBench}, the first open benchmark to capture high-fidelity stochastic dynamics in vehicle routing at urban scale. Spanning more than 500 instances with up…
Current methods for initializing state space models (SSMs) parameters mainly rely on the \textit{HiPPO framework}, which is based on an online approximation of orthogonal polynomials. Recently, diagonal alternatives have shown to reach a similar level of performance while being significantly more ef…
We present a new accelerated stochastic second-order method that is robust to both gradient and Hessian inexactness, typical in machine learning. We establish theoretical lower bounds and prove that our algorithm achieves optimal convergence in both gradient and Hessian inexactness in this key setti…
Variational inequalities represent a broad class of problems, including minimization and min-max problems, commonly found in machine learning. Existing second-order and high-order methods for variational inequalities require precise computation of derivatives, often resulting in prohibitively high i…
Adaptive methods are extremely popular in machine learning as they make learning rate tuning less expensive. This paper introduces a novel optimization algorithm named KATE, which presents a scale-invariant adaptation of the well-known AdaGrad algorithm. We prove the scale-invariance of KATE for the…
In this paper, we find that the training of Normalizing Flows (NFs) are easily affected by the outliers and a small number (or high dimensionality) of training samples. To solve this problem, we propose a Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence regularization on the Jacobian matrix of NFs. We prove that su…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become pivotal in addressing reasoning tasks across diverse domains, including arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning. They utilize prompting techniques such as Exploration-of-Thought, Decomposition, and Refinement to effectively navigate and solve intricat…
Robustness to Byzantine attacks is a necessity for various distributed training scenarios. When the training reduces to the process of solving a minimization problem, Byzantine robustness is relatively well-understood. However, other problem formulations, such as min-max problems or, more generally,…
Recently the SP (Stochastic Polyak step size) method has emerged as a competitive adaptive method for setting the step sizes of SGD. SP can be interpreted as a method specialized to interpolated models, since it solves the interpolation equations. SP solves these equation by using local linearizati…
Variational inequalities are a broad and flexible class of problems that includes minimization, saddle point, and fixed point problems as special cases. Therefore, variational inequalities are used in various applications ranging from equilibrium search to adversarial learning. With the increasing s…
In this paper, we present the first stepsize schedule for Newton method resulting in fast global and local convergence guarantees. In particular, we a) prove an $\mathcal O \left( 1/{k^2} \right)$ global rate, which matches the state-of-the-art global rate of cubically regularized Newton method of P…
We investigate a classification problem using multiple mobile agents capable of collecting (partial) pose-dependent observations of an unknown environment. The objective is to classify an image over a finite time horizon. We propose a network architecture on how agents should form a local belief, ta…
In this paper, we propose a StochAstic Recursive grAdient algoritHm (SARAH), as well as its practical variant SARAH+, as a novel approach to the finite-sum minimization problems. Different from the vanilla SGD and other modern stochastic methods such as SVRG, S2GD, SAG and SAGA, SARAH admits a simpl…