Thinking Outside the Ball: Optimal Learning with Gradient Descent for Generalized Linear Stochastic Convex OptimizationDownload PDF

Published: 31 Oct 2022, Last Modified: 12 Jan 2023NeurIPS 2022 AcceptReaders: Everyone
Keywords: stochastic, convex, optimization
Abstract: We consider linear prediction with a convex Lipschitz loss, or more generally, stochastic convex optimization problems of generalized linear form, i.e.~where each instantaneous loss is a scalar convex function of a linear function. We show that in this setting, early stopped Gradient Descent (GD), without any explicit regularization or projection, ensures excess error at most $\varepsilon$ (compared to the best possible with unit Euclidean norm) with an optimal, up to logarithmic factors, sample complexity of $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ and only $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ iterations. This contrasts with general stochastic convex optimization, where $\Omega(1/\varepsilon^4)$ iterations are needed Amir et al. 2021. The lower iteration complexity is ensured by leveraging uniform convergence rather than stability. But instead of uniform convergence in a norm ball, which we show can guarantee suboptimal learning using $\Theta(1/\varepsilon^4)$ samples, we rely on uniform convergence in a distribution-dependent ball.
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TL;DR: optimal learning of unconstrained gradient descent for the generalized linear stochastic setting
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