Iteration and Stochastic First-order Oracle Complexities of Stochastic Gradient Descent using Constant and Decaying Learning Rates

22 Sept 2023 (modified: 11 Feb 2024)Submitted to ICLR 2024EveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Primary Area: optimization
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Keywords: batch size, iteration complexity, nonconvex optimization, SFO complexity, SGD, step-decay learning rate
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TL;DR: SGD using a step-decay learning rate and a small batch size reduces the SFO complexity to find a local minimizer of a nonconvex loss function.
Abstract: The performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which is the simplest first-order optimizer for training deep neural networks, depends on not only the learning rate but also the batch size. They both affect the number of iterations and the stochastic first-order oracle (SFO) complexity needed for training. In particular, the previous numerical results indicated that, for SGD using a constant learning rate, the number of iterations needed for training decreases when the batch size increases, and the SFO complexity needed for training is minimized at a critical batch size and increases once the batch size exceeds that size. This paper studies the relationship between batch size and the iteration and the SFO complexities needed for nonconvex optimization in deep learning with SGD using constant/decay learning rates. We show that SGD using a step-decay learning rate and a small batch size reduces the SFO complexity to find a local minimizer of a loss function. We also provide numerical comparisons of SGD with the existing first-order optimizers and show the usefulness of SGD using a step-decay learning rate and a small batch size.
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Submission Number: 5017
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