Advanced Optimization Techniques for Machine Learning
Chapter 1: Foundations of Optimization in Machine Learning
Revisiting Gradient Descent Variants
The Role of Convexity
Understanding Loss Surfaces
Convergence Analysis Fundamentals
Challenges in Non-Convex Optimization
Numerical Stability Considerations
Practice: Analyzing Convergence Behavior
Chapter 2: Second-Order Optimization Methods
Newton's Method: Theory and Derivation
The Hessian Matrix: Computation and Properties
Challenges with Newton's Method
Quasi-Newton Methods: Approximating the Hessian
BFGS Algorithm Explained
Limited-memory BFGS (L-BFGS)
Trust Region Methods
Hands-on Practical: Implementing L-BFGS
Chapter 3: Adaptive Learning Rate Algorithms
Limitations of Fixed Learning Rates
AdaGrad: Adapting Rates Based on Past Gradients
RMSprop: Addressing AdaGrad's Diminishing Rates
Adam: Combining Momentum and RMSprop
Adamax and Nadam Variants
AMSGrad: Improving Adam's Convergence
Understanding Learning Rate Schedules
Hands-on Practical: Comparing Adaptive Optimizers
Chapter 4: Optimization for Large-Scale Datasets
Stochastic Gradient Descent Revisited: Variance Reduction
Stochastic Average Gradient (SAG)
Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG)
Mini-batch Gradient Descent Trade-offs
Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent
Data Parallelism Strategies
Hands-on Practical: Implementing SVRG
Chapter 5: Distributed Optimization Strategies
Motivation for Distributed Training
Parameter Server Architectures
Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Updates
Communication Bottlenecks and Strategies
All-Reduce Algorithms
Federated Learning Optimization Principles
Hands-on Practical: Simulating Distributed SGD
Chapter 6: Optimization Challenges in Deep Learning
Characteristics of Deep Learning Loss Landscapes
Impact of Network Architecture on Optimization
Normalization Techniques and Optimization
Gradient Clipping and Explosion/Vanishing Gradients
Initialization Strategies and Their Effect
Regularization Methods as Implicit Optimization
Practice: Tuning Optimizers for Deep Networks
Chapter 7: Advanced and Specialized Optimization Topics
Constrained Optimization Fundamentals
Lagrangian Duality and KKT Conditions
Projected Gradient Methods
Derivative-Free Optimization Overview
Bayesian Optimization for Hyperparameter Tuning
Optimization for Reinforcement Learning Policies
Practice: Implementing Projected Gradient Descent
Numerical Stability Considerations
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- Accuracy and Stability of Numerical Algorithms, Nicholas J. Higham, 2002 (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)) DOI: 10.1137/1.9780898718027 - A standard text on floating-point arithmetic, error analysis, and stability of numerical methods.
- Numerical Optimization, Jorge Nocedal and Stephen J. Wright, 2006 (Springer) DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-40065-5 - A comprehensive book on optimization, with detailed coverage of conditioning, numerical properties, and algorithms.
- Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, 2016 (MIT Press) - Features discussions on numerical computation, optimization stability, and common issues in training neural networks.
- Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization, Diederik P. Kingma and Jimmy Ba, 2015 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1412.6980 - Introduces the Adam optimizer, a widely used adaptive method that includes strategies for numerical stability.
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