Accelerating Optimization via Differentiable Stopping Time

Optimization is an important module of modern machine learning applications. Tremendous efforts have been made to accelerate optimization algorithms. A common formulation is achieving a lower loss at a given time. This enables a differentiable framework with respect to the algorithm hyperparameters. In contrast, its dual, minimizing the time to reach a target loss, is believed to be non-differentiable, as the time is not differentiable. As a result, it usually serves as a conceptual framework or is optimized using zeroth-order methods. To address this limitation, we propose a differentiable stopping time and theoretically justify it based on differential equations. An efficient algorithm is designed to backpropagate through it. As a result, the proposed differentiable stopping time enables a new differentiable formulation for accelerating algorithms. We further discuss its applications, such as online hyperparameter tuning and learning to optimize. Our proposed methods show superior performance in comprehensive experiments across various problems, which confirms their effectiveness.

LMask: Learn to Solve Constrained Routing Problems with Lazy Masking

Routing problems are canonical combinatorial optimization tasks with wide-ranging applications in logistics, transportation, and supply chain management. However, solving these problems becomes significantly more challenging when complex constraints are involved. In this paper, we propose LMask, a novel learning framework that utilizes dynamic masking to generate high-quality feasible solutions for constrained routing problems. LMask introduces the LazyMask decoding method, which lazily refines feasibility masks with the backtracking mechanism. In addition, it employs the refinement intensity embedding to encode the search trace into the model, mitigating representation ambiguities induced by backtracking. To further reduce sampling cost, LMask sets a backtracking budget during decoding, while constraint violations are penalized in the loss function during training to counteract infeasibility caused by this budget. We provide theoretical guarantees for the validity and probabilistic optimality of our approach. Extensive experiments on the traveling salesman problem with time windows (TSPTW) and TSP with draft limits (TSPDL) demonstrate that LMask achieves state-of-the-art feasibility rates and solution quality, outperforming existing neural methods.

A Memory Efficient Randomized Subspace Optimization Method for Training Large Language Models

The memory challenges associated with training Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a critical concern, particularly when using the Adam optimizer. To address this issue, numerous memory-efficient techniques have been proposed, with GaLore standing out as a notable example designed to reduce the memory footprint of optimizer states. However, these approaches do not alleviate the memory burden imposed by activations, rendering them unsuitable for scenarios involving long context sequences or large mini-batches. Moreover, their convergence properties are still not well-understood in the literature. In this work, we introduce a Randomized Subspace Optimization framework for pre-training and fine-tuning LLMs. Our approach decomposes the high-dimensional training problem into a series of lower-dimensional subproblems. At each iteration, a random subspace is selected, and the parameters within that subspace are optimized. This structured reduction in dimensionality allows our method to simultaneously reduce memory usage for both activations and optimizer states. We establish comprehensive convergence guarantees and derive rates for various scenarios, accommodating different optimization strategies to solve the subproblems. Extensive experiments validate the superior memory and communication efficiency of our method, achieving performance comparable to GaLore and Adam.

Enhancing Zeroth-order Fine-tuning for Language Models with Low-rank Structures

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) significantly reduces memory costs when adapting large language models (LLMs) for downstream applications. However, traditional first-order (FO) fine-tuning algorithms incur substantial memory overhead due to the need to store activation values for back-propagation during gradient computation, particularly in long-context fine-tuning tasks. Zeroth-order (ZO) algorithms offer a promising alternative by approximating gradients using finite differences of function values, thus eliminating the need for activation storage. Nevertheless, existing ZO methods struggle to capture the low-rank gradient structure common in LLM fine-tuning, leading to suboptimal performance. This paper proposes a low-rank ZO gradient estimator and introduces a novel low-rank ZO algorithm (LOZO) that effectively captures this structure in LLMs. We provide convergence guarantees for LOZO by framing it as a subspace optimization method. Additionally, its low-rank nature enables LOZO to integrate with momentum techniques while incurring negligible extra memory costs. Extensive experiments across various model sizes and downstream tasks demonstrate that LOZO and its momentum-based variant outperform existing ZO methods and closely approach the performance of FO algorithms.

ODE-based Learning to Optimize

Recent years have seen a growing interest in understanding acceleration methods through the lens of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Despite the theoretical advancements, translating the rapid convergence observed in continuous-time models to discrete-time iterative methods poses significant challenges. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework integrating the inertial systems with Hessian-driven damping equation (ISHD) and learning-based approaches for developing optimization methods through a deep synergy of theoretical insights. We first establish the convergence condition for ensuring the convergence of the solution trajectory of ISHD. Then, we show that provided the stability condition, another relaxed requirement on the coefficients of ISHD, the sequence generated through the explicit Euler discretization of ISHD converges, which gives a large family of practical optimization methods. In order to select the best optimization method in this family for certain problems, we introduce the stopping time, the time required for an optimization method derived from ISHD to achieve a predefined level of suboptimality. Then, we formulate a novel learning to optimize (L2O) problem aimed at minimizing the stopping time subject to the convergence and stability condition. To navigate this learning problem, we present an algorithm combining stochastic optimization and the penalty method (StoPM). The convergence of StoPM using the conservative gradient is proved. Empirical validation of our framework is conducted through extensive numerical experiments across a diverse set of optimization problems. These experiments showcase the superior performance of the learned optimization methods.

An Improved Finite-time Analysis of Temporal Difference Learning with Deep Neural Networks

Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms with neural network function parameterization have well-established empirical success in many practical large-scale reinforcement learning tasks. However, theoretical understanding of these algorithms remains challenging due to the nonlinearity of the action-value approximation. In this paper, we develop an improved non-asymptotic analysis of the neural TD method with a general $L$-layer neural network. New proof techniques are developed and an improved new $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-1})$ sample complexity is derived. To our best knowledge, this is the first finite-time analysis of neural TD that achieves an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-1})$ complexity under the Markovian sampling, as opposed to the best known $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-2})$ complexity in the existing literature.

Monte Carlo Policy Gradient Method for Binary Optimization

Binary optimization has a wide range of applications in combinatorial optimization problems such as MaxCut, MIMO detection, and MaxSAT. However, these problems are typically NP-hard due to the binary constraints. We develop a novel probabilistic model to sample the binary solution according to a parameterized policy distribution. Specifically, minimizing the KL divergence between the parameterized policy distribution and the Gibbs distributions of the function value leads to a stochastic optimization problem whose policy gradient can be derived explicitly similar to reinforcement learning. For coherent exploration in discrete spaces, parallel Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are employed to sample from the policy distribution with diversity and approximate the gradient efficiently. We further develop a filter scheme to replace the original objective function by the one with the local search technique to broaden the horizon of the function landscape. Convergence to stationary points in expectation of the policy gradient method is established based on the concentration inequality for MCMC. Numerical results show that this framework is very promising to provide near-optimal solutions for quite a few binary optimization problems.

Provable Convergence of Variational Monte Carlo Methods

The Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) is a promising approach for computing the ground state energy of many-body quantum problems and attracts more and more interests due to the development of machine learning. The recent paradigms in VMC construct neural networks as trial wave functions, sample quantum configurations using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and train neural networks with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method. However, the theoretical convergence of VMC is still unknown when SGD interacts with MCMC sampling given a well-designed trial wave function. Since MCMC reduces the difficulty of estimating gradients, it has inevitable bias in practice. Moreover, the local energy may be unbounded, which makes it harder to analyze the error of MCMC sampling. Therefore, we assume that the local energy is sub-exponential and use the Bernstein inequality for non-stationary Markov chains to derive error bounds of the MCMC estimator. Consequently, VMC is proven to have a first order convergence rate $O(\log K/\sqrt{n K})$ with $K$ iterations and a sample size $n$. It partially explains how MCMC influences the behavior of SGD. Furthermore, we verify the so-called correlated negative curvature condition and relate it to the zero-variance phenomena in solving eigenvalue functions. It is shown that VMC escapes from saddle points and reaches $(\epsilon,\epsilon^{1/4})$ -approximate second order stationary points or $\epsilon^{1/2}$-variance points in at least $O(\epsilon^{-11/2}\log^{2}(1/\epsilon) )$ steps with high probability. Our analysis enriches the understanding of how VMC converges efficiently and can be applied to general variational methods in physics and statistics.

Provably Efficient Gauss-Newton Temporal Difference Learning Method with Function Approximation

In this paper, based on the spirit of Fitted Q-Iteration (FQI), we propose a Gauss-Newton Temporal Difference (GNTD) method to solve the Q-value estimation problem with function approximation. In each iteration, unlike the original FQI that solves a nonlinear least square subproblem to fit the Q-iteration, the GNTD method can be viewed as an \emph{inexact} FQI that takes only one Gauss-Newton step to optimize this subproblem, which is much cheaper in computation. Compared to the popular Temporal Difference (TD) learning, which can be viewed as taking a single gradient descent step to FQI's subproblem per iteration, the Gauss-Newton step of GNTD better retains the structure of FQI and hence leads to better convergence. In our work, we derive the finite-sample non-asymptotic convergence of GNTD under linear, neural network, and general smooth function approximations. In particular, recent works on neural TD only guarantee a suboptimal $\mathcal{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-4})$ sample complexity, while GNTD obtains an improved complexity of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-2})$. Finally, we validate our method via extensive experiments in both online and offline RL problems. Our method exhibits both higher rewards and faster convergence than TD-type methods, including DQN.

Riemannian Natural Gradient Methods

This paper studies large-scale optimization problems on Riemannian manifolds whose objective function is a finite sum of negative log-probability losses. Such problems arise in various machine learning and signal processing applications. By introducing the notion of Fisher information matrix in the manifold setting, we propose a novel Riemannian natural gradient method, which can be viewed as a natural extension of the natural gradient method from the Euclidean setting to the manifold setting. We establish the almost-sure global convergence of our proposed method under standard assumptions. Moreover, we show that if the loss function satisfies certain convexity and smoothness conditions and the input-output map satisfies a Riemannian Jacobian stability condition, then our proposed method enjoys a local linear -- or, under the Lipschitz continuity of the Riemannian Jacobian of the input-output map, even quadratic -- rate of convergence. We then prove that the Riemannian Jacobian stability condition will be satisfied by a two-layer fully connected neural network with batch normalization with high probability, provided that the width of the network is sufficiently large. This demonstrates the practical relevance of our convergence rate result. Numerical experiments on applications arising from machine learning demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method over state-of-the-art ones.