Title
Laplacian Smoothing Gradient Descent.
Abstract
We propose a very simple modification of gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent. We show that when applied to a variety of machine learning models including softmax regression, convolutional neural nets, generative adversarial nets, and deep reinforcement learning, this very simple surrogate can dramatically reduce the variance and improve the accuracy of the generalization. The new algorithm, (which depends on one nonnegative parameter) when applied to non-convex minimization, tends to avoid sharp local minima. Instead it seeks somewhat flatter local (and often global) minima. The method only involves preconditioning the gradient by the inverse of a tri-diagonal matrix that is positive definite. The motivation comes from the theory of Hamilton-Jacobi partial differential equations. This theory demonstrates that the new algorithm is almost the same as doing gradient descent on a new function which (a) has the same global minima as the original function and (b) is more convex. Again, the programming effort in doing this is minimal, in cost, complexity and effort. We implement our algorithm into both PyTorch and Tensorflow platforms, which will be made publicly available.
Year
Venue
Field
2018
arXiv: Learning
Mathematical optimization,Stochastic gradient descent,Gradient descent,Laplacian smoothing,Softmax function,Positive-definite matrix,Maxima and minima,Artificial neural network,Mathematics,Reinforcement learning
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1806.06317
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
2
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Stanley Osher17973514.62
bao wang2358.19
Penghang Yin3609.03
Xiyang Luo4175.09
Minh Pham540.77
Alex Lin661.18