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We review recent works on analyzing the dynamics of gradient-based algorithms in a prototypical statistical inference problem. Using methods and insights from the physics of glassy systems, these works showed how to understand quantitatively and qualitatively the performance of gradient-based algorithms. Here we review the key results and their interpretation in non-technical terms accessible to a wide audience of physicists in the context of related works.
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Many questions of fundamental interest in todays science can be formulated as inference problems: Some partial, or noisy, observations are performed over a set of variables and the goal is to recover, or infer, the values of the variables based on the indirect information contained in the measurements. For such problems, the central scientific questions are: Under what conditions is the information contained in the measurements sufficient for a satisfactory inference to be possible? What are the most efficient algorithms for this task? A growing body of work has shown that often we can understand and locate these fundamental barriers by thinking of them as phase transitions in the sense of statistical physics. Moreover, it turned out that we can use the gained physical insight to develop new promising algorithms. Connection between inference and statistical physics is currently witnessing an impressive renaissance and we review here the current state-of-the-art, with a pedagogical focus on the Ising model which formulated as an inference problem we call the planted spin glass. In terms of applications we review two classes of problems: (i) inference of clusters on graphs and networks, with community detection as a special case and (ii) estimating a signal from its noisy linear measurements, with compressed sensing as a case of sparse estimation. Our goal is to provide a pedagogical review for researchers in physics and other fields interested in this fascinating topic.
The properties of flat minima in the empirical risk landscape of neural networks have been debated for some time. Increasing evidence suggests they possess better generalization capabilities with respect to sharp ones. First, we discuss Gaussian mixture classification models and show analytically that there exist Bayes optimal pointwise estimators which correspond to minimizers belonging to wide flat regions. These estimators can be found by applying maximum flatness algorithms either directly on the classifier (which is norm independent) or on the differentiable loss function used in learning. Next, we extend the analysis to the deep learning scenario by extensive numerical validations. Using two algorithms, Entropy-SGD and Replicated-SGD, that explicitly include in the optimization objective a non-local flatness measure known as local entropy, we consistently improve the generalization error for common architectures (e.g. ResNet, EfficientNet). An easy to compute flatness measure shows a clear correlation with test accuracy.
In multiple scientific and technological applications we face the problem of having low dimensional data to be justified by a linear model defined in a high dimensional parameter space. The difference in dimensionality makes the problem ill-defined: the model is consistent with the data for many values of its parameters. The objective is to find the probability distribution of parameter values consistent with the data, a problem that can be cast as the exploration of a high dimensional convex polytope. In this work we introduce a novel algorithm to solve this problem efficiently. It provides results that are statistically indistinguishable from currently used numerical techniques while its running time scales linearly with the system size. We show that the algorithm performs robustly in many abstract and practical applications. As working examples we simulate the effects of restricting reaction fluxes on the space of feasible phenotypes of a {em genome} scale E. Coli metabolic network and infer the traffic flow between origin and destination nodes in a real communication network.
Gradient-descent-based algorithms and their stochast
In this work we analyse quantitatively the interplay between the loss landscape and performance of descent algorithms in a prototypical inference problem, the spiked matrix-tensor model. We study a loss function that is the negative log-likelihood of the model. We analyse the number of local minima at a fixed distance from the signal/spike with the Kac-Rice formula, and locate trivialization of the landscape at large signal-to-noise ratios. We evaluate in a closed form the performance of a gradient flow algorithm using integro-differential PDEs as developed in physics of disordered systems for the Langevin dynamics. We analyze the performance of an approximate message passing algorithm estimating the maximum likelihood configuration via its state evolution. We conclude by comparing the above results: while we observe a drastic slow down of the gradient flow dynamics even in the region where the landscape is trivial, both the analyzed algorithms are shown to perform well even in the part of the region of parameters where spurious local minima are present.
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