No Arabic abstract
We investigate implicit regularization schemes for gradient descent methods applied to unpenalized least squares regression to solve the problem of reconstructing a sparse signal from an underdetermined system of linear measurements under the restricted isometry assumption. For a given parametrization yielding a non-convex optimization problem, we show that prescribed choices of initialization, step size and stopping time yield a statistically and computationally optimal algorithm that achieves the minimax rate with the same cost required to read the data up to poly-logarithmic factors. Beyond minimax optimality, we show that our algorithm adapts to instance difficulty and yields a dimension-independent rate when the signal-to-noise ratio is high enough. Key to the computational efficiency of our method is an increasing step size scheme that adapts to refined estimates of the true solution. We validate our findings with numerical experiments and compare our algorithm against explicit $ell_{1}$ penalization. Going from hard instances to easy ones, our algorithm is seen to undergo a phase transition, eventually matching least squares with an oracle knowledge of the true support.
In this paper, we study the implicit bias of gradient descent for sparse regression. We extend results on regression with quadratic parametrization, which amounts to depth-2 diagonal linear networks, to more general depth-N networks, under more realistic settings of noise and correlated designs. We show that early stopping is crucial for gradient descent to converge to a sparse model, a phenomenon that we call implicit sparse regularization. This result is in sharp contrast to known results for noiseless and uncorrelated-design cases. We characterize the impact of depth and early stopping and show that for a general depth parameter N, gradient descent with early stopping achieves minimax optimal sparse recovery with sufficiently small initialization and step size. In particular, we show that increasing depth enlarges the scale of working initialization and the early-stopping window, which leads to more stable gradient paths for sparse recovery.
We study the implicit regularization of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent, when applied to the fundamental problem of least squares regression. We leverage a continuous-time stochastic differential equation having the same moments as stochastic gradient descent, which we call stochastic gradient flow. We give a bound on the excess risk of stochastic gradient flow at time $t$, over ridge regression with tuning parameter $lambda = 1/t$. The bound may be computed from explicit constants (e.g., the mini-batch size, step size, number of iterations), revealing precisely how these quantities drive the excess risk. Numerical examples show the bound can be small, indicating a tight relationship between the two estimators. We give a similar result relating the coefficients of stochastic gradient flow and ridge. These results hold under no conditions on the data matrix $X$, and across the entire optimization path (not just at convergence).
We study discrete-time mirror descent applied to the unregularized empirical risk in matrix sensing. In both the general case of rectangular matrices and the particular case of positive semidefinite matrices, a simple potential-based analysis in terms of the Bregman divergence allows us to establish convergence of mirror descent -- with different choices of the mirror maps -- to a matrix that, among all global minimizers of the empirical risk, minimizes a quantity explicitly related to the nuclear norm, the Frobenius norm, and the von Neumann entropy. In both cases, this characterization implies that mirror descent, a first-order algorithm minimizing the unregularized empirical risk, recovers low-rank matrices under the same set of assumptions that are sufficient to guarantee recovery for nuclear-norm minimization. When the sensing matrices are symmetric and commute, we show that gradient descent with full-rank factorized parametrization is a first-order approximation to mirror descent, in which case we obtain an explicit characterization of the implicit bias of gradient flow as a by-product.
In the past decade, sparse and low-rank recovery have drawn much attention in many areas such as signal/image processing, statistics, bioinformatics and machine learning. To achieve sparsity and/or low-rankness inducing, the $ell_1$ norm and nuclear norm are of the most popular regularization penalties due to their convexity. While the $ell_1$ and nuclear norm are convenient as the related convex optimization problems are usually tractable, it has been shown in many applications that a nonconvex penalty can yield significantly better performance. In recent, nonconvex regularization based sparse and low-rank recovery is of considerable interest and it in fact is a main driver of the recent progress in nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization. This paper gives an overview of this topic in various fields in signal processing, statistics and machine learning, including compressive sensing (CS), sparse regression and variable selection, sparse signals separation, sparse principal component analysis (PCA), large covariance and inverse covariance matrices estimation, matrix completion, and robust PCA. We present recent developments of nonconvex regularization based sparse and low-rank recovery in these fields, addressing the issues of penalty selection, applications and the convergence of nonconvex algorithms. Code is available at https://github.com/FWen/ncreg.git.
We consider the problem of reconstructing an $n$-dimensional $k$-sparse signal from a set of noiseless magnitude-only measurements. Formulating the problem as an unregularized empirical risk minimization task, we study the sample complexity performance of gradient descent with Hadamard parametrization, which we call Hadamard Wirtinger flow (HWF). Provided knowledge of the signal sparsity $k$, we prove that a single step of HWF is able to recover the support from $k(x^*_{max})^{-2}$ (modulo logarithmic term) samples, where $x^*_{max}$ is the largest component of the signal in magnitude. This support recovery procedure can be used to initialize existing reconstruction methods and yields algorithms with total runtime proportional to the cost of reading the data and improved sample complexity, which is linear in $k$ when the signal contains at least one large component. We numerically investigate the performance of HWF at convergence and show that, while not requiring any explicit form of regularization nor knowledge of $k$, HWF adapts to the signal sparsity and reconstructs sparse signals with fewer measurements than existing gradient based methods.