Polygonal Unadjusted Langevin Algorithms: Creating stable and efficient adaptive algorithms for neural networks

We present a new class of adaptive stochastic optimization algorithms, which overcomes many of the known shortcomings of popular adaptive optimizers that are currently used for the fine tuning of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Its underpinning theory relies on advances of Eulers polygonal approximations for stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with monotone coefficients. As a result, it inherits the stability properties of tamed algorithms, while it addresses other known issues, e.g. vanishing gradients in ANNs. In particular, we provide an nonasymptotic analysis and full theoretical guarantees for the convergence properties of an algorithm of this novel class, which we named TH$varepsilon$O POULA (or, simply, TheoPouLa). Finally, several experiments are presented with different types of ANNs, which show the superior performance of TheoPouLa over many popular adaptive optimization algorithms.