How Inefficient Is Natural Gradient Descent? From Exact Optimality to \Theta ( \sqrt{ \log d } ) Divergence
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
arXiv:2606. 18306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gaussian width is a central geometric complexity measure in high-dimensional probability, compressed sensing, convex optimization, and learning theory.
arXiv:2607. 20578v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Gaussian-width complexity on statistical manifolds through a pair of functionals: the primal Fisher width $w_G(T) = w(G^{1/2}T)$, induced by the Fisher metric, and the inverse-Fisher width $w_{G^{-1}}(T) = w(G^{-1/2}T)$, induced by the inverse Fisher metric.
The paper introduces a Projected Riemannian Gradient Descent (RGD) algorithm for computing the Bures‑Wasserstein barycenter of positive definite matrices, achieving dimension‑independent linear convergence at unit step size. It resolves a previous dichotomy by showing that clipping eigenvalues to a fixed interval yields a closed‑form, non‑expansive projection in the BW metric, allowing the algorithm to match the empirical speed of unit‑step RGD while maintaining theoretical guarantees. The method also extends to the invariant matrix projection problem, providing a unified dimension‑independent analysis.
arXiv:2609. 26647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study statistical rates in entropic optimal transport in the semi-discrete regime where one measure has finite support and the other is subGaussian.
arXiv:2602. 12471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of minimizing the logistic loss with gradient descent to train a linear model for binary classification with separable data.
The paper introduces a new convergence framework for solving distributionally robust optimization problems formulated as nonconvex, nonconcave minimax problems over a Euclidean space and a Riemannian manifold. It defines a "basin saddle point"—a locally defined Nash equilibrium—and proves that a Riemannian gradient ascent–descent algorithm converges to such points under a local Łojasiewicz growth condition. The authors apply this theory to a statistical risk DRO problem over Gaussian measures, deriving explicit convergence rates and constants in terms of data dimension, loss moments, and reference covariance.