Description
The 14th Seminar
Date and Time: May 11th 5:00pm – 6:00pm(JST)
10:00am-11:00am(CEST)
Venue: Zoom webinar
Language: English
Speaker: Lenka Zdeborova, EPFL CIS
Title: Insights on gradient-based algorithms in high-dimensional non-convex optimisation
Abstract: Gradient descent algorithms and their noisy variants, such as the Langevin dynamics or multi-pass SGD, are at the center of attention in machine learning. Yet their behaviour remains perplexing, in particular in the high-dimensional non-convex setting. In this talk, I will present several high-dimensional and non-convex statistical learning problems in which the performance of algorithms can be analysed down to a constant. The common point of these settings is that the data come from a probabilistic generative model leading to problems for which, in the high-dimensional limit, statistical physics provides exact closed solutions. The discussion will focus on the model of phase retrieval. We will discuss the role of over-parametrization as well as the noise in SGD.
Bio: Lenka Zdeborová is a Professor of Physics and of Computer Science in École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where she leads the Statistical Physics of Computation Laboratory. She received a PhD in physics from University Paris-Sud and from Charles University in Prague in 2008. She spent two years in the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Between 2010 and 2020 she was a researcher at CNRS working in the Institute of Theoretical Physics in CEA Saclay, France. In 2014, she was awarded the CNRS bronze medal, in 2016 Philippe Meyer prize in theoretical physics and an ERC Starting Grant, in 2018 the Irène Joliot-Curie prize, in 2021 the Gibbs lectureship of AMS and the Neuron Fund award. She is an editorial board member for Journal of Physics A, Physical Review E, Physical Review X, SIMODS, Machine Learning: Science and Technology, and Information and Inference. Lenka’s expertise is in applications of concepts from statistical physics, such as advanced mean field methods, replica method and related message-passing algorithms, to problems in machine learning, signal processing, inference and optimization. She enjoys erasing the boundaries between theoretical physics, mathematics and computer science.
