We consider a variant of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a random learning rate and reveal its convergence properties. SGD is a widely used stochastic optimization algorithm in machine learning, especially deep learning. Numerous studies reveal the convergence properties of SGD and its simplified variants. Among these, the analysis of convergence using a stationary distribution of updated parameters provides generalizable results. However, to obtain a stationary distribution, the update direction of the parameters must not degenerate, which limits the applicable variants of SGD. In this study, we consider a novel SGD variant, Poisson SGD, which has degenerated parameter update directions and instead utilizes a random learning rate. Consequently, we demonstrate that a distribution of a parameter updated by Poisson SGD converges to a stationary distribution under weak assumptions on a loss function. Based on this, we further show that Poisson SGD finds global minima in non-convex optimization problems and also evaluate the generalization error using this method. As a proof technique, we approximate the distribution by Poisson SGD with that of the bouncy particle sampler (BPS) and derive its stationary distribution, using the theoretical advance of the piece-wise deterministic Markov process (PDMP).

We propose to optimize neural networks with a uniformly-distributed random learning rate. The associated stochastic gradient descent algorithm can be approximated by continuous stochastic equations and analyzed with the Fokker-Planck formalism. In the small learning rate approximation, the training process is characterized by an effective temperature which depends on the average learning rate, the mini-batch size and the momentum of the optimization algorithm. By comparing the random learning rate protocol with cyclic and constant protocols, we suggest that the random choice is generically the best strategy in the small learning rate regime, yielding better regularization without extra computational cost. We provide supporting evidence through experiments on both shallow, fully-connected and deep, convolutional neural networks for image classification on the MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets.