Mathematical interpretation of why Gradient descent works

 

For minimizing a differentiable multivariable function \(f(\mathbf x)\) with initial value of \(\mathbf x_0\), the fastest decreasing would be the direction of negative gradient of \(f(x)\) since its gradient points to fastest ascending direction. The updating rule

\[\begin{equation} \mathbf x_{t+1} = \mathbf x_t - \eta\nabla f(\mathbf x_t), t=1,2~\cdots \end{equation}\]

with sufficiently small \(\eta\) leads to \(f(\mathbf x_{t+1})<f(\mathbf x_t)\). The scalar constant \(\eta\) is the step size determining how far the updating moves in the negative gradient direction, which is usually called learning rate in machine learning model training.

But, why \(\eta\) has to be small?

To gain the mathematical interpretation, assume the general context of

\[\begin{equation} \min_{\mathbf x}f(\mathbf x), \mathbf x\in \mathcal R^m \end{equation}\]

with initial condition \(\mathbf x=\mathbf x_0\).

The goal of first updating is to find \(\mathbf x_1=\mathbf x_0+\Delta\mathbf x\) such that

\[\begin{equation} f(\mathbf x_1) \le f(\mathbf x_0), \end{equation}\]

where \(\Delta\mathbf x\) is the updating vector.

First we approximate \(f(\mathbf x_1)\) with the first-order Taylor expansion as

\[\begin{equation} f(\mathbf x_1) = f(\mathbf x_0 + \Delta\mathbf x)=f(\mathbf x_0)+\Delta\mathbf x^T\nabla f(\mathbf x_0), \end{equation}\]

which leads to

\[\begin{equation} f(\mathbf x_1) - f(\mathbf x_0)=\Delta\mathbf x^T\nabla f(\mathbf x_0). \end{equation}\]

Now to ensure the semi-negative definite of \(f(\mathbf x_1) - f(\mathbf x_0)\), we can simply choose

\[\begin{equation} \Delta\mathbf x = -\eta\nabla f(\mathbf x_0) \end{equation}\]

and then we have

\[\begin{equation} f(\mathbf x_1) - f(\mathbf x_0)=-\eta\|\nabla f(\mathbf x_0)\|^2 \le 0, \end{equation}\]

for some scalar constant \(\eta\), and \(\|\nabla f(\mathbf x_0)\|^2=0\) if and only if \(f(\mathbf x_0)\) is already the minimum.

To sum up and generalize to step \(t\), the updating rule

\[\begin{equation} \mathbf x_{t+1} = \mathbf x_t - \eta \nabla f(\mathbf x_t) \end{equation}\]

drives the searching towards the minimum given that the proper value of \(\eta\) can ensure that \(x_{t+1}\) is close enough to \(x_t\) such that first-order approximate is a valid approximate with tolerable error.