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Due to the non-smoothness of optimization problems in Machine Learning, generalized smoothness assumptions have been gaining a lot of attention in recent years. One of the most popular assumptions of this type is $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness…
Gradient descent methods and especially their stochastic variants have become highly popular in the last decade due to their efficiency on big data optimization problems. In this thesis we present the development of data sampling strategies…
Stochastic gradient methods are among the most widely used algorithms for large-scale optimization and machine learning. A key technique for improving the statistical efficiency and stability of these methods is the use of averaging schemes…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
Stochastic gradient descent method and its variants constitute the core optimization algorithms that achieve good convergence rates for solving machine learning problems. These rates are obtained especially when these algorithms are…
Recent advances in optimization theory have shown that smooth strongly convex finite sums can be minimized faster than by treating them as a black box "batch" problem. In this work we introduce a new method in this class with a theoretical…
In this paper, we consider constrained optimization problems with convex, smooth objective and constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called the Stochastic Moving Ball Approximation (SMBA) method, to solve this class…
Many structured data-fitting applications require the solution of an optimization problem involving a sum over a potentially large number of measurements. Incremental gradient algorithms offer inexpensive iterations by sampling a subset of…
We propose a novel randomized incremental gradient algorithm, namely, VAriance-Reduced Accelerated Gradient (Varag), for finite-sum optimization. Equipped with a unified step-size policy that adjusts itself to the value of the condition…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
Stochastic gradient algorithms have been the main focus of large-scale learning problems and they led to important successes in machine learning. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of learning rate and the amount of the…
Stochastic gradient methods are among the most important algorithms in training machine learning problems. While classical assumptions such as strong convexity allow a simple analysis they are rarely satisfied in applications. In recent…
A subgradient method is presented for solving general convex optimization problems, the main requirement being that a strictly-feasible point is known. A feasible sequence of iterates is generated, which converges to within user-specified…
We survey incremental methods for minimizing a sum $\sum_{i=1}^mf_i(x)$ consisting of a large number of convex component functions $f_i$. Our methods consist of iterations applied to single components, and have proved very effective in…
In this paper, we describe a new way to get convergence rates for optimal methods in smooth (strongly) convex optimization tasks. Our approach is based on results for tasks where gradients have nonrandom small noises. Unlike previous…
We present a uniform analysis of biased stochastic gradient methods for minimizing convex, strongly convex, and non-convex composite objectives, and identify settings where bias is useful in stochastic gradient estimation. The framework we…
We present a new algorithm for solving optimization problems with objective functions that are the sum of a smooth function and a (potentially) nonsmooth regularization function, and nonlinear equality constraints. The algorithm may be…
In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. This point of view covers the stochastic gradient…
We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…