Related papers: Smoothed Functional Algorithms for Stochastic Opti…
The Frank-Wolfe optimization algorithm has recently regained popularity for machine learning applications due to its projection-free property and its ability to handle structured constraints. However, in the stochastic learning setting, it…
We analyze a batched variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with weighted sampling distribution for smooth and non-smooth objective functions. We show that by distributing the batches computationally, a significant speedup in the…
As is well known, both sampling from the posterior and computing the mean of the posterior in Gaussian process regression reduces to solving a large linear system of equations. We study the use of stochastic gradient descent for solving…
As the size of modern data sets exceeds the disk and memory capacities of a single computer, machine learning practitioners have resorted to parallel and distributed computing. Given that optimization is one of the pillars of machine…
Probabilistic smoothing is a standard tool for global optimization, but existing methods rely on Gaussian kernels and specific transforms, often resulting in strong hyperparameter sensitivity and limited robustness. We propose a general…
We consider stochastic optimization with delayed gradients where, at each time step $t$, the algorithm makes an update using a stale stochastic gradient from step $t - d_t$ for some arbitrary delay $d_t$. This setting abstracts asynchronous…
This paper studies non-smooth problems of convex stochastic optimization. Using the smoothing technique based on the replacement of the function value at the considered point by the averaged function value over a ball (in $l_1$-norm or…
This paper considers a distributed stochastic strongly convex optimization, where agents connected over a network aim to cooperatively minimize the average of all agents' local cost functions. Due to the stochasticity of gradient estimation…
This paper proposes a distributed stochastic projection-free algorithm for large-scale constrained finite-sum optimization whose constraint set is complicated such that the projection onto the constraint set can be expensive. The global…
Distributed stochastic optimization has drawn great attention recently due to its effectiveness in solving large-scale machine learning problems. Though numerous algorithms have been proposed and successfully applied to general practical…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
We present an optimizer which uses Bayesian optimization to tune the system parameters of distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Given a specific context, our goal is to quickly find efficient configurations which appropriately…
We consider the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm driven by a general stochastic sequence, including i.i.d noise and random walk on an arbitrary graph, among others; and analyze it in the asymptotic sense. Specifically, we employ…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…
Large-scale distributed optimization is of great importance in various applications. For data-parallel based distributed learning, the inter-node gradient communication often becomes the performance bottleneck. In this paper, we propose the…
In this paper, we study convex optimization problems where agents of a network cooperatively minimize the global objective function which consists of multiple local objective functions. Different from most of the existing works, the local…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
In this paper we measured the stability of stochastic gradient method (SGM) for learning an approximated Fourier primal support vector machine. The stability of an algorithm is considered by measuring the generalization error in terms of…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…
In this paper, we study and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for solving bilvel problems, when neither the upper/lower objective values, nor their unbiased gradient estimates are available. In particular, exploiting…