Related papers: Gradient-Based Adaptive Stochastic Search for Non-…

We develop and analyze a set of new sequential simulation-optimization algorithms for large-scale multi-dimensional discrete optimization via simulation problems with a convexity structure. The "large-scale" notion refers to that the…

Our work focuses on stochastic gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer. Research on this class of problem is quite limited, and until recently no non-asymptotic convergence…

Optimization lies at the heart of machine learning and signal processing. Contemporary approaches based on the stochastic gradient method are non-adaptive in the sense that their implementation employs prescribed parameter values that need…

High-dimensional classification has become an increasingly important problem. In this paper we propose a "Multivariate Adaptive Stochastic Search" (MASS) approach which first reduces the dimension of the data space and then applies a…

In this work we propose the use of adaptive stochastic search as a building block for general, non-convex optimization operations within deep neural network architectures. Specifically, for an objective function located at some layer in the…

Due to the highly non-convex nature of large-scale robust parameter estimation, avoiding poor local minima is challenging in real-world applications where input data is contaminated by a large or unknown fraction of outliers. In this paper,…

We study contextual stochastic optimization problems, where we leverage rich auxiliary observations (e.g., product characteristics) to improve decision making with uncertain variables (e.g., demand). We show how to train forest decision…

We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has…

We consider the projected gradient algorithm for the nonconvex best subset selection problem that minimizes a given empirical loss function under an $\ell_0$-norm constraint. Through decomposing the feasible set of the given sparsity…

Gradient boosting is a state-of-the-art prediction technique that sequentially produces a model in the form of linear combinations of simple predictors---typically decision trees---by solving an infinite-dimensional convex optimization…

Stochastic network optimization problems entail finding resource allocation policies that are optimum on an average but must be designed in an online fashion. Such problems are ubiquitous in communication networks, where resources such as…

This paper introduces an iterative algorithm for training nonparametric additive models that enjoys favorable memory storage and computational requirements. The algorithm can be viewed as the functional counterpart of stochastic gradient…

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 show how to transform any optimization problem that arises from fitting a machine learning model into one that (1) detects and removes contaminated data from the training set while (2) simultaneously fitting the trimmed…

An algorithm is proposed for solving stochastic and finite sum minimization problems. Based on a trust region methodology, the algorithm employs normalized steps, at least as long as the norms of the stochastic gradient estimates are within…

In this paper we consider a distributed optimization scenario in which the aggregate objective function to minimize is partitioned, big-data and possibly non-convex. Specifically, we focus on a set-up in which the dimension of the decision…

A random search algorithm intended to solve discrete optimization problems is considered. We outline the main components of the algorithm, and then describe it in more detail. We show how the algorithm can be implemented on parallel…

(Mini-batch) Stochastic Gradient Descent is a popular optimization method which has been applied to many machine learning applications. But a rather high variance introduced by the stochastic gradient in each step may slow down the…

It has been found that stochastic algorithms often find good solutions much more rapidly than inherently-batch approaches. Indeed, a very useful rule of thumb is that often, when solving a machine learning problem, an iterative technique…

In this paper, we consider large-scale ranking problems where one is given a set of (possibly non-redundant) pairwise comparisons and the underlying ranking explained by those comparisons is desired. We show that stochastic gradient descent…