Related papers: Non-strongly-convex smooth stochastic approximatio…
Bilevel optimization problems are receiving increasing attention in machine learning as they provide a natural framework for hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning. A key step to tackle these problems is the efficient computation of…
This paper presents an algorithmic framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems using only stochastic function evaluations. We employ central finite-difference based gradient estimation methods to approximate the…
We investigate the stochastic optimization problem of minimizing population risk, where the loss defining the risk is assumed to be weakly convex. Compositions of Lipschitz convex functions with smooth maps are the primary examples of such…
We consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In the context of most machine learning applications, each loss function is non-negative and thus can be expressed as the…
In this paper, we introduce a stochastic projected subgradient method for weakly convex (i.e., uniformly prox-regular) nonsmooth, nonconvex functions---a wide class of functions which includes the additive and convex composite classes. At a…
Stochastic saddle point (SSP) problems are, in general, less studied compared to stochastic minimization problems. However, SSP problems emerge from machine learning (adversarial training, e.g., GAN, AUC maximization), statistics (robust…
We consider the unconstrained optimization problem whose objective function is composed of a smooth and a non-smooth conponents where the smooth component is the expectation a random function. This type of problem arises in some interesting…
Motivated by applications in optimization and machine learning, we consider stochastic quasi-Newton (SQN) methods for solving stochastic optimization problems. In the literature, the convergence analysis of these algorithms relies on strong…
We consider the least-squares regression problem and provide a detailed asymptotic analysis of the performance of averaged constant-step-size stochastic gradient descent (a.k.a. least-mean-squares). In the strongly-convex case, we provide…
Previous studies on stochastic primal-dual algorithms for solving min-max problems with faster convergence heavily rely on the bilinear structure of the problem, which restricts their applicability to a narrowed range of problems. The main…
In this paper we analyze several new methods for solving nonconvex optimization problems with the objective function formed as a sum of two terms: one is nonconvex and smooth, and another is convex but simple and its structure is known.…
Stochastic gradient method (SGM) has been popularly applied to solve optimization problems with objective that is stochastic or an average of many functions. Most existing works on SGMs assume that the underlying problem is unconstrained or…
We study a class of non-convex and non-smooth problems with \textit{rank} regularization to promote sparsity in optimal solution. We propose to apply the proximal gradient descent method to solve the problem and accelerate the process with…
Interesting theoretical associations have been established by recent papers between the fields of active learning and stochastic convex optimization due to the common role of feedback in sequential querying mechanisms. In this paper, we…
We propose a new stochastic L-BFGS algorithm and prove a linear convergence rate for strongly convex and smooth functions. Our algorithm draws heavily from a recent stochastic variant of L-BFGS proposed in Byrd et al. (2014) as well as a…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
There has been a growing effort in studying the distributed optimization problem over a network. The objective is to optimize a global function formed by a sum of local functions, using only local computation and communication. Literature…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…
It is well known that the optimal convergence rate for stochastic optimization of smooth functions is $O(1/\sqrt{T})$, which is same as stochastic optimization of Lipschitz continuous convex functions. This is in contrast to optimizing…