Related papers: Minimizing Finite Sums with the Stochastic Average…
Stochastic variance reduced methods have shown strong performance in solving finite-sum problems. However, these methods usually require the users to manually tune the step-size, which is time-consuming or even infeasible for some…
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…
This paper presents a stochastic approximation proximal subgradient (SAPS) method for stochastic convex-concave minimax optimization. By accessing unbiased and variance bounded approximate subgradients, we show that this algorithm exhibits…
Several useful variance-reduced stochastic gradient algorithms, such as SVRG, SAGA, Finito, and SAG, have been proposed to minimize empirical risks with linear convergence properties to the exact minimizer. The existing convergence results…
In the paper, we study the stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for the nonconvex optimizations, and propose three classes of the nonconvex stochastic ADMM with variance reduction, based on different reduced…
In this paper we study a family of variance reduction methods with randomized batch size---at each step, the algorithm first randomly chooses the batch size and then selects a batch of samples to conduct a variance-reduced stochastic…
This paper studies distributed nonconvex optimization problems with stochastic gradients for a multi-agent system, in which each agent aims to minimize the sum of all agents' cost functions by using local compressed information exchange. We…
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University. In this work we introduce several new optimisation methods for problems in machine learning. Our algorithms broadly fall into two categories:…
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…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a key method used in statistical learning. Recently, its non-asymptotic convergence analysis has been considered in many papers. However, most of the prior analyses are made under restrictive assumptions…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is differentiable and relatively smooth with respect to a reference convex function, and the other can be nondifferentiable but simple to optimize. We investigate a…
This paper reviews the gradient sampling methodology for solving nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization problems. An intuitively straightforward gradient sampling algorithm is stated and its convergence properties are summarized. Throughout this…
We consider a class of stochastic smooth convex optimization problems under rather general assumptions on the noise in the stochastic gradient observation. As opposed to the classical problem setting in which the variance of noise is…
This paper optimizes the step coefficients of first-order methods for smooth convex minimization in terms of the worst-case convergence bound (i.e., efficiency) of the decrease in the gradient norm. This work is based on the performance…
This paper considers a class of constrained stochastic composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a certain non-differentiable (but…
We consider stochastic strongly convex optimization with a complex inequality constraint. This complex inequality constraint may lead to computationally expensive projections in algorithmic iterations of the stochastic gradient…
For finite-sum optimization, variance-reduced gradient methods (VR) compute at each iteration the gradient of a single function (or of a mini-batch), and yet achieve faster convergence than SGD thanks to a carefully crafted lower-variance…
Sign stochastic gradient descent (signSGD) is a communication-efficient method that transmits only the sign of stochastic gradients for parameter updating. Existing literature has demonstrated that signSGD can achieve a convergence rate of…
In this paper we study the problem of minimizing the average of a large number ($n$) of smooth convex loss functions. We propose a new method, S2GD (Semi-Stochastic Gradient Descent), which runs for one or several epochs in each of which a…
In this note we propose a new variant of the hybrid variance-reduced proximal gradient method in [7] to solve a common stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problem under standard assumptions. We simply replace the independent…