Related papers: Stochastic First- and Zeroth-order Methods for Non…
We propose a randomized nonmonotone block proximal gradient (RNBPG) method for minimizing the sum of a smooth (possibly nonconvex) function and a block-separable (possibly nonconvex nonsmooth) function. At each iteration, this method…
Decentralized optimization with orthogonality constraints is found widely in scientific computing and data science. Since the orthogonality constraints are nonconvex, it is quite challenging to design efficient algorithms. Existing…
In this paper, we propose a successive pseudo-convex approximation algorithm to efficiently compute stationary points for a large class of possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The stationary points are obtained by solving a sequence of…
Cubic regularization (CR) is an optimization method with emerging popularity due to its capability to escape saddle points and converge to second-order stationary solutions for nonconvex optimization. However, CR encounters a high sample…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a prevalent optimization technique for large-scale distributed machine learning. While SGD computation can be efficiently divided between multiple machines, communication typically becomes a bottleneck…
The stochastic proximal gradient method is a powerful generalization of the widely used stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and has found numerous applications in Machine Learning. However, it is notoriously known that this method…
In this work we investigate the practicality of stochastic gradient descent and recently introduced variants with variance-reduction techniques in imaging inverse problems. Such algorithms have been shown in the machine learning literature…
Sparsity-inducing regularization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning applications, ranging from feature selection to model compression. In this paper, we present a novel stochastic method -- Orthant Based Proximal Stochastic…
Gradient-based (a.k.a. `first order') optimization algorithms are routinely used to solve large scale non-convex problems. Yet, it is generally hard to predict their effectiveness. In order to gain insight into this question, we revisit the…
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
Optimization over the Stiefel manifold is a fundamental computational problem in many scientific and engineering applications. Despite considerable research effort, high-dimensional optimization problems over the Stiefel manifold remain…
In this paper we study a broad class of structured nonlinear programming (SNLP) problems. In particular, we first establish the first-order optimality conditions for them. Then we propose sequential convex programming (SCP) methods for…
We consider the problem of training a deep neural network with nonsmooth regularization to retrieve a sparse and efficient sub-structure. Our regularizer is only assumed to be lower semi-continuous and prox-bounded. We combine an adaptive…
We propose an inexact variable-metric proximal point algorithm to accelerate gradient-based optimization algorithms. The proposed scheme, called QNing can be notably applied to incremental first-order methods such as the stochastic…
Stochastic algorithms, especially stochastic gradient descent (SGD), have proven to be the go-to methods in data science and machine learning. In recent years, the stochastic proximal point algorithm (SPPA) emerged, and it was shown to be…
We introduce two new stochastic conjugate frameworks for a class of nonconvex and possibly also nonsmooth optimization problems. These frameworks are built upon Stochastic Recursive Gradient Algorithm (SARAH) and we thus refer to them as…
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…
The proximal gradient algorithm has been popularly used for convex optimization. Recently, it has also been extended for nonconvex problems, and the current state-of-the-art is the nonmonotone accelerated proximal gradient algorithm.…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
We develop and analyze a variant of the SARAH algorithm, which does not require computation of the exact gradient. Thus this new method can be applied to general expectation minimization problems rather than only finite sum problems. While…