Related papers: Fast large-scale optimization by unifying stochast…
In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
We consider unconstrained stochastic optimization problems with no available gradient information. Such problems arise in settings from derivative-free simulation optimization to reinforcement learning. We propose an adaptive sampling…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
Quasi-Newton (QN) methods provide an efficient alternative to second-order methods for minimizing smooth unconstrained problems. While QN methods generally compose a Hessian estimate based on one secant interpolation per iteration,…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their action selections so as to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms require solving a nonconvex and…
In this paper, we study structured quasi-Newton methods for optimization problems with orthogonality constraints. Note that the Riemannian Hessian of the objective function requires both the Euclidean Hessian and the Euclidean gradient. In…
A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…
The Hessian-vector product has been utilized to find a second-order stationary solution with strong complexity guarantee (e.g., almost linear time complexity in the problem's dimensionality). In this paper, we propose to further reduce the…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
Quasi-Newton methods form an important class of methods for solving nonlinear optimization problems. In such methods, first order information is used to approximate the second derivative. The aim is to mimic the fast convergence that can be…
Quasi-Newton methods are ubiquitous in deterministic local search due to their efficiency and low computational cost. This class of methods uses the history of gradient evaluations to approximate second-order derivatives. However, only…
We present two new remarkably simple stochastic second-order methods for minimizing the average of a very large number of sufficiently smooth and strongly convex functions. The first is a stochastic variant of Newton's method (SN), and the…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex objective function using an iterative algorithm based on Newton's method and the linear conjugate gradient algorithm, with explicit detection and use of negative curvature directions for the…
First-order stochastic methods for solving large-scale non-convex optimization problems are widely used in many big-data applications, e.g. training deep neural networks as well as other complex and potentially non-convex machine learning…
In this work, we generalized and unified recent two completely different works of Jascha \cite{sohl2014fast} and Lee \cite{lee2012proximal} respectively into one by proposing the \textbf{prox}imal s\textbf{to}chastic \textbf{N}ewton-type…
Many structured data-fitting applications require the solution of an optimization problem involving a sum over a potentially large number of measurements. Incremental gradient algorithms offer inexpensive iterations by sampling a subset of…
We develop a new algorithm for non-convex stochastic optimization that finds an $\epsilon$-critical point in the optimal $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector product computations. Our algorithm uses Hessian-vector…
In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…
We present a quasi-Newton method for unconstrained stochastic optimization. Most existing literature on this topic assumes a setting of stochastic optimization in which a finite sum of component functions is a reasonable approximation of an…