Related papers: Fast large-scale optimization by unifying stochast…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…
This paper addresses the problem of optimizing partition functions in a stochastic learning setting. We propose a stochastic variant of the bound majorization algorithm that relies on upper-bounding the partition function with a quadratic…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…
Gradient normalization and soft clipping are two popular techniques for tackling instability issues and improving convergence of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum. In this article, we study these types of methods through the…
Due to the effectiveness of second-order algorithms in solving classical optimization problems, designing second-order optimizers to train deep neural networks (DNNs) has attracted much research interest in recent years. However, because of…
In this work, we propose Natural Hypergradient Descent (NHGD), a new method for solving bilevel optimization problems. To address the computational bottleneck in hypergradient estimation--namely, the need to compute or approximate Hessian…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
In this paper, we propose a method of distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD), with low communication load and computational complexity, and still fast convergence. To reduce the communication load, at each iteration of the algorithm,…
Global convergence of an online (stochastic) limited memory version of the Broyden-Fletcher- Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) quasi-Newton method for solving optimization problems with stochastic objectives that arise in large scale machine learning…
This work considers the non-convex finite sum minimization problem. There are several algorithms for such problems, but existing methods often work poorly when the problem is badly scaled and/or ill-conditioned, and a primary goal of this…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…
This article explores how to effectively incorporate curvature information generated using SIMD-parallel forward-mode Algorithmic Differentiation (AD) into unconstrained Quasi-Newton (QN) minimization of a smooth objective function, $f$.…
Recently several methods were proposed for sparse optimization which make careful use of second-order information [10, 28, 16, 3] to improve local convergence rates. These methods construct a composite quadratic approximation using Hessian…
First-order methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are currently the standard algorithm for training deep neural networks. Second-order methods, despite their better convergence rate, are rarely used in practice due to the…
We consider minimizing finite-sum and expectation objective functions via Hessian-averaging based subsampled Newton methods. These methods allow for gradient inexactness and have fixed per-iteration Hessian approximation costs. The recent…
We develop R2N, a modified quasi-Newton method for minimizing the sum of a $\mathcal{C}^1$ function $f$ and a lower semi-continuous prox-bounded $h$. Both $f$ and $h$ may be nonconvex. At each iteration, our method computes a step by…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely adopted iterative method for optimizing differentiable objective functions. In this paper, we propose and discuss a novel approach to scale up SGD in applications involving non-convex functions…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
We present novel algorithms for simulation optimization using random directions stochastic approximation (RDSA). These include first-order (gradient) as well as second-order (Newton) schemes. We incorporate both continuous-valued as well as…
A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…