Related papers: A Proximal Stochastic Gradient Method with Progres…

The stochastic gradient descent has been widely used for solving composite optimization problems in big data analyses. Many algorithms and convergence properties have been developed. The composite functions were convex primarily and…

We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…

In this work, we consider constrained stochastic optimization problems under hidden convexity, i.e., those that admit a convex reformulation via non-linear (but invertible) map $c(\cdot)$. A number of non-convex problems ranging from…

A subgradient method is presented for solving general convex optimization problems, the main requirement being that a strictly-feasible point is known. A feasible sequence of iterates is generated, which converges to within user-specified…

We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…

In this paper we study the effect of stochastic errors on two constrained incremental sub-gradient algorithms. We view the incremental sub-gradient algorithms as decentralized network optimization algorithms as applied to minimize a sum of…

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of an average function of a large number of smooth convex components and a general, possibly non-differentiable, convex function. Although many methods have been proposed to solve this problem…

In this work, we consider the problem of a network of agents collectively minimizing a sum of convex functions. The agents in our setting can only access their local objective functions and exchange information with their immediate…

Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) have been widely used for solving stochastic optimization problems. A majority of existing works assume no constraints or easy-to-project constraints. In this paper, we consider convex stochastic…

We present a uniform analysis of biased stochastic gradient methods for minimizing convex, strongly convex, and non-convex composite objectives, and identify settings where bias is useful in stochastic gradient estimation. The framework we…

This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…

The sum of ratios problem has a variety of important applications in economics and management science, but it is difficult to globally solve this problem. In this paper, we consider the minimization problem of a sum of a number of…

We develop and analyze an asynchronous algorithm for distributed convex optimization when the objective writes a sum of smooth functions, local to each worker, and a non-smooth function. Unlike many existing methods, our distributed…

We investigate a family of approximate multi-step proximal point methods, framed as implicit linear discretizations of gradient flow. The resulting methods are multi-step proximal point methods, with similar computational cost in each…

Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…

We develop subgradient- and gradient-based methods for minimizing strongly convex functions under a notion which generalizes the standard Euclidean strong convexity. We propose a unifying framework for subgradient methods which yields two…

Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…

Many important machine learning applications involve regularized nonconvex bi-level optimization. However, the existing gradient-based bi-level optimization algorithms cannot handle nonconvex or nonsmooth regularizers, and they suffer from…

We propose a novel stochastic gradient method---semi-stochastic coordinate descent (S2CD)---for the problem of minimizing a strongly convex function represented as the average of a large number of smooth convex functions:…

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…