Related papers: Stochastic Compositional Gradient Descent: Algorit…
Stochastic compositional optimization generalizes classic (non-compositional) stochastic optimization to the minimization of compositions of functions. Each composition may introduce an additional expectation. The series of expectations may…
The stochastic composition optimization proposed recently by Wang et al. [2014] minimizes the objective with the compositional expectation form: $\min_x~(\mathbb{E}_iF_i \circ \mathbb{E}_j G_j)(x).$ It summarizes many important applications…
Stochastic gradient methods are scalable for solving large-scale optimization problems that involve empirical expectations of loss functions. Existing results mainly apply to optimization problems where the objectives are one- or two-level…
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…
We consider in this work a system of two stochastic differential equations named the perturbed compositional gradient flow. By introducing a separation of fast and slow scales of the two equations, we show that the limit of the slow motion…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…
This work considers optimization of composition of functions in a nested form over Riemannian manifolds where each function contains an expectation. This type of problems is gaining popularity in applications such as policy evaluation in…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
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…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
This work studies constrained stochastic optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are convex and expressed as compositions of stochastic functions. The problem arises in the context of fair classification, fair…
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…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…
Stochastic compositional minimax problems are prevalent in machine learning, yet there are only limited established on the convergence of this class of problems. In this paper, we propose a formal definition of the stochastic compositional…
Many relevant problems in the area of systems and control, such as controller synthesis, observer design and model reduction, can be viewed as optimization problems involving dynamical systems: for instance, maximizing performance in the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still is the workhorse for many practical problems. However, it converges slow, and can be difficult to tune. It is possible to precondition SGD to accelerate its convergence remarkably. But many attempts…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
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…