Related papers: Stochastic Compositional Gradient Descent: Algorit…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
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 consider the unconstrained optimization problem whose objective function is composed of a smooth and a non-smooth conponents where the smooth component is the expectation a random function. This type of problem arises in some interesting…
Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a popular parallel optimization algorithm in machine learning. Most theoretical analysis on ASGD take a discrete view and prove upper bounds for their convergence rates. However, the…
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,…
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…
Stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods have been proved to converge efficiently to first-order stationary points which, however, can be saddle points in nonconvex optimization. It has been observed that a stochastic…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely used algorithm in machine learning, particularly for neural network training. Recent studies on SGD for canonical quadratic optimization or linear regression show it attains well generalization…
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…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is being used routinely for optimizing non-convex functions. Yet, the standard convergence theory for SGD in the smooth non-convex setting gives a slow sublinear convergence to a stationary point. In this…
SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent) is a popular algorithm for large scale optimization problems due to its low iterative cost. However, SGD can not achieve linear convergence rate as FGD (Full Gradient Descent) because of the inherent…
In this paper, we consider the convex and non-convex composition problem with the structure $\frac{1}{n}\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^n {{F_i}( {G( x )} )}$, where $G( x )=\frac{1}{n}\sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^n {{G_j}( x )} $ is the inner function, and…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for optimization problems arising in high-dimensional inference tasks. Here one produces an estimator of an unknown parameter from independent samples of data by iteratively…
Optimization algorithms are pivotal in advancing various scientific and industrial fields but often encounter obstacles such as trapping in local minima, saddle points, and plateaus (flat regions), which makes the convergence to reasonable…
We introduce a novel and efficient algorithm called the stochastic approximate gradient descent (SAGD), as an alternative to the stochastic gradient descent for cases where unbiased stochastic gradients cannot be trivially obtained.…
The Stochastic Gradient Descent method (SGD) and its stochastic variants have become methods of choice for solving finite-sum optimization problems arising from machine learning and data science thanks to their ability to handle large-scale…
We study diffusion and consensus based optimization of a sum of unknown convex objective functions over distributed networks. The only access to these functions is through stochastic gradient oracles, each of which is only available at a…
Motivated by the problem of online canonical correlation analysis, we propose the \emph{Stochastic Scaled-Gradient Descent} (SSGD) algorithm for minimizing the expectation of a stochastic function over a generic Riemannian manifold. SSGD…
In this paper, we introduce an unbiased gradient simulation algorithms for solving convex optimization problem with stochastic function compositions. We show that the unbiased gradient generated from the algorithm has finite variance and…
Stochastic nested optimization, including stochastic compositional, min-max and bilevel optimization, is gaining popularity in many machine learning applications. While the three problems share the nested structure, existing works often…