Related papers: SGD with Variance Reduction beyond Empirical Risk …
Our work focuses on stochastic gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer. Research on this class of problem is quite limited, and until recently no non-asymptotic convergence…
Motivated by broad applications in reinforcement learning and machine learning, this paper considers the popular stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when the gradients of the underlying objective function are sampled from Markov processes.…
Stochastic descent methods (of the gradient and mirror varieties) have become increasingly popular in optimization. In fact, it is now widely recognized that the success of deep learning is not only due to the special deep architecture of…
A framework is introduced for sequentially solving convex stochastic minimization problems, where the objective functions change slowly, in the sense that the distance between successive minimizers is bounded. The minimization problems are…
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 propose new sequential simulation-optimization algorithms for general convex optimization via simulation problems with high-dimensional discrete decision space. The performance of each choice of discrete decision variables is evaluated…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variations have been effectively used to optimize neural network models. However, with the rapid growth of big data and deep learning, SGD is no longer the most suitable choice due to its…
This paper considers convex optimization problems where nodes of a network have access to summands of a global objective. Each of these local objectives is further assumed to be an average of a finite set of functions. The motivation for…
We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…
We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…
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…
Recently, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods have been proposed for scaling up Monte Carlo computations to large data problems. Whilst these approaches have proven useful in many applications, vanilla SG-MCMC…
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…
This paper investigates accelerating the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on non-convex problems. We propose a distributed primal-dual stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) equipped with "powerball" method to accelerate. We…
Recently there is a large amount of work devoted to the study of Markov chain stochastic gradient methods (MC-SGMs) which mainly focus on their convergence analysis for solving minimization problems. In this paper, we provide a…
There are several applications of stochastic optimization where one can benefit from a robust estimate of the gradient. For example, domains such as distributed learning with corrupted nodes, the presence of large outliers in the training…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods are Bayesian analogs to popular stochastic optimization methods; however, this connection is not well studied. We explore this relationship by applying simulated annealing to an…
We study distributed stochastic nonconvex optimization in multi-agent networks. We introduce a novel algorithmic framework for the distributed minimization of the sum of the expected value of a smooth (possibly nonconvex) function (the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) provides a simple and efficient way to solve a broad range of machine learning problems. Here, we focus on distribution regression (DR), involving two stages of sampling: Firstly, we regress from…