Related papers: Why Random Reshuffling Beats Stochastic Gradient D…
We study convergence lower bounds of without-replacement stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for solving smooth (strongly-)convex finite-sum minimization problems. Unlike most existing results focusing on final iterate lower bounds in terms…
When using stochastic gradient descent to solve large-scale machine learning problems, a common practice of data processing is to shuffle the training data, partition the data across multiple machines if needed, and then perform several…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a low-rank factorization is commonly employed to speed up matrix problems including matrix completion, subspace tracking, and SDP relaxation. In this paper, we exhibit a step size scheme for SGD on a…
Variants of the coordinate descent approach for minimizing a nonlinear function are distinguished in part by the order in which coordinates are considered for relaxation. Three common orderings are cyclic (CCD), in which we cycle through…
We analyze the convergence rates of two popular variants of coordinate descent (CD): random CD (RCD), in which the coordinates are sampled uniformly at random, and random-permutation CD (RPCD), in which random permutations are used to…
In distributed learning, local SGD (also known as federated averaging) and its simple baseline minibatch SGD are widely studied optimization methods. Most existing analyses of these methods assume independent and unbiased gradient estimates…
We present a family of algorithms, called descent algorithms, for optimizing convex and non-convex functions. We also introduce a new first-order algorithm, called rescaled gradient descent (RGD), and show that RGD achieves a faster…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a workhorse algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems in data science and machine learning. Understanding the convergence of SGD is hence of fundamental importance. In this work we examine…
Several useful variance-reduced stochastic gradient algorithms, such as SVRG, SAGA, Finito, and SAG, have been proposed to minimize empirical risks with linear convergence properties to the exact minimizer. The existing convergence results…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for strongly convex functions converges at the rate $\bO(1/k)$. However, achieving good results in practice requires tuning the parameters (for example the learning rate) of the algorithm. In this paper we…
This paper considers stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method for solving constrained convex minimization problems. In particular, a stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method with weighted iterate-averaging is investigated and its…
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…
We analyze two classical algorithms for solving additively composite convex optimization problems where the objective is the sum of a smooth term and a nonsmooth regularizer: proximal stochastic gradient method for a single regularizer; and…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
The incremental gradient method is a prominent algorithm for minimizing a finite sum of smooth convex functions, used in many contexts including large-scale data processing applications and distributed optimization over networks. It is a…
Optimization objectives in the form of a sum of intractable expectations are rising in importance (e.g., diffusion models, variational autoencoders, and many more), a setting also known as "finite sum with infinite data." For these…
In this paper, we propose a proximal stochasitc gradient algorithm (PSGA) for solving composite optimization problems by incorporating variance reduction techniques and an adaptive step-size strategy. In the PSGA method, the objective…
When applying a stochastic algorithm, one must choose an order to draw samples. The practical choices are without-replacement sampling orders, which are empirically faster and more cache-friendly than uniform-iid-sampling but often have…
We uncover how SGD interacts with batch normalization and can exhibit undesirable training dynamics such as divergence. More precisely, we study how Single Shuffle (SS) and Random Reshuffle (RR) -- two widely used variants of SGD --…
Stochastic approximation is a foundation for many algorithms found in machine learning and optimization. It is in general slow to converge: the mean square error vanishes as $O(n^{-1})$. A deterministic counterpart known as quasi-stochastic…