Related papers: Stop Wasting My Gradients: Practical SVRG

In this paper, we consider to improve the stochastic variance reduce gradient (SVRG) method via incorporating the curvature information of the objective function. We propose to reduce the variance of stochastic gradients using the…

Variance reduction methods such as SVRG and SpiderBoost use a mixture of large and small batch gradients to reduce the variance of stochastic gradients. Compared to SGD, these methods require at least double the number of operations per…

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…

(Mini-batch) Stochastic Gradient Descent is a popular optimization method which has been applied to many machine learning applications. But a rather high variance introduced by the stochastic gradient in each step may slow down the…

In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. This point of view covers the stochastic gradient…

In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for stochastic variance reduced gradient descent methods such as SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient…

In this contribution, we present a full overview of the continuous stochastic gradient (CSG) method, including convergence results, step size rules and algorithmic insights. We consider optimization problems in which the objective function…

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have achieved human-level performance on a variety of real-world applications. However, the current algorithms still suffer from poor gradient estimation with excessive variance, resulting in…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular optimization method which has been applied to many important machine learning tasks such as Support Vector Machines and Deep Neural Networks. In order to parallelize SGD, minibatch training is…

In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…

Recent advances in policy gradient methods and deep learning have demonstrated their applicability for complex reinforcement learning problems. However, the variance of the performance gradient estimates obtained from the simulation is…

Variance reduction is a crucial tool for improving the slow convergence of stochastic gradient descent. Only a few variance-reduced methods, however, have yet been shown to directly benefit from Nesterov's acceleration techniques to match…

Despite the strong theoretical guarantees that variance-reduced finite-sum optimization algorithms enjoy, their applicability remains limited to cases where the memory overhead they introduce (SAG/SAGA), or the periodic full gradient…

Decentralized stochastic optimization has recently benefited from gradient tracking methods \cite{DSGT_Pu,DSGT_Xin} providing efficient solutions for large-scale empirical risk minimization problems. In Part I \cite{GT_SAGA} of this work,…

We propose an optimization method for minimizing the finite sums of smooth convex functions. Our method incorporates an accelerated gradient descent (AGD) and a stochastic variance reduction gradient (SVRG) in a mini-batch setting. Unlike…

Stochastic optimization lies at the heart of machine learning, and its cornerstone is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a method introduced over 60 years ago. The last 8 years have seen an exciting new development: variance reduction (VR)…

Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG), introduced by Johnson & Zhang (2013), is a theoretically compelling optimization method. However, as Defazio & Bottou (2019) highlight, its effectiveness in deep learning is yet to be proven. In…

Stochastic first-order methods for empirical risk minimization employ gradient approximations based on sampled data in lieu of exact gradients. Such constructions introduce noise into the learning dynamics, which can be corrected through…

In this paper, we study decentralized empirical risk minimization problems, where the goal is to minimize a finite-sum of smooth and strongly-convex functions available over a network of nodes. In this Part I, we propose…

In this paper we consider the question of whether it is possible to apply a gradient averaging strategy to improve on the sublinear convergence rates without any increase in storage. Our analysis reveals that a positive answer requires an…