Related papers: Stop Wasting My Gradients: Practical SVRG
Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG) and its variants aim to speed-up training by using gradient corrections, but have seen limited success in deep learning. Here, we show surprising new foundational connections of SVRG to a recently…
We study the stochastic Riemannian gradient algorithm for matrix eigen-decomposition. The state-of-the-art stochastic Riemannian algorithm requires the learning rate to decay to zero and thus suffers from slow convergence and sub-optimal…
Stochastic gradient descent updates parameters with summation gradient computed from a random data batch. This summation will lead to unbalanced training process if the data we obtained is unbalanced. To address this issue, this paper takes…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
Stochastic gradient methods are among the most widely used algorithms for large-scale optimization and machine learning. A key technique for improving the statistical efficiency and stability of these methods is the use of averaging schemes…
Among the very first variance reduced stochastic methods for solving the empirical risk minimization problem was the SVRG method (Johnson & Zhang 2013). SVRG is an inner-outer loop based method, where in the outer loop a reference full…
Sign stochastic gradient descent (signSGD) is a communication-efficient method that transmits only the sign of stochastic gradients for parameter updating. Existing literature has demonstrated that signSGD can achieve a convergence rate of…
Machine learning, especially deep neural networks, has been rapidly developed in fields including computer vision, speech recognition and reinforcement learning. Although Mini-batch SGD is one of the most popular stochastic optimization…
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…
We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of modern machine learning. Sometimes, there are many different potential gradient estimators that can be used. When so, choosing the one with the best tradeoff between cost and variance is…
A recent article introduced thecontinuous stochastic gradient method (CSG) for the efficient solution of a class of stochastic optimization problems. While the applicability of known stochastic gradient type methods is typically limited to…
The fluctuation effect of gradient expectation and variance caused by parameter update between consecutive iterations is neglected or confusing by current mainstream gradient optimization algorithms.Using this fluctuation effect, combined…
In this paper, we develop a new accelerated stochastic gradient method for efficiently solving the convex regularized empirical risk minimization problem in mini-batch settings. The use of mini-batches is becoming a golden standard in the…
Classical stochastic gradient methods for optimization rely on noisy gradient approximations that become progressively less accurate as iterates approach a solution. The large noise and small signal in the resulting gradients makes it…
Variance-reduced algorithms, although achieve great theoretical performance, can run slowly in practice due to the periodic gradient estimation with a large batch of data. Batch-size adaptation thus arises as a promising approach to…
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 study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of \emph{heterogeneous} functions distributed across several machines with a focus on communication efficiency. In such settings, naively using the classical stochastic…
In this work, we study an optimizer, Grad-Avg to optimize error functions. We establish the convergence of the sequence of iterates of Grad-Avg mathematically to a minimizer (under boundedness assumption). We apply Grad-Avg along with some…
We propose a randomized first order optimization method--SEGA (SkEtched GrAdient method)-- which progressively throughout its iterations builds a variance-reduced estimate of the gradient from random linear measurements (sketches) of the…