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State-of-the-art training algorithms for deep learning models are based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Recently, many variations have been explored: perturbing parameters for better accuracy (such as in Extragradient), limiting SGD…
Large sectors of the recent optimization literature focused in the last decade on the development of optimal stochastic first order schemes for constrained convex models under progressively relaxed assumptions. Stochastic proximal point is…
We consider a wide range of regularized stochastic minimization problems with two regularization terms, one of which is composed with a linear function. This optimization model abstracts a number of important applications in artificial…
This paper presents the first sufficient conditions that guarantee the stability and almost sure convergence of multi-timescale stochastic approximation (SA) iterates. It extends the existing results on one-timescale and two-timescale SA…
This paper targets solving distributed machine learning problems such as federated learning in a communication-efficient fashion. A class of new stochastic gradient descent (SGD) approaches have been developed, which can be viewed as the…
Stochastic gradient descent is one of the most successful approaches for solving large-scale problems, especially in machine learning and statistics. At each iteration, it employs an unbiased estimator of the full gradient computed from one…
We provide global convergence rates for vanilla and entropy-regularized federated softmax stochastic policy gradient (FedPG) with local training. We show that FedPG converges to a near-optimal policy in terms of the average agent value,…
Recent analyses of certain gradient descent optimization methods have shown that performance can degrade in some settings - such as with stochasticity or implicit momentum. In deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), such optimization methods…
We introduce a stochastic principal-agent model. A principal and an agent interact in a stochastic environment, each privy to observations about the state not available to the other. The principal has the power of commitment, both to elicit…
Despite the development of numerous adaptive optimizers, tuning the learning rate of stochastic gradient methods remains a major roadblock to obtaining good practical performance in machine learning. Rather than changing the learning rate…
LoRA has emerged as one of the de facto methods for fine-tuning foundation models with low computational cost and memory footprint. The idea is to only train a low-rank perturbation to the weights of a pre-trained model, given supervised…
Stochastic gradient-based descent (SGD), have long been central to training large language models (LLMs). However, their effectiveness is increasingly being questioned, particularly in large-scale applications where empirical evidence…
We prove quantitative convergence rates at which discrete Langevin-like processes converge to the invariant distribution of a related stochastic differential equation. We study the setup where the additive noise can be non-Gaussian and…
In this work, we develop analysis and algorithms for a class of (stochastic) bilevel optimization problems whose lower-level (LL) problem is strongly convex and linearly constrained. Most existing approaches for solving such problems rely…
A fundamental challenge in multiagent reinforcement learning is to learn beneficial behaviors in a shared environment with other simultaneously learning agents. In particular, each agent perceives the environment as effectively…
Recently, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants have become the dominant methods in the large-scale optimization of machine learning (ML) problems. A variety of strategies have been proposed for tuning the step sizes, ranging…
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
Stochastic First-Order (SFO) methods have been a cornerstone in addressing a broad spectrum of modern machine learning (ML) challenges. However, their efficacy is increasingly questioned, especially in large-scale applications where…
We revisit the use of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for solving convex optimization problems that serve as highly popular convex relaxations for many important low-rank matrix recovery problems such as \textit{matrix completion},…
We consider long-lived agents who interact repeatedly in a social network. In each period, each agent learns about an unknown state by observing a private signal and her neighbors' actions from the previous period before choosing her own…