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Variance reduction (VR) methods employ stochastic gradients with decreasing variance, and they have been widely applied to solve large-scale optimization problems in machine learning because of their efficiency. Existing theoretical studies…

In this paper, a modification to the Gradient Sampling (GS) method for minimizing nonsmooth nonconvex functions is presented. One drawback in GS method is the need of solving a Quadratic optimization Problem (QP) at each iteration, which is…

This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…

We develop and analyze the Generalized Multiplicative Gradient (GMG) method for solving a class of convex optimization problems over symmetric cones, where the objective function does not have Lipschitz gradient over the feasible region.…

We present and analyze several strategies for improving the performance of stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods. We first show that the convergence rate of these methods can be preserved under a decreasing sequence of errors…

Recently, there has been growing interest in developing optimization methods for solving large-scale machine learning problems. Most of these problems boil down to the problem of minimizing an average of a finite set of smooth and strongly…

We consider SGD-type optimization on infinite-dimensional quadratic problems with power law spectral conditions. It is well-known that on such problems deterministic GD has loss convergence rates $L_t=O(t^{-\zeta})$, which can be improved…

A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…

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

In this paper we develop accelerated first-order methods for convex optimization with locally Lipschitz continuous gradient (LLCG), which is beyond the well-studied class of convex optimization with Lipschitz continuous gradient. In…

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…

We study decentralized non-convex finite-sum minimization problems described over a network of nodes, where each node possesses a local batch of data samples. In this context, we analyze a single-timescale randomized incremental gradient…

Here we study non-convex composite optimization: first, a finite-sum of smooth but non-convex functions, and second, a general function that admits a simple proximal mapping. Most research on stochastic methods for composite optimization…

This paper presents the SCvx algorithm, a successive convexification algorithm designed to solve non-convex constrained optimal control problems with global convergence and superlinear convergence-rate guarantees. The proposed algorithm can…

We study diffusion and consensus based optimization of a sum of unknown convex objective functions over distributed networks. The only access to these functions is through stochastic gradient oracles, each of which is only available at a…

Two-level stochastic optimization formulations have become instrumental in a number of machine learning contexts such as continual learning, neural architecture search, adversarial learning, and hyperparameter tuning. Practical stochastic…

Gradient methods are among the simplest yet most widely used algorithms for unconstrained optimization. Motivated by a geometric property of the steepest descent (SD) method that can alleviate the zigzag behavior in quadratic problems, we…

This paper studies accelerated gradient methods for nonconvex optimization with Lipschitz continuous gradient and Hessian. We propose two simple accelerated gradient methods, restarted accelerated gradient descent (AGD) and restarted heavy…

Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…