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We present a unified convergence analysis for first order convex optimization methods using the concept of strong Lyapunov conditions. Combining this with suitable time scaling factors, we are able to handle both convex and strong convex…
In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…
Momentum methods, including heavy-ball~(HB) and Nesterov's accelerated gradient~(NAG), are widely used in training neural networks for their fast convergence. However, there is a lack of theoretical guarantees for their convergence and…
We introduce a general method for improving the convergence rate of gradient-based optimizers that is easy to implement and works well in practice. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in a range of optimization problems by…
We introduce the "continuized" Nesterov acceleration, a close variant of Nesterov acceleration whose variables are indexed by a continuous time parameter. The two variables continuously mix following a linear ordinary differential equation…
Composite convex optimization models arise in several applications, and are especially prevalent in inverse problems with a sparsity inducing norm and in general convex optimization with simple constraints. The most widely used algorithms…
We present a variant of accelerated gradient descent algorithms, adapted from Nesterov's optimal first-order methods, for weakly-quasi-convex and weakly-quasi-strongly-convex functions. We show that by tweaking the so-called estimate…
We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is one of the most widely used optimization algorithms in machine learning. While optimization properties of SGDM have been extensively studied in the literature, it remains insufficiently…
The stochastic proximal gradient method is a powerful generalization of the widely used stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and has found numerous applications in Machine Learning. However, it is notoriously known that this method…
Mini-batch algorithms have been proposed as a way to speed-up stochastic convex optimization problems. We study how such algorithms can be improved using accelerated gradient methods. We provide a novel analysis, which shows how standard…
Nesterov's accelerated gradient (AG) is a popular technique to optimize objective functions comprising two components: a convex loss and a penalty function. While AG methods perform well for convex penalties, such as the LASSO, convergence…
This note considers the momentum method by Polyak and the accelerated gradient method by Nesterov, both without line search but with fixed step length applied to strictly convex quadratic functions assuming that exact gradients are used and…
Nesterov's accelerated gradient method (NAG) is widely used in problems with machine learning background including deep learning, and is corresponding to a continuous-time differential equation. From this connection, the property of the…
We propose a new method for unconstrained optimization of a smooth and strongly convex function, which attains the optimal rate of convergence of Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent. The new algorithm has a simple geometric…
We present a dynamical system framework for understanding Nesterov's accelerated gradient method. In contrast to earlier work, our derivation does not rely on a vanishing step size argument. We show that Nesterov acceleration arises from…
We study the algorithmic stability of Nesterov's accelerated gradient method. For convex quadratic objectives, Chen et al. (2018) proved that the uniform stability of the method grows quadratically with the number of optimization steps, and…
This paper presents a sufficient condition for stochastic gradients not to slow down the convergence of Nesterov's accelerated gradient method. The new condition has the strong-growth condition by Schmidt \& Roux as a special case, and it…
In this paper, acceleration of gradient methods for convex optimization problems with weak levels of convexity and smoothness is considered. Starting from the universal fast gradient method which was designed to be an optimal method for…
High order momentum-based parameter update algorithms have seen widespread applications in training machine learning models. Recently, connections with variational approaches have led to the derivation of new learning algorithms with…