Related papers: Trading-off variance and complexity in stochastic …
Stein variational gradient decent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful approximate inference algorithm for complex distributions. However, the standard SVGD requires calculating the gradient of the target density and cannot be applied…
Stochastic-gradient-based optimization has been a core enabling methodology in applications to large-scale problems in machine learning and related areas. Despite the progress, the gap between theory and practice remains significant, with…
Stochastic optimization algorithms are widely used for large-scale data analysis due to their low per-iteration costs, but they often suffer from slow asymptotic convergence caused by inherent variance. Variance-reduced techniques have been…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…
Problem decomposition plays a vital role when applying cooperative coevolution (CC) to large scale global optimization problems. However, most learning-based decomposition algorithms either only apply to additively separable problems or…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…
Many problems require to optimize empirical risk functions over large data sets. Gradient descent methods that calculate the full gradient in every descent step do not scale to such datasets. Various flavours of Stochastic Gradient Descent…
In this paper, we propose a vector transport-free stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) method with general retraction for empirical risk minimization over Riemannian manifold. Existing SVRG methods on manifold usually consider a…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing…
We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…
Stochastic Gradient Boosting (SGB) is a widely used approach to regularization of boosting models based on decision trees. It was shown that, in many cases, random sampling at each iteration can lead to better generalization performance of…
A framework previously introduced in [3] for solving a sequence of stochastic optimization problems with bounded changes in the minimizers is extended and applied to machine learning problems such as regression and classification. The…
We study to what extent may stochastic gradient descent (SGD) be understood as a "conventional" learning rule that achieves generalization performance by obtaining a good fit to training data. We consider the fundamental stochastic convex…
Large-scale non-convex sparsity-constrained problems have recently gained extensive attention. Most existing deterministic optimization methods (e.g., GraSP) are not suitable for large-scale and high-dimensional problems, and thus…
We propose a class of very simple modifications of gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent. We show that when applied to a large variety of machine learning problems, ranging from logistic regression to deep neural nets, the…
We develop and analyze a variant of the SARAH algorithm, which does not require computation of the exact gradient. Thus this new method can be applied to general expectation minimization problems rather than only finite sum problems. While…
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 develop two novel stochastic variance-reduction methods to approximate solutions of a class of nonmonotone [generalized] equations. Our algorithms leverage a new combination of ideas from the forward-reflected-backward splitting method…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…