Related papers: Less than a Single Pass: Stochastically Controlled…
Motivated by penalized likelihood maximization in complex models, we study optimization problems where neither the function to optimize nor its gradient have an explicit expression, but its gradient can be approximated by a Monte Carlo…
We propose and analyze a new stochastic gradient method, which we call Stochastic Unbiased Curvature-aided Gradient (SUCAG), for finite sum optimization problems. SUCAG constitutes an unbiased total gradient tracking technique that uses…
There are several applications of stochastic optimization where one can benefit from a robust estimate of the gradient. For example, domains such as distributed learning with corrupted nodes, the presence of large outliers in the training…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
Stochastic Gradient Descent or SGD is the most popular optimization algorithm for large-scale problems. SGD estimates the gradient by uniform sampling with sample size one. There have been several other works that suggest faster epoch-wise…
We introduce Multi-Iteration Stochastic Optimizers, a novel class of first-order stochastic methods that control the relative $L^2$ error using successive control variates along the iteration path. By exploiting correlations between…
We consider the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm driven by a general stochastic sequence, including i.i.d noise and random walk on an arbitrary graph, among others; and analyze it in the asymptotic sense. Specifically, we employ…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…
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…
Stochastic computation graphs (SCGs) provide a formalism to represent structured optimization problems arising in artificial intelligence, including supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. Previous work has shown that an…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has become one of the most popular optimization methods for training machine learning models on massive datasets. However, SGD suffers from two main drawbacks: (i) The noisy gradient updates have high…
The distributed subgradient method (DSG) is a widely discussed algorithm to cope with large-scale distributed optimization problems in the arising machine learning applications. Most exisiting works on DSG focus on ideal communication…
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…
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…
We propose a novel stochastic smoothing accelerated gradient (SSAG) method for general constrained nonsmooth convex composite optimization, and analyze the convergence rates. The SSAG method allows various smoothing techniques, and can deal…
We propose the stochastic average gradient (SAG) method for optimizing the sum of a finite number of smooth convex functions. Like stochastic gradient (SG) methods, the SAG method's iteration cost is independent of the number of terms in…
We consider stochastic approximations which arise from such applications as data communications and image processing. We demonstrate why constraints are needed in a stochastic approximation and how a constrained approximation can be…
A popular method of force-directed graph drawing is multidimensional scaling using graph-theoretic distances as input. We present an algorithm to minimize its energy function, known as stress, by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to…
In this paper, we study the problem of distributed multi-agent optimization over a network, where each agent possesses a local cost function that is smooth and strongly convex. The global objective is to find a common solution that…
Stochastic optimization algorithms are widely used for machine learning with large-scale data. However, their convergence often suffers from non-vanishing variance. Variance Reduction (VR) methods, such as SVRG and SARAH, address this issue…