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We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…
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…
In this paper, we propose a StochAstic Recursive grAdient algoritHm (SARAH), as well as its practical variant SARAH+, as a novel approach to the finite-sum minimization problems. Different from the vanilla SGD and other modern stochastic…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithms have been shown to work favorably in solving large-scale learning problems. Despite the remarkable success, the stochastic gradient complexity of SVRG-type algorithms usually scales…
In additive models with many nonparametric components, a number of regularized estimators have been proposed and proven to attain various error bounds under different combinations of sparsity and fixed smoothness conditions. Some of these…
Many machine learning techniques sacrifice convenient computational structures to gain estimation robustness and modeling flexibility. However, by exploring the modeling structures, we find these "sacrifices" do not always require more…
Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large-scale machine learning problems, by virtue of its light complexity per iteration. However, it lags behind its non-stochastic counterparts with respect to the convergence rate,…
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…
We examine gradient descent on unregularized logistic regression problems, with homogeneous linear predictors on linearly separable datasets. We show the predictor converges to the direction of the max-margin (hard margin SVM) solution. The…
We consider the question of estimating a solution to a system of equations that involve convex nonlinearities, a problem that is common in machine learning and signal processing. Because of these nonlinearities, conventional estimators…
The application of stochastic variance reduction to optimization has shown remarkable recent theoretical and practical success. The applicability of these techniques to the hard non-convex optimization problems encountered during training…
It is generally recognized that finite learning rate (LR), in contrast to infinitesimal LR, is important for good generalization in real-life deep nets. Most attempted explanations propose approximating finite-LR SGD with Ito Stochastic…
We propose a stochastic gradient framework for solving stochastic composite convex optimization problems with (possibly) infinite number of linear inclusion constraints that need to be satisfied almost surely. We use smoothing and homotopy…
The nonconvex and nonsmooth finite-sum optimization problem with linear constraint has attracted much attention in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer, and mathematics, due to its wide applications in machine learning and the…
Motivated by applications arising from large scale optimization and machine learning, we consider stochastic quasi-Newton (SQN) methods for solving unconstrained convex optimization problems. The convergence analysis of the SQN methods,…
We consider the stochastic composition optimization problem proposed in \cite{wang2017stochastic}, which has applications ranging from estimation to statistical and machine learning. We propose the first ADMM-based algorithm named…
We develop and analyze stochastic optimization algorithms for problems in which the expected loss is strongly convex, and the optimum is (approximately) sparse. Previous approaches are able to exploit only one of these two structures,…
The standard assumption for proving linear convergence of first order methods for smooth convex optimization is the strong convexity of the objective function, an assumption which does not hold for many practical applications. In this…
We investigate the relation of two fundamental tools in machine learning and signal processing, that is the support vector machine (SVM) for classification, and the Lasso technique used in regression. We show that the resulting optimization…