Related papers: Dropping Convexity for More Efficient and Scalable…
Optimization problems with rank constraints arise in many applications, including matrix regression, structured PCA, matrix completion and matrix decomposition problems. An attractive heuristic for solving such problems is to factorize the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a low-rank factorization is commonly employed to speed up matrix problems including matrix completion, subspace tracking, and SDP relaxation. In this paper, we exhibit a step size scheme for SGD on a…
Motivated by recent increased interest in optimization algorithms for non-convex optimization in application to training deep neural networks and other optimization problems in data analysis, we give an overview of recent theoretical…
Although stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants (e.g., stochastic momentum methods, AdaGrad) are the choice of algorithms for solving non-convex problems (especially deep learning), there still remain big gaps between the…
Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…
First-order stochastic methods for solving large-scale non-convex optimization problems are widely used in many big-data applications, e.g. training deep neural networks as well as other complex and potentially non-convex machine learning…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been found to be surprisingly effective in training a variety of deep neural networks. However, there is still a lack of understanding on how and why SGD can train these complex networks towards a…
The distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by a sum of $n$ local cost functions by using local information exchange is considered. This problem is an important component of many machine…
In this paper, we consider nonconvex minimax optimization, which is gaining prominence in many modern machine learning applications such as GANs. Large-scale edge-based collection of training data in these applications calls for…
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'…
We propose a nonconvex estimator for joint multivariate regression and precision matrix estimation in the high dimensional regime, under sparsity constraints. A gradient descent algorithm with hard thresholding is developed to solve the…
We consider a distributionally robust formulation of stochastic optimization problems arising in statistical learning, where robustness is with respect to uncertainty in the underlying data distribution. Our formulation builds on…
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…
A scaled conjugate gradient method that accelerates existing adaptive methods utilizing stochastic gradients is proposed for solving nonconvex optimization problems with deep neural networks. It is shown theoretically that, whether with…
Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…
The stochastic gradient descent has been widely used for solving composite optimization problems in big data analyses. Many algorithms and convergence properties have been developed. The composite functions were convex primarily and…
Various optimal gradient-based algorithms have been developed for smooth nonconvex optimization. However, many nonconvex machine learning problems do not belong to the class of smooth functions and therefore the existing algorithms are…
We study nonconvex optimization landscapes for learning overcomplete representations, including learning (i) sparsely used overcomplete dictionaries and (ii) convolutional dictionaries, where these unsupervised learning problems find many…